SUBMERGENCE OF INDIVIDUALS.

Manawatu Herald, Volume LI, Issue 4506, 18 September 1930, Page 1

SUBMERGENCE OF INDIVIDUALS.

“In the modern world (lie most ignorant of men can exercise power of such enormous sort that had the most learned recluse of a collide of hundred years ago hit by accident upon its source he would certainly have been condemned lo the (ire as an accomplice of the devil. Irt the simplest operations of’ our daily lives we all employ means which have only just ceased to be miraculous,” says Mr. Aubrey de Selin court, in the Hibhert Journal. “W;e annihilate time with motor-cars, and space with our telephones, and till the laws, it would seem, both of God and man, with our wireless telegraphy. Any tool can do it, and, indeed, does. The power of the foot equally with that of the wise man, is tremendous, and he exercises it every hour of his day and night. Nevertheless, he is not content. N'o wonder, for in all this he is doing nothing at all. The danger of high industrial civilisation is its increasing personality, the submergence of the individual in the growing organisation, both of himself for labour and of science for power. A man who works in a big industrial concern can seldom be conscious of the organisation as a whole, or of his own part in relation' to that whole; he does what he is told to do, ill or well, for the elementary purpose of earning his wages. . . . Within the limits of his purse, all the resources of the world and all the marvellous inventions of science are Iris for lint buying. . . . the ultimate fruits of long and elaborate processes of which he himself understands nothing, or next to nothing.