VOICES of the NATION

Dominion, Volume 20, Issue 54, 27 November 1926, Page 17

VOICES of the NATION

SAYINGS AND WRITINGS :: :: OF THE TIMES :: ::

State Servants and Trade Unionism. “The State has a right to control its own servants, and to lay down conditions on which their employment depends. They are entitled, if they so desire, to combine for the protection of their own interests, but it is intolerable that they should seek to take sides in an industrial dispute in which they are not directly concerned, and especially to threaten to quit their posts or to attach conditions to their loyalty in a time of national crisis.”—The “Scotsman.”

The Ups and the Downs. “You will be unusually fortunate or unfortunate if you do not meet in your life with both triumph and disaster, either on a small or great scale. They will dog your footsteps. My advice to you is to meet triumph when it comes like a gentleman, and disaster when it comes like a man. Youth of this generation can never know life or the world as it was before the war. It is a harsh truth, but one which the youngest in the school should learn, that they for the rest of their lives, and their children after them, will be living a severely competitive life in a harshly competitive world. We are beginning to realise that this country will not in the future be either safe or comfortable or self-supporting for idlers. It is to be in the future a country in which those who work may find it difficult to obtain even a means of subsistence. Therefore, however young, cultivate a habit of industry.”—Lord Birkenhead, at a school speech day.

The Fallacy of Over-taxing. “Public opinion permit: the present devastating burden of taxation because it does not understand what it is doing, a..d because there has been so little effort on right lines to educate it. An impecunious public can hardly be blamed for failing to develop much enthusiasm for the woes of the super-tax payer, and dissertations on his troubles not unnaturally produce a reactionary effect. But if the public understood _ that the super-tax takes away and dissipates most of the wealth on which industrial and other development alone depends, then there would be no more super-tax. Property left in the hands of the individual, however degraded and immoral he may be, and however much it may spoil his individual chances of getting to heaven, can only function to promote enterprise and development, thus bringing employment and prosperity. Whereas property taken from the individual and used by the Minister of Agriculture to employ a clerk to make a census of sows, earns nothing for anybody (except the clerk), turns capital into income, adds to the price of pork, reduces the supply of bacon, mid renders impossible the productive enterprise to which the property would hive been applied had it been left in private hands."—Sir Ernest Benn. The Nature of Evil.

“Evil would not be entirely evil if it had not the power-of overcoming us, by deceiving us about its very nature, bv tempting us to make terms with it. There is, indeed, a logic in the very principle of evil; it is tluit which confuses and bewilders us when we think about it, unless we keep the logic of its nature always in mind—unless, that is, we insist in our thought that it is in every respect the opposite of good. ... If good is beauty, then evil is ugliness; the complete ugliness that comes, not of perverted character, but of lack of character, the ugliness that is failure: of expression disguising itself in platitude. Evil, as we know it in ourselves, has always this power of disguise, this imitative and parasitic power of disguise; its very nature is to pretend to be what it is not; and our concern with it is to separate ourselves from it, by seeing through its disguises. Fbr this we need all our faculties, intellectual and aesthetic as well as moral.”—The late E. CluttonBrock.

The End of Education. “The end of-education is action no less than character. If a man has made progress at all, he can no longer separate, though he may have learned to distinguish the world of thought and the world of action. He perceives how interdependent they are. Therefore he cannot cut off his family life and his social relationships from religion. There remains for him no dividing, line between the realm of moral principle and the realm of politics or industry. He finds it impossible to practise brotherhood between nations and deny it between classes; if he is out on a ‘no more war’ -crusade it must end the class war as well as international wars. In fact, he finds himself impelled and committed to a range and thoroughness of action infinitely greater than the _ man who has not sought, this liberalising, power-releasing education has ever dreamed of.”—Dr. Basil Yeaxlee, in his Clifford Lecture. The Right of Inheritance.

"Capital is an essential of life, and the worker would be badly off if it were not accumulated. Incentive is required for this. Right of bequest is an incentive to accumulation; inheritance and bequest are correlatives. Therefore, if rights of inheritance were altered, capital would dry up, and workers would suffer. The worker lias no real right to be annoyed or sulky at a system which really benefits him, and in which the appearance of social injustice is an illusion; therefore ■ a can ignore the fact that he actually is annoyed and sulky. Great businesses give the worker something he would not otherwise have—they depend on the right of accumulation, and therefore inheritance laws arc sacrosanct.” —Sir Josiah Stamp. After Geneva.

“The only complete piece of constructive work which this year’s Assembly may be said to have accomplished has been the new Slavery Convention, sponsored by Lord Cecil, who has in other ways also done useful work, and has worthily upheld the British tradition of unostentatious achievement. On the whole the delegates to the® Assembly seem to have departed well content and animated with fresh confidence in the future of the League as a result of the admission of Germany.”—“The Times” (London).

Broadcasting Broadens the Mind. “The charge brought against broadcasting is that it tends to stuftify the minds of listeners by constant ‘spoonfeeding.’ I have, on the other hand, come to the directly opposite conclusion that, wisely directed, it should, and does, broaden the mind.- It is, of course, easy to carp at tabloid tales and ten-minute talks on topical subjects, but on the other hand it can be argued with considerable force that a little knowledge, though proverbialIv dangerous, is less so than abysmal ignorance. At the risk of being charged with egoism—though how one can form opinions except from one’s personal experiences I am at a loss to conceive—l must state that not only have I derived interest from, for instance, the tabloid biographies of famous characters, which have been a prominent feature of the broadcasting programmes, but that they’ have on occasion sent me direct to those impartial three-volume biographies which ‘the Old Stager’ fears will now moulder into dust unheeded on our shelves.” -Lieutenant-Colonel W. Lockwood Marsh in the “English Review.” The New Hospital.

“Creators of hospitals must bear in mind that whatever provision they make to-day is merely temporary, and that additions will have to be made on something like the same scale. There is a great opportunity for somebody to devise a new kind of hospital, which will be cheap, easily capable of extension upon the original plan and from the professional point of view of even greater efficiency than the old hospital. One' feels that if the old tradition of hospital construction is to be broken there may be many anxious hearts. But traditions are really not kept alive by routine observance of an ancient system or by mute obedience to an ancient law. They are kept alive by an active faith which forever is seeking some new adventure and _ exploring new paths, in ccmforniity with the old spirit and with unchanged devotion to the great ideal of which traditions are the shrine.”—Sir Berkeley Moynihan in a speech reported in the “Yorkshire Post.” After Sixty. “If you happen to have the luck to survive the age of sixty you find yourself getting lonely; your contemporaries begin to pass from the stage. For the Psalmist gravely exaggerated, as anj’ insurance office will tell you, when he put the length of human life at seventy. The expectation of life for a male child at birth is just over fifty years, and so, if you reach sixty, you are already ten years above the average. After that, however much we may like to forget it, we live on constant reprieve. During the last few years the men of my youth have passed in one unbroken procession out of my sight. I now see the world going over to a new generation of rulera and builders. The younger generation is marching on to the stage: and good luck go with them. We hand our torches over to them. They spell to us a true kind of immortality, tne iml mortality of the human race. But they will rule and build no worse by giving an occasional thought to the famous men who came before them. I am not an advocate of ancestor worship; but humanity lives by the example and experience of those who have blazed the trail through the trackless forest of life.”—The late Mr. Harold Spender.

Airways v. Seaways. “Cobham arrived Home by air only a day or two in advance of Mr. Bruce, the Australian Premier, who left Australia simultaneously with him by the old-fashioned sea route. It is well to remember that significant circumstance in our speculations on the future. What Mr. Cobham has done in the practical sense is to define the difficulties of a flight of this kind, to learn what means must be taken to overcome them. These are no inconsiderable results. But we are still scarcely within measurable distance of the time when journeys of such magnitude can be put on a really safe commercial basis, and when the ordinary timid citizen will look upon an air’-passage to Melbourne with the easy nonchalance with which he would at present regard the voyage by sea.”— “Daily News" (London). That American Debt.

“So far a.; possible, America has insisted that she shall be paid not in goods or services but in sterling, which adds to our burdens and surfeits her existing plethora of gold. Surely ‘rigour’ is too weak rather than too strong a descriptive epithet. Yet we would lay stress on the fact that Britain has not asked to be released from her bond; and it is because she has shown herself ready to meet her obligations that her credit stands high in the world.”—“Daily Telegraph” (London).

Modern Life and Men. “Undoubtedly modern life involves men in a far more distracting network of material relations than they suffered in the thirteenth century. But it is clearer to mankind now than it was then than life is, in one respect, all material; and that the transition from the material to the spiritual is not a passage from one world to another, but a substitution in the soul of a changed attitude to the same things. More and more we realise that the example we chiefly need is the example, not of abnegation, but of use and fulfilment; it is, indeed, infinitely more difficult to create harmony than to refuse to touch the instrument with which it is to be made; and the task of religion, we increasingly perceive, is not to show us how to escape the world, but how to avail ourselves of it most fully and most completely.”—London “Times" Literary Supplement.

The Talking Film. “The talking film will have its uses, and not for one party alone. But it will no more supersede the appeal of the personal encounter and the live, spoken word, than broadcasting lias superseded the theatre or the telephone the intimate conversations when men meet face to face. Spell-binders we shall always have, but they will never succeed in their spell-binding through the mechanical arts of the screen and the phonograph.”—.“The Star” (London).-