its associations met and submitted a memorandum of protest to the Honorable Governor of the North.
* At the end of last month the hand of death carried off a woman whose fame filled the horizons of Lebanon and beyond Lebanon — the late Nazira Jumblatt, mother of Mr. Kamal Jumblatt, Deputy for the Mountain and president of the Progressive Socialist Party.
Mrs. Nazira contended with death for a week or somewhat more. Delegations streamed to the Saint Charles Hospital, where the departed breathed her last, and a solemn national funeral was held for her, in which the country took part from one end to the other.
To Mr. Jumblatt, heir to the departed lady's forefathers and to her standing in the country; to her daughter, the wife of Emir Hassan al-Atrash; and to all the honored Jumblatt family, this magazine offers its warmest condolences.
* Last month Mrs. Nazira al-Sulh, mother of His Excellency Riad Bey al-Sulh, the former Prime Minister, passed to the abode of eternity. She died in a righteous old age, having been throughout her life the patriotic example to be followed. The papers have recalled that in 1943, when the delegations came to console her over her son, whom the French had arrested, she said with pride: I bore my son for nothing but such a struggle as this.
Her death weighed heavily upon the sons of the country, who hastened to mourn her and to offer the most sincere expressions of condolence to His Excellency the Prime Minister, asking mercy for her and solace for her kin.
* The Marquis de Freige died last month, after passing a life filled with charity and good works that shall not be forgotten.
The Woman's Voice sends its most sincere condolences to the family of the departed, and especially to his wife, the Marquise de Freige, president of the Lebanese Red Cross, who was to her late husband the best of partners: together they were the two wings that soar aloft — and soar well.
memorized matter, without preparing the man for his national duty and the woman for her social and national mission, are failed, truncated programs which promise no good, treat no ills, and will yield no cure.
It is of the nature of true learning to strengthen personality and develop the faculties; its sign is invention and creation, and its mission is building and reform. To guarantee these effective scientific results it is not enough to carry ranks and diplomas: the lofty ends toward which academic degrees are directed must be made plain. And when learning in its pure essence reaches the understanding of the young, and they are trained upon it and their conceptions are saturated with it, the individual personality is formed, and in consequence the general personality is set in order and upright popular principles are realized. Then no man will lord it over another by virtue of office or birth or inheritance or any
other accidental distinction, for all are equal in essence... in their humanity... in their rights and their duties as working citizens.
Society is the sum of the qualities of the individuals who compose it; and in the measure that free, ordered personalities abound in it, in that measure will the society be orderly in its progress and deep-rooted in its progressivism. Our greatest duty today, therefore — the heaviest burden laid upon our shoulders — is to form these liberated, ordered personalities and to multiply them by the unified, national, scientific and educational curricula we prepare for them; so that the hoped-for Arab progressivism may spring from the lights of true learning and the radiance of creative thought, rather than from arbitrary borrowing and offhand outward imitation...
That is the elementary reform required to lift us from our stumblings. To what extent is it spreading in our society? To what
depth has it sunk into the souls of our leaders, and how far do they strive in their leadership to bring it about? How long will the echoes of learning remain faint and sickly on our horizons, so that we regard the weak citizen — the peasant, the workman, the functionary, the employee, the poor man — as a means to be exploited, instead of regarding him as an end in himself, a personality that commands respect and calls for development and enrichment?
And once we have taken this foundation step — the step of national scientific pruning — and held fast to this living, progressive reform, and made our conduct a truthful expression of it and our life an embodiment of our faith in it and in the truth to which it leads, we shall be freed within and then without, and shall achieve a real, independent progressivism, our profit from which will be measured by the inviolability and dignity it secures us, and by the eminence and strength it gives us.