TOPICS OF THE DAY.

Waikato Times, Volume 121, Issue 20277, 20 August 1937, Page 6

TOPICS OF THE DAY.

Beyond Politics. “There arc two great ideals of our community life which go beyond politics: authority on the one side, self-realisation on tlie other; personal, autocratic leadership on the one side, and on the other co-operation in experiment and in the chances and changes of our national life. The conllict is between those who believe in our ultimate rationality and sanity, and those who do not. Taine, the great historian, after living through the French Commune, in a terrible phrase deseribed man as a chained gorilla. If he is really that, tlie on I\- thing In do is to keep him behind bars and to keep his chains on, to tell him that it' he votes at all, he must vote for a particular party, he miml lake his orders from the dictator. ••If you read Hitler’s ‘Autobiography,’ or tlie writings of Lenin, or Mussolini’s authoritative article on Fascism, you will find that all these people say that those old values are gone, and gone for ever; that thee were essentially the children of the nineteenth century; that they are dead and deserved to die because they were based on a completely wrong conception of human nature. They thought human nature was better than it was, and these people say that human nature j s no | in any country, however educated and however nominally civilised good enough for the community to be able to run ils own show. A wav, they say, with ihe liberty of the individual, of what I call the spiritual finality of the citizen.” —Dr. C. I‘. Good. Physical Fitness. Viscount Dawson of Penn, the eminent physician, took part in a recent House of Lords debate on the Physical Training and Recreation Bill. Referring to the policy of looking after those who arc unfit, lie said: —"We have to remember that in securing a tit race in days gone by Nature did a large part of the work. She killed off the unfit, and only the fit survived. But we are gradually undoing Nature's efforts by our developed sense of greater humanity and a more acute conscience towards those who are in distress and those who are weak. But if we are to continue that policy of looking 1 after the weaker brethren —and 1 cannot conceive anybody doubling • J i ice undoing Nature’s plan for di-mirdmg Ihr wr.-iklings <*f ! lhr It (hen-fore becomes doubly important for u- lo set up a 1 * .. j [, VVI . iv.it.- tit no - > and give the proper opportunities :! is ini v... j ill u'.: iii Ki. <■!> oris, i.n.l y.i w ill i ! In<ri| .11 I'm’ I-.'U I: 1.1.1-! !"■ min.l iliat 111.- v.'im—- ' ~,v .ill hero worshippers, and they will lollow the leaders ot iheir | ~u n general ion. If therefore von give opportunity to those who arc mo-t tit to move forward, as they inevitably will, in the company of their generation, they will set the pace of conduct and the stand-