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Hokitika Guardian, 9 April 1924, Page 2

“The only happy man is the man who enjoys his daily work, and the only good man is he who does it to the host of his ability,” declares Dr. L. P. Jacks, in an essay on minding one’s business, included in a recently published volume. He says:—“As happens so often, the moralists, with their cry of Mo good to others,’ have got hold of the stick, hut by the wrong end. The most effectual way of doing good to others is to mind your own business. One often wonders what the world would be like at the present moment if civilisation had been grounded from the first oil the law of ‘mind your own business,’ with less said about doing good to others. 1 cannot but believe that we should be* living in u far bettor world. There would be loss idleness, less inefficiency, less ugliness, less dirt, less shoddy, and above all. less humbug— less, in short, of everything which darkens the future of mankind. Wo should be more united, more sociable, more unselfish, and more willing to lull together. And the Great War would never have taken place. Germany had never learnt to mind her own business, and to leave other nations to mind theirs. She claimed the right to impose her culture on the rest of the world without, consulting it. which is precisely what some educational reformers do when they take the ‘uneducated masses’ in hand. In fact. Prussian militarism sought to cany out on the international scale, and to its logical conclusion. the mistake we all commit when we grasp the principle of doing good fo others by the wrong end.”