COMMUNITY’S LIFE

Wairarapa Times-Age, 6 August 1941, Page 3

COMMUNITY’S LIFE

SERVICE IN A DEMOCRACY. “Without a lively sense of duty and a proper system of outlets for it in the shape of service, no community can be truly alive and vigorous,” said Professor Julian Huxley in a recent address. “However, man's desire to feel useful, to contribute to a greater whole, can be made part of the driving force of a Totalitarian State just as readily as of a democratic one. But its expression has to be .quite different. In Germany, blind obedience within the framework of the leadership system is the method' adopted. No one will deny that it has generated a fanatical spirit of service and indeed of sacrifice, or that it has heightened the national sense of living unity to an extraordinary degree. How can we harness this potent force and yet remain democratic? Somehow we must do so if our societies are to remain vigorous. Indeed it is only by so doing that we can hope to become really democratic; for duties and services are the concrete expression of that fraternity which democracy has as yet hardly begun to realise in practice.”