Welsh Journals

To a large extent, we have now throughout Wales, secured three of the objects we set out to gain. (1) We have won the sympathy of the Education Authorities. (2) We have also been able to win the whole-hearted co-operation of a great number of our teachers through con- ferences conducted by Professor C. K. Webster, Mr. Turberville, Mr. Sydney Herbert, and others. (3) We have been able to interest the children themselves in international friendship by asking them all to join once a year in an act of International goodwill. In the schools of Wales, every year for the last 4 years, a CHILDREN'S WIRELESS MES- SAGE OF GOODWILL TO THE CHILDREN OF EVERY OTHER COUNTRY has been adopted with enthusiasm and sent out on Whit- Sunday morning by one of the most powerful stations in the Kingdom. This year the response from other countries has been wonderful,. 3. So far the Publications of the Committee have been confined to three slender pamphlets- but fortunately the importance of printed matter does not entirely depend upon its size and weight: (1) It has been responsible for the well- known booklet of the League of Nations Union on Teachers and World Peace." (2) It is to the members of the Commit- tee that we owe the Suggestions for The Comte de Saint-Simon and the League of Nations. By D. O. Evans, M.A., D.Phil. (Oxon), Docteur ès Lettres (Paris). Assistant Professor of French Language and Literature in the University of Manitoba. CLAUDE-HENRI DE ROUVROY, Comte de Saint-Simon, the centenary of whose death is being kept this year, was at once one of the most striking personalities of his time and among the most original thinkers of the nineteenth century. His character was that of the man of action; he was a Napoleon of the intellectual sphere. In his daily life and in the intenser life of the mind, he was disconcertingly original and romantically eccentric. A realistic visionary and a pers- picacious prophet, he appears by his writings to have been endowed in peculiar measure with the Consideration of Teachers in Framing Schemes of Lessons on the League of Nations which is now printed in French, German, Spanish, Italian, and soon will be issued in Dutch, Bohemian, Greek, Turkish, and Japanese. (3) And it has also produced A Scheme for a First Course in General His- tory with a very complete Biblio- graphy. Of this Professor Archer says The Scheme here put for- ward seems to me the best attempt yet made to base a syllabus of Ele- mentary History on the lines which the increase of human knowledge during the last 100 years has been leading us. It does not represent a view of History peculiar to the League of Nations; it represents History as it is now conceived." D. Nothing could give us in Wales greater pleasure than that our teachers and our schools should be linked in their endeavour for the Peace of the World with the teachers and schools of other lands. No immediate results can be looked for and the teachers in all countries will not expect it. They are accustomed to processes-to the sowing which only makes itself felt after many years. Although slow this pioneer work of the teachers in every country is likely to be more far- reaching in its aims and more abiding in its results than any other method which can be imagined. the gift of foreknowledge. He certainly foresaw the principal currents which were to dominate political and social thought during the nineteenth century, for he laid the solid basis of modern Socialism, before it was perverted by German in- tellectuals. Before Renan, he declared his un- bounded faith in science; before Auguste-Comte he taught Positivism; while his ideas on European politics assume to-day a peculiar interest from the fact of his having very clearly anticipated the League of Nations. The idea of a state of universal peace was of course not particulary novel towards 1800. In the Middle Ages it had been already conceived by men like Pierre Dubois, while Henry IV. of France was moved by the civil wars into very similar dreams. Kant, too, before the outbreak of the French Revolution, took up the same idea. It is Saint- Simon's peculiar merit that he sought and clearly formulated the means whereby it might be trans- lated into reality.