6 JULY 1934, Page 7

* * Truth Under Revolver-Rule • The International Universities Conference

has just been launched as a meeting-ground for the professors of all countries, with no national or party prejudices. It has held its first meeting at Oxford ; next year it will assemble in France, and the year after in Germany. All the more significant was its enthusiastic and more or less unanimous applause of what Professor Gilbert Murray said in his closing address about the evil of violence and its menace to liberty of thought. .Naturally he. was careful not to hint at any particular country. But he could not have stated his broad argument with more clearness : • "violence has come forward in public life to a degree which I do not remember at any other time in my life . . . In an atmo. sphere of violence everything for which we stand and in which we believe is made powerless. We want truth. It is a big blow to tts if we may only say what the man with the revolver wants us to say:" With the crash of the German shootings in its ears, the conference might perhaps think too much of one country. But the thing is true of all countries under dictatorships, Fascist and Communist alike. Indeed it is only fair to remember that in this as in so much else it was the Dictatorship . of the Proletariat which pointed the evil way.