DUTY AND HARD WORK

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume LXIV, 2 January 1931, Page 8

DUTY AND HARD WORK

NATIONAL CHARACTER GONE SOFT “Look back to the old, much-abused Victorian days, and estimate the qualities of our fathers, the men who held the world’s markets, and were the unchallenged dictators of commerce,” writes the Bishop of Chelmsford in the London “Evening News.” “To them duty was a constant driving force, and hard work was the reply their conscience made to duty. All these qualities have disappeared from the people of to-day. The austere persistence in pursuit of efficiency and world-leadership has been exchanged for easy-going habits. Possessed of education vastly superior to their parents, dowered with a personal charm which makes their forebears look woefully bedraggled, our young people suggest by their attitude to their work that they, regard it as a curse and a bore. The national character has gone soft. The dignity of labour and the joy of hard work are gone. The principal art to-day is to discover how to take as much out of the concern as possible by putting into the concern the least possible, whereas our forefathers’ method was to put in the maximum and take out the minimum. Quite likely before the ship sinks the crew will come to its senses. That has happened more than once in our own history, but all hands should have been at the pumps long before this. It is not political nostrums iwliich will save us, but hard work, thrift, devotion to dull and monotonous duty, and a far more sober view of life and its responsibilities.”