BEYOND POLITICS.

Hawke's Bay Herald-Tribune, Issue 188, 26 August 1937, Page 4

BEYOND POLITICS.

"There are two great ideals of our community life. which go beyond politics: authority on the one side, s.elf-realisation on the - other; personal, autocratic leadership on the one side, and on the other co-operation in experiment and in the chances and changes of our national life. The conflict is between thOse who believe in our ultimate rationality and sanity, and tbose wbo do not. Taine, the great historian, after living tbrougb the French Commune, in a terrible phrase described man as a chained gorilla. If he is really that, the only thing to do is to keep him behind bars and to keep his chains on, fio tell him that if he votes at all, he must vote for a particular party, he must take his orders from the dictator. " If you read Hitler's 'Autobiography,' or the writings of Lenin, or Mussolini's authoritative article on Fascism, you will find that all these people say that those old values are gone, and gone for ever; that they were essentially the children of the nineteenth century; that they are dead and deserved to die because they were based on a ■ completely wrong conception of human nature. They thought human nature was better tban it was, and these people say that human nature is not, in any country, however educated and however nominally civilised, good enough for the community to' he ahle to run its own show. Away, thev say, with the liberty of the individual, of what I call the spiritual finality of the citizen.'V-Dr. C. P. Good.