6 FEBRUARY 1948, Page 15

Strt,—In emphasising her plea for State medicine, Dr. Esther Carling

is somewhat unhappy in the choice of quotation, viz.: " Whate'er is best administered is best." It implies a coldness, a sense of fatalism ; conjures up the dangers of rationalism ; disregards individual creative good work, and envisages humanity in the mass. Surely the aim should be to keep administration and what is finest for a nation as being interpretable in the best of practical craftsmanship. Macaulay understood the pitfalls of ideologies and of unbalanced, unrelated philosophies, when he wrote: " Much knowledge is traced on paper, but little is engraved in the soul."