LEVEL HEADS.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 19472, 6 May 1925, Page 11

LEVEL HEADS.

SIR PERCY SCOTT’S INJUNCTION. Sir Percy Scott, the admiral, left a clause in his' will enjoining his executors, with regard to his children, to “endeavour to keep their heads straight.” I do not know, anything about Sir Percy’s children (writes “John Blunt” in (ho Daily Mail), but, speaking generally, the supervision suggested would help many of tho younger generation in these times when such numbers of people are perpetually losing their heads and being led away 1 by all sorts of unsound ideas. Tho curse of the age is really an unrostful desire to experiment with life in every direction, rather than think out for oneself what is the sure road to follow. The air is full of new theories about life and society, and many young persons aro entranced by their mere revolutionary now. ness and do not stop to consider whether they will, so to speak, hold water. They do not realise that newness is, in itself, no virtue, and that- some of tho oldest truths aro the most profound. Youth is naturally adventurous and naturally, perhaps, contemptuous of what is usually ■ accepted, but that is no valid reason for so often flinging logic to the winds and following wills o’ the wisp which lead only to disillusion and disaster. To have your head screwed on right is one of the most fortunate things anybody can bo born with. It means that you have been gifted with instinctive judgment and sense of proportion and that you aro not going to bo carried off your feet by specibus faulty arguments or emotional, unsound appeals. It means, in short, that you will not accept as gospel (ho ideas either of the old generation or the now, but will think things out for yourself in a level-headed manner. Some people pro governed almost entirely !w tradition, others almost entirely by a desire for the latest novelty. Both such tvoes arc often equally unthinking, and, indeed, both are assured in their attitudes by the attitude of the other. Tho conservative mind distrusts tho revolutionary mind and becomes more conservative in consequence, whereas the revolutionary mmd is contemptuous of the conservative mind and becomes more and more revolutionary out ol sheer bravado. But if people, and especially young people, would only keep their heads straight wo should avoid this clash of extremes, because we should all have a more commonsense conception of the problems and difficulties that face tho world to-day. Humanity has become very self-conscious and temperamental, and in the desire to express ourselves many of us are selfishly oblivious to tho fact that society is not a mere experimental ground for onr personalities, but is something for which we all have to work. If at the start of adult life young people would clearly envisage what their obligations are ami what they owe to their country and to society as a whole, there would be fewer victims of insane doctrines and subversive ideas. But nowadays so many people think it clever to show what they are pleased to consider originality that everything is at sixes and sevens and the world is full of false prophets.