It was recently reported in the Press that Judge H. W. Falk, of Los Angeles, had granted permission for microphones to be installed in the witness-box and at counsels’ table in his court in order that the trial for murder of a former District Attorney might be broadcasted.

An innovation so profoundly affecting the conduct of courts of law gives rise to questions which concern intimately the judicature, the radio and the general public. It is true that the case in point hails from the United States, where the judicial atmosphere is less rarefied than it is in this country, and where restraint in matters of jurisprudence is not a particularly salient characteristic of public affairs. Its significance lies in its being the first indication that wireless threatens to invade a department of public life which has hitherto been regarded as sacrosanct, as much, one believed, by common consent, whether for reasons based on sentiment or public expediency, as, privately, on grounds of good taste. Although there does not at present appear to be any likelihood of the occasion at Los Angeles being cited as a precedent for similar action in this country, it marks an appropriate moment in which to review certain aspects of broadcasting with which considerations affecting public policy and decorum are closely bound up.

St. Thomas’s originality lies in the fact that he made his philosophy a welded, organic whole including and co-ordinating in the sweep of its horizon the entire panorama of being. To understand the humanism which is one facet of his philosophy. We must understand his W eltanschauung : his vision of the world, of reality, as a whole. It is the aim of this essay simply to set forth St. Thomas’s teaching, hoping thereby to shew that his philosophy is humanist in what has been submitted in the preceding pages to be the true meaning of humanism.

Man is not to be studied as an isolated phenomenon : he is part of a design infinitely vaster than himself. It is of importance to realise that St. Thomas’s metaphysic, like Aristotle’s, is teleological. In exitu creaturarum a primo principio, he says in the Sentences, attenditur quaedam circulatio vel regiratio, eo quod omnia, revertuntur sicut in finem in id a quo sicut a principio prodierunt. He sees the birth of worlds, the march of centuries, as an emanation from the infinite, which in a vast sweep runs its course back to the abyss of energy from which it sprang. The Aristotelean idea of potentiality applies to the universe as a whole : each entity aspiring towards its proper actualization, the cosmos itself is viewed as ‘yearning,’ in the Aristotelean phrase, for its fulfilment. The desire of the soul for assimilation with the godhead is the supreme human example of this general trend.

In England we find the summer useful as an excuse for jokes about the wintry weather, but it may be safely assumed that there is some sort of difference between winter and summer: otherwise, how should we get strawberries and cream in July and not even want them in January? Summer may be regarded as beyond a joke sometimes, but it is also more than a joke if but strawberries and cream be the happy memory it conjures up into renewed pleasure. To some people it means more even than this; maybe tramping over the green hills or loitering in sun-splashed woods. To others the summer is most pleasantly companioned by the sea, but the ways in which they respond to its briny flavour form the gravamen of these curious observations which follow.

Perhaps you remember one of Robert Browning’s lyrical ruminations that tells how he swam out a long way from the seashore on a sunny day. He was peacefully floating on his back when he saw a flittering white butterfly above him in the sunlight. The poem makes a pretty picture, but to any swimmer it appeals more than any picture. For there is a whole world of exhilarating contacts belonging to those whose love of the sea is not confined to an admiration of its appearance, or an appreciation of the salubrious properties of ozone. Therefore, swimmers in general must be distinguished from that other big group of sea-lovers, whose pleasure is rather in ‘those water-trampling ships which made me glow,’ to quote the English Laureate, who seems to owe something to Wordsworth’s ‘trampling waves.’

It may appear strange to those unacquainted with social organization in France and Belgium to learn that the latter country has left the former decades behind in the curing of crime. While France is only just waking up to the necessity of coping with the appalling crimes, daily reported, of youthful criminals and with the cases of cruelty to young children by their natural protectors—a factor which partly accounts for the first evil—Belgium has for over twenty years tackled the question of the protection of childhood and the proper provision for caring for and re-educating deficient and abnormal children. The efforts being made to rescue children from the almost inevitable career of crime and degradation to which vicious surroundings and congenital infirmities have driven them is one of the most admirable examples of practical idealism in the present age, and places Belgium in the front rank as a civilizing agent of humanity.

From the period of the crêche to the kindergarten stage, the dossier of every child rescued by the Oeuvre de la Protection de l'Enfance and its various co-operating organizations is carefully preserved with the report of any necessary curative or corrective treatment applied. When the period of school education arrives (compulsory from the age of 8 to 14), the process of segregation is virtually accomplished; the normal and the abnormal child are separately classified. The latter is assigned to a special class, the classe des anormaux, which is attached to the great public schools and conducted’ by teachers trained for that particular purpose.

‘And He said : the Kingdom of God is as if a man should cast seed into the earth—and should sleep—and should rise night and day—and the seed should spring and grow up whilst he knoweth it not.

For the earth of itself bringeth forth fruit—first the blade—then the ear—afterwards the full corn in the ears.

And when the fruit is brought forth, immediately he putteth in the sickle, because the harvest is come.’ [Mark iv, 26—29.]

10th May, 1932. Eureka! To-day in a home of contemplative nuns to whom I am presuming to give a retreat, I seem to have found what for years I have sought in vain to find. St. Mark, who has so few parables, has yet this one that is to be found in no other gospel. The questions that have troubled me for years were, first, if St. Matthew and St. Luke knew of this parable, why did they pass over it? and, secondly, why did St. Mark, that is St. Peter, think it should not be passed over?

The choice of a career for his son is, in general, a problem of great perplexity for a man, and, often, one which he is ill equipped to manage. He probably makes large sacrifices to defray the cost of a ‘good education,’ and is liable finally to sacrifice his boy’s chances of happiness and success by an injudicious decision about his future. His difficulties may be increased, curiously enough, by his failure to realise that conditions of entry into a career are radically different from what they were thirty or forty years ago. He perhaps is still sufficiently romantic to talk about, and even to believe in, the ‘self-made man’ ideal, although the impracticability of it in these days of combines and over-population is surely manifest. Or he is likely to adopt one of two favourite attitudes; either, that his personal experience of the exigencies of his own calling determines him not to allow his son to follow it, or that the only reasonable thing for a son to do is to step into his father’s shoes and continue the work built up for him. If he is neither romantic nor obstinate, he will consult his son’s inclinations and, in all probability, he will find them either fantastic or completely unformed.

A normal boy rarely shows a marked aptitude for one particular business or profession in his early or middle school-days, and if he forms an opinion about his future it is usually much influenced by a limited knowledge of his father’s occupation.

That the murderer of Henry III was Jacques Clément, a Jacobin friar, is certain, although soon after the event some were inclined to doubt whether the miscreant were a Jacobin or no in spite of his habit. The extraordinary story ran that Clément was put up for the night by the Proctireur Général de la Guesle and there murdered in order to obtain his habit to disguise the real assassin, who was a soldier. It is not necessary to kill a man to obtain the habit of a religious and at that time the environs of Paris swarmed with every kind of Order. Again, why a Dominican? Was the Procureur Général especially anxious to make a case against that Order as well as to murder his King? In short the story is incredible in every way and could only have arisen owing to the fact that Clément was killed on the spot. De la Guesle called out that he was not to be injured, although he himself had knocked the assassin down, with a view, of course, for torture to discover who were behind him.

The facts are that Clément exhibited two passports, one of which was forged, when he came to St. Cloud saying that he was an escaped royalist with vital news for the King. Quite early in the morning the friar was introduced to Henry and dealt him a blow which proved fatal within twenty-four hours. By a strange fatality the King had only put on a chamois vest under the violet coat which he always wore, instead of the cuirasse which would be the usual dress during a campaign.