CURRENT TOPICS.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LIII, Issue 189, 19 November 1910, Page 4

CURRENT TOPICS.

THE PENALTY OF GREATNESS. The greatness of genius may be almost gauged by the simplicity of its possessor. The epigram, "genius is akin to madness," seemed to apply in the ease of the most eminent of all latterday Russians, Leo Tolstoi, whose towering intellect made liirn the one Russian man who seemed absolutely immune from State interference and punishment. Tolstoi had said so many true things, had achieved such splendid results, bad [ fought in so many of the people's causes, that, by all Russian precedents, he should have been rotting in the mines of Siberia. In the work-a-dav world the successful love what notoriety and its cash price they are able to obtain. This Russian, who outshone most of the world's great ones, preferred solitude, a peasant's smock, and to wander around barefooted, than the loud anplause of multitudes or the money of the admiring. We usually become pathetic at the recitals of tales of poverty. We pity the pauper and envy the rich. Toktoi, giiied himself for Ms eminence

and his riches. He stole away into a monastery to get out of the way of publishers who pestered him, or cinematograph fiends who wished to get a moving picture of the quaint genius, of the postal mail that brought him the Nobel Prize. He was a man who was doomed to earn money. lie was punished for an eminence he could not avoid for a genius that welled out of his soul. One may lie as sorry for the people who are afflicted with a relative of soaring genius, for the history of them all shows that they are peculiarly unpleasant folk to those around them, a constant trouble to their relatives, and to all those who have to do business with them. It is only necessary to review the family affairs of Napoleon, Alexander, Wesley, Dickens, Poe, Carlyle, and others to be assured that a tame bear is a more companionable animal than a genius. The work-a-day person who is not afflicted with ideas would find it hard to realise that a man should run away from applause, notoriety, adoration and money, and the realisation that the great Tolstoi did this is the best evidence that genius does not grow in happiness, and that the possession of great wealth cannot bring contentment. [This -was written in the belief that the great Russian was dead. Later advice states that the report was premature.]

POLICE SPIES. Inducing a man to sin and then punishing him for it may be good law but it is bad morality. If an engineer deliberately smashed an engine in order that he might get the job of mending it he would be execrated. The office of the police is to prevent crime, not to induce it. This apropos of a recent case where police probationers obtained a conviction against an old-age pensioner for sly-grog ■ selling, having carefully incited the man to commit the sin. There is reason to believe that this disreputable system of espionage is detested by all decent police officials. Police probationers are usually young and inexperienced men. It is because of their youth and innocent appearance that they are detailed for the simplest and worst form of espionage. They cannot help being the agents of the authorities and simply obey orders. It is their business to secure convictions. In this particular case, because two probationers persisted, an old man 77 years of age was fined £3, with an alternative of 14 days' imprisonment, and the conviction will possibly make it easy for our benevolent law to rob him of his pension. In the opinion of most people the police probationer who by a specious trick obtains sly-grog, presumably drinks it, is a licensed sneak of the worst description and a breaker of the law himself. To be set in the eariy stages of a police career to do such dirtywork is not good training, and it seems to be as necessary to have moral lawabiding policemen as more law-abiding old-age pensioners. To revert to the specific case, the Magistrate said—and the evidence showed—that "your hospitality got you into trouble." It is very necessary for reasons best known to the police tliat the force should__try to retrieve its reputation as a clean,lawabiding and impartial body. We wonder whether the average policeman has been unlawfully "hospitable" to anybody, and if he would like to ''do" 14 days for it, be deprived of seniority, and generally disgraced. It is a matter for the consideration of Mr. Waldergrave.

FALLOW SOIL. Sir ■ George Reid is a brilliant specialist and has always advocated the discovery of .the trend of thought in individual children with the idea of discovering their buried talents. He recently made the following Avise remarks: young days we were taught by a series of abstract propositions. If there is one curse to a young mind it is endeavouring to make it master, in the glimmerings of its growing consciousness, abstract metaphysical propositions. It will be a grand thing when our men of science do really know everything they write about and talk about—because, when they do, they will be able to tell us what it all means in plain English. Take the child. What is its predominant mental attribute? Curiosity, a desire to learn. The child is fallow soil, ready to be cultivated; its mind is not twisted, not vicious, but bright, unspotted, curious. But how is it that the child finds the school a sort of prison? I mean a child like myself. How is it that he finds school a sort of penitentiary? _ I sometimes think it is because the mind is treated in a way that the body is never treated—sometimes gets walnuts with the shells on. I think the first thing that I, as an outsider, would like to see would be that memory shall not be put in too high a place in mental education. If you want to get the finest triumph of accurate memory you get it out of the phonograph. Memory is a faculty without which all other faculties are more or less useless, but do not forget that memory, if it becomes original, is not memory at all. Memory never adds anything to your mental conceptions. It brings raw material into your mental factory. Memory is a warehouse, not a factory. The highest powers of the mind are the powers of the factory. Excellent memory, however, is sometimes mistaken for mental power. It is thus that many men get marvellous prizes at universities and are never heard of again afterwards."