TRUTH AND THE MOTORIST.

Hawke's Bay Herald-Tribune, Issue 77, 17 April 1937, Page 4

TRUTH AND THE MOTORIST.

t " In war, it has been said, truth is always the first casualty. It is a profound saying and yet in one respOct misleading, sinee it implies that truth goes into War in sound condition," Wfites " Y.T." in the New Statesman and the Nation. " Unf oftunately, even in peaeetime truth is something of a cripple, eonstantly being waylaid and bruised and left badly in need of attention from a good Samaritan-. Truth, indeed, has for as long as anybody can remeinber, hobbled about looking like 'one of the ruins that Cromwell knoeked about a bit,1—that tragic figure of whom Marie Lloyd used to sing. In wartime the unhappy creature pierely gets knoeked about still niore violently, still more disastrously. Sand-bagged, bound and gagged, With her eyes bandaged, she looks a mere wreck of her former self. Yet, as I haVe suggested, h§r former self was nothing to boast of. All that has happened is that a comparative wreck has becoine a superlative wreek. " Can it be that there is something demoralising in the possession of a motor-car? Is there any othef invention that has led so many human beings from the stfict path of truth 7 The fishing-rod, it may be arghed. But angling' Was never a universal cult like motoring. The golf ball? As to that, I have never fou&d any siibstantiation of the theory that golfers are giveh to lying about the number of tbeir strokes. The eroquet mallet ? Ah, yes! there is — or used to be— plenty of lying and cheating on the eroquet lawn. (This itself may be a lie, fpr I am merely repeating gossip.) But, even if we take tbe darkest view of eroquet, does tbe ircfegination of the croquet-player ever rise to the same heights as the imagination of the motofist? It was Lofd HeWart, I think, who once said that he was eonstantly trying cases abotit head-on collisions between two ears, eaeb of them on its own side of the foad and each stationar y. To own a motor-car is for many people to enlef the spiritual compaiiy qf Crinini and Ha.ns Andersen.''' — - ;