Manawatu Herald TUESDAY, OCTOBER 11, 1921. PUBLIC OPINION.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XLIII, Issue 2340, 11 October 1921, Page 2

Manawatu Herald TUESDAY, OCTOBER 11, 1921. PUBLIC OPINION.

THE power ol' mass thought in the long run is really irresistible, says Sir Phillip Gibbs. The fate of the world is really decided on by the Nobodies —by groups of young men talking together in college gowns or between two games of dominoes in a tea shop; by husbands and wives discussing their family budget in the back parlour, or in the kitchen, or the suburban drawing-room; by working men in the tap-room or the committee room; by mothers of men everywhere; by every writer who tells a word of truth or a word of charily. The vibrations of all these thoughts reach out to the leaders, unite into that mysterious power known as “public opinion” which no autocrat may resist when he is aware of it. The peoples themselves, therefore, have their chance of fulfilling their own ideals if they will use their power. Clearly, if there is anything clear in life, many millions of minds are set upon international peace, and they are "fed up” with war and the price of war. But they have not been logical in their application of that faith to their own social problems. The abandonment of force as a method of argument between nations is generally accepted as the onl\ way of sense by all bill tin* reactionaries, but while they proclaim (hat ideal and denounce the militarists, they have been tempted lo ado-pl force as a means* of supporting their own claims to liberty or good wages. So it is with the Communists who are halers of militarism but advocates of ruthless revolution. Yet in many places force and its inevitable cruelties have been defeated. Bolshevism would have swept over many countries if the Russians had maintained their first ideals of gaining pence by passive resistance to German guns and German bayonets, and the declaration of human brotherhood, but directly they started cutting throats and setting up their own tyranny and denying liberty by force, they lost their power of conversion, and were destroyed by their own evil.