CLEAN HEART FIRST

Wairarapa Times-Age, 31 August 1939, Page 8

CLEAN HEART FIRST

DISTANT HORIZONS OF OUR DESTINY. CRISES LIMITING VISION. A succession of crises has limited our vision in Britain, writes Sir Wyndham Doedes in the "Spectator." We have become so dominated by the thought of immediate danger that we arc losing sight of the distant horizons of our destiny. Our thoughts are directed toward saving political power by armed force, but soon there will come the realisation that far more than political power is endangered. Already there is a growing consciousness that not onlj r our dominion, but all our ideas of democratic government and individual liberty are at stake. Arms cannot safeguard the concepts it has taken centuries to formulate and hold. Only the united will of all our peoples resolved to make liberty and justice the inspiration of our rule can do that. If we desire to create an Empire informed .in its farthest party by the vigour of healthy liberty, we must first make clean its heart. A fine facade cannot long survive a rotten structure, and it is evils within our home which, like a spiritual dry-rot. are sapping the strength of our civilisation. The dangerous complacency with which we accept the evils of cur social life is either a revelation of crass stupidity or of a selfishness which does not wish to be disturbed. A man's amusements are a i measure of his spiritual quality, and it is fair, therefore, to estimate cur people’s interests by examining those things on which they most freely spend their money. Drink figures high in the iist; in 1932 the'naticn’s drink bill was £232,500,000. in 1937 it rose to £259,387,00(1, and convictions from drunkI enness increased from 30,146 to 44,525 in 1933. The distress and crime resulting from gambling are generally acknowledged, and through organised —and legal—commercial exploitation the turnover on gambling is estimated at from £350.000.000 to £500.000.000 annually. Frivolity conceals selfishness with a bright veneer, and therefore it is not encouraging to discover that women spend £00,000,000 a year on 1 beauty-culture. J