CLASSES AND PARTIES.

Shannon News, 8 April 1924, Page 3

CLASSES AND PARTIES.

. . r- — To-day everything is being arranged in the suburban villa and the workman's cottage. It is the most amazing change in our time, writes Mr Harold Spender, in the “Daily Chronicle.” A few years ago, colonial governorships were regarded as the presumptive property of a few noble families. But now they will be open to anyone who can both deserve and afford them. There is one tremendous fact about this great change not yet sufficiently realised. It is that the upper classes, taken as a whole, haye failed in recent years in the task of government. That is why the public now turns with a Curious complacency ta the experiment of drawing a Government from the untried classes. “May we not find t}je root of the matter in the whole system of our higher education, which from early life segregates the boy of the upper classes from the mass of the people? Not merely does it take him from his home, but! also from his own town or countryside. Whether he goes to Eton or to Oundle, he is equally detached for all the impressionable years of his life from other classes, and placed among his own class alone. He passes oni to the University, and there the same conditions prevail. At Oxford to-day the Labour College, Ruskin Hall, stands aloof and solitary from the other colleges, with a different training and a different outlook May it not/ be that this separation of the classes from early years has had its revenge in the present incapability of the upper classes to understand the workers? What does the average upper-class boy know of the housing of the working classes? A hundred years ago he lived among them, and saw some of them. But to-day ho lives in detachment, and in lator years he is barred off from knowledge by a Ywall of early impressions.”