BAD TEMPER.

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume XXXVIII, Issue 5082, 31 January 1927, Page 4

BAD TEMPER.

SOME SUGGESTED CUBES. SQUARING SHOULDERS, & DRUGS. According to a psycho-analyst, most people, wh<?,n they are 'feeling annoyed, contract their chests and hunch up their shoulders. If they squared their shoulders instead,” he declares, “they would find it much more difficult to be bad-tempqred. This, is why I have not been annoyed once during the last four years.” Men of science have on more than one occasion tried to invent a cure for bad temper (writes Robert Lynd in the “Daily Mail”). Sir Lauder Brunton some years ago claimed to have discovered some drug that acted on bad temper as quinine acts on fever. All that the bad-tempersd man had to do was to take Sir Lauder Brunton’s prescription to a chemist and, when he felt an attack of crossness coming on, to swallow a tabloid or something and his wrath at the same time. Whether anybody cve,r tried the cure or not I do not know. If one. may judge 'from the behaviour of the human race in recent years very little use has been made of Sir Lauder Brunton’s tabloids. If Sir Lauder Brunton had told us how to cure baldness or blushing or catarrh by taking tabloids, the tabloids, I am .sure.,would .have been sold by the million. It isi all the more curious that we will not take tabloids for our tempers, since far more misery is caused in the world by bad temper than by baldness or blushing, or even catarrh.

Abolish bad temper and you will cut at the very roots Of war, despotism, and industrial conflict. A good-tem-pered Europe would be a sort of United States of Europe. A bad-tem-pered Europe, ig the sort of Europe you read about in the histories. It is quite common for a European country to have a Government which is simply an organised bad temper. You will see an example of' this in Italy to-day.

In England, again, who, can doubt that tabloids of good nature, judiciously distributed among men of all parties and swallowed at moments of crisjs would have given the national life a far,-far rosier complexion during recent months ? If all the cross masters and all the cross men had been practised tabloid-takers the masters, the men, and thQ nation at large would all be better off to-day.

This being so, it seems to me that it would be a good thing for both the League of Nations and the individual governments of Europe, to consider the question of making the use •->X these tablodis compulsory. I'f a politician in the House of Commons got cross, it might be made a penal offence if, on being called on by the Speaker, he refused to swallow a tabloid. Similarly, if a man lost his ternper with his wife and she, in order to calm him, said, “Oh, gt> and take

a tabloid he would lay liimsej'f open to a fine if he did not immediately obey her instructions. Not that I care, whether bad temper is banished by the tabloid cure or the. method of squaring one’s shoulders. At the. same time., I wonder how many bad-tempered people want to get rid cf their bad tempers. Most of them, I suspect, enjoy be.ing in a temper; and, besides, there is no doubt that a bad temper is much more profitable than a good temper. A better-tempered Mussolini might have, been a saint or a martyr. He would never have been the dictator olf Italy.