RIGHTS AND DUTIES

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 910, 1 March 1930, Page 8

RIGHTS AND DUTIES

THE QUIET CORNER.

(Written for THE SUN by the Rev. Charles Chandler.) •Life is a mission; duty, therefore, is its highest law.”—Mazzini. I T wiu hc readily conceded by all thinking people that selfishness lies at the root of a great deal of our personal, family and national unhappiness. The doctrine of the survival of the fittest is pressed home to all of us in our modern competitive system, and as a result of this we are prone to interpose ourselves between the world and what it needs for its highest good. Nor is all our selfishness a matter of the conscious interposition of ourselves between the highest good and the world’s great need. It’s just thoughtlessness some of the time One thing, however, is certain, our English grammar has something to do icith our ingrained sense of “Self First.” First person I ■ second person, you; third person, he or she. ’ ’ U' ay back in the tooth~and-claw stage of our development, it is hard to see how it could have been otherwise, but now, with our highly civilised social life, some sort of a subversion of this primitive standard is surely necessary. Too much emphasis is placed upon personl rights instead of upon personal duties. We are social beings, and really have no existence at all apart from our neighbours, therefore duty must come first. As Mazzini has elsewhere than in his “Duties of Man’’ inferred, ive get our rights by doing our duty. “Our first duty is to Humanity, because we are men before we are citizens or fathers; our second to our country, because icithout country we have neither name, token, voice, nor rights. Our third duty is to the family (the country of the heart), and our fourth duty is to ourselves.’’ That is the Mazzinian order, and if not “worthy of an acceptation,” is at least an interesting contribution to the question of making the “ cock-eyed world” see straight. NEXT WEEK: THE EMPTY PEW,—AND WHY!