The war has given many education authorities a new and complicated problem to solve. These are the authorities of evacuation and of reception areas. In the former, between twenty and thirty per cent, of elementary school children have been evacuated to and have remained in the reception areas, a small percentage have made private arrangements for shelter in the country, leaving, perhaps, seventy per cent, of the children remaining at home.

Correspondingly the reception areas have had their school rolls increased in number in the same proportion, this necessitating in many cases modifications of the school organization.

The fact, however, remains that the well-planned evacuation scheme for school children in school parties has broken down through lack of complete support from the parents living in the vulnerable areas. A twenty or thirty per cent, response leaves the education authority of the evacuation area with the major task of education still to be carried out within its own precincts. At the same time the teaching staffs, in the first place, left with the evacuated children and were billeted in the reception areas. A large proportion have now, however, been recalled. Taking first the problem as affecting the children who refused to be evacuated, the President of the Board of Education, after much pressure, announced in the House of Lords on November 1st, 1939:

I am not attempting to discuss here the wider problems of evacuation taken in its most general sense. The general scheme and its results have come in for much adverse criticism both in the secular press and in our catholic papers. It seems only fair, then, that one should give some of the good effects where one has found them. Of course it is only in the normal order of things that first things come first with Catholics. So we make no apology for the fact that in the case of children evacuated from our catholic schools it is with their religious welfare that we are primarily concerned. Not that we think the material welfare of the child to be unimportant. It is merely considered in its proper place. For convenience I shall, however, take this less important aspect first.

The evacuees came from the danger areas, namely the large industrial cities with their congested conditions of life, and from crowded seaports. Such places are unhealthy not only in war time, and for fear of German bombers. When one thinks, then, of the money that is spent in an ever-increasing amount, year by year, in peace time, in bringing children from the worst of such areas into the healthy surroundings of seaside or countryside; and that the evacuation scheme did this very thing on a wholesale scale—for all children, and not merely for a week or two, but indefinitely—it seems evident from this, the point of view of national health and fitness, that the scheme deserved more support from the public generally.

The ordinary Christian is apt to wonder at the traditional teaching of theologians and spiritual writers on the two ways of living a Christian life. He hears of the active and contemplative lives, but to which of the two, he asks himself, does he belong? Of course, his life is one long activity; but it would not seem to be precisely Christian activity. His days are spent in earning his living, and what little time he has for himself he uses for his personal recreation. Must he, therefore, conclude that his life does not come into the Christian scheme of things, that it is neither active nor contemplative? Then again, he remembers how Martha hurried about the house in Bethany; but Mary sat still at His feet. It seems that the rebuke is turned towards him: ‘Martha, Martha, thou art careful and art troubled about many things. But one thing is necessary. Mary hath chosen the best part, which shall not be taken away from her’ (Luke x, 41-42). How distant it all seems, how remote from his own life. And what chance has he got of practising the one thing necessary, tvhich would seem to be the life of contemplation? But he recollects perhaps how St. Paul, and the Fathers of the Church after him, taught that variety is necessary for the perfection of the Mystical Body which has some members for more abundant honour and some for less honourable functions: he is perfect if he fills his perfect place in that Body. But he does not appreciate the idea of living perpetually among the second rate.

It is sometimes said in travellers’ tales that Christianity does more harm than good among the African peoples. It seems at first to destroy their native virtues without building up new ones, to change external observances without giving real Christian character.

There is a certain amount of truth in this, and apart from the more mysterious causes—that first knowledge of the moral law tends, as St. Paul said, to multiply sin—there are many others not far to seek.

The real Africans, the negroes and the peoples called the Bantu, who are nearly negroes, covering the southern two-thirds of the continent, are essentially gregarious. In the village community, which was more or less uniform from the northern tropics to the Cape before the white man came and brought his individualism, there was a most strict community of life. There is a story of some European philanthropist who wrote to a Bishop in Africa offering to finance an orphanage. The missionaries laughed. There was not, and hardly is, in spite of all changes, an ‘orphan’ among the tribes. The children belonged to the community as much as to the father. Food was virtually pooled in this society; all the communty turned out, freely without payment, to build each other’s house, to hoe each other’s field, to herd each other’s cattle. It went to extremes when, as in some tribes, the chief’s relatives had to be buried with him, whether they happened to be dead or alive.

‘It is a well-known fact that the spiritual welfare cannot be separated from the material welfare. There is a constant interaction between both. By arousing in the destitute a longing to raise and better himself economically and socially we awaken in him a desire to make the best possible use of all moral and physical forces.’ That was said many years ago by a Protestant in Germany, and though we could quote similar statements from important Catholic sources, we prefer to quote this from the works of Frederick Raiffeisen because it has a direct connection with the subject of this article.

Raiffeisen started among the German peasants people’s banks, or credit unions. To-day, throughout the world, credit unions on the Raiffesen system number well over 250,000 and have some 28,000,000 members. The line we are tracing from Raiffeisen to the natives of South Africa runs through Dr. Heim, the founder of the Bavarian Catholic Farmers’ Union, and Fr. Tom Finlay, S.J., the great Irish co-operator, who died recently, to Fr. Bernard Huss, a Marianhi'll missionary in South Africa. Though this line starts with a Protestant it can be ultimately traced back to the formation by the Franciscans in fifteenth century Italy of the Montes Pie tat is, welfare associations to alleviate the economic distress of the people. Then the great burden of the people was heavy taxation, and to meet this they had to borrow and the heavy rates of interest that they had to pay kept them permanently tied to the money lender.

St. Bonaventure’s touchstone in philosophy was exemplarism. A philosophy is true or false according to its acceptance or refusal of the ideas. It was then natural that his preference would be given to Plato, who, because of his discovery of the reality of ideas, was in his eyes the most excellent philosopher, to whom the gift of wisdom was fittingly appropriated. Aristotle, on the contrary, a great scholar but a bad philosopher, built up a philosophy of the useless: his philosophy is irrelevant to the real, and hence worthless. Aquinas’s keystone, on the other hand, was that doctrine, so typically Aristotelian, of actuality and potentiality; accordingly, it is no matter of surprise that he should hold Aristotle in such esteem, for the latter’s metaphysics and his whole philosophy are pervaded throughout by the doctrine of actuality and potentiality, built up on this as upon two pillars.

To view a problem from the wrong angle leads inevitably to disastrous consequences and utter failure. Aquinas made his own, as a fundamental basis of all his enquiries, the Aristotelian principle, stated also by Boethius, that it is a scholar’s duty to formulate his belief about anything according to its real nature. As each science has its special subject-matter, which constitutes it as a particular science and distinguishes it from any other, so it has to be dealt with according to its proper method, strictly adhered to and used rigorously according to its special nature; consequently nothing adventitious or extraneous ought to be introduced in the process, if utter confusion and gross blunders are to be avoided.

Mr. Wells’s latest book, The Fate of Homo Sapiens, is a pedestrian effort, and to those who revel in his peculiar vein of imaginative prophecy it must come as a distinct anti-climax. Nevertheless, it is an important book, for it is based on the distilled essence of Mr, Wells’s thought during the whole of his career; one feels that it is the final revised edition of his opinions. Here is the bare skeleton of Wellsianism, stripped of everything that its author considered superfluous. The Fate of Homo Sapiens is probably the most topical of Mr. Wells’s books. He has ceased to look for the laws that govern the course of human history and to map prodigious cities of the future. The period of analysis is over, criteria have become fixed, and he now looks out on the world of to-day fully confident that he can both diagnose and cure.

The book is primarily an essay in sociology, an attempt by Mr. Wells to sum up the present state of man in the light of his own principles. It is as such that it must be judged. Some of the reviews in the Catholic press gave the impression that it was merely an attack on the Church; this overlooks the more positive elements of the book, which will probably come to be regarded as the official handbook of Wellsian thought.

Briefly, The Fate of Homo Sapiens is an outline of Mr. Wells’s social philosophy, together with a series of sketches showing how the modem world helps or hinders (usually hinders) the dawn of greater happiness for all.