SOAP-BOX ORATORS.

Bruce Herald, Volume LIV, Issue 52, 11 July 1918, Page 3

SOAP-BOX ORATORS.

SUPERNAL SUPERMEN. SYDNEY'S 'EXPERIENCES. THEIR RISE AND DECLINE. The Sydney Sun, dealing with the question of the soap-box orator, writes as follows. The paper states that the Gorman philosopher never, in his wildest dreams, anticipated such an assay of supermen per ton of humanity as Sydney has returned during the last dozen years. The remarks are also pertinent in New Zealand's case, where the supernal superman is by no means a rara avis, and whose knowledge is seemingly only bounded by the wildest flights of imagination:— "By some strange paradoxical development, the extremist political element, while loudly avowing that leadership is a myth, and that the cause of Truth prevails by the weight of its own righteousness, has given to this city an apparently endless procession of individuals who loom for a period as supermen of the most aggravated type. Such periods aro brief. They cometli up as a mushroom, and fade away with the speed of a vaudeville star. One week they are unknown. The next they are in full glare of the limelight, the radiating gleams from their gorgeousness penetrating into the darkest places of the 'Commonwealth. The orchestra strikes a noble chord, the audience rises with enthusiasm, the press agent works overtime, and the turn is in full progress. Then the superman passes out, and a few weeks later another takes his place. "Nothing is so absolutely ex as an ex-superman. No human power can bring him to the position he formerly occupied, any more than a vaudeville manager can boom the revival of a star as lie did his first appearance. Sometimes they expire merely by effluxion of time. Sometimes we send them to gaol, in which case they live only in memory, like the dead souls in the Blue Bird; out of life they lie in shades of Long Bay or Goulbum, and are galvanised into being only when some extraneous incident, such as an outsider's win, recalls the fact that poor old 'Blowhard is doing time for the Cause of Freedom. Sometimes we arc even less merciful. We send the superman to Parliament, where he becomes a sub-man indeed.

"Nothing yet invented has succeeded in taking the super out of the superman more than election to Parliament. The poll is hardly declared before he is reduced to a dead-level of that hated emissary of Capital, the Average 'Member of Parliament. The newspapers, which formerly recorded his flambuoyant remarks under headlines half an inch deep, now content themselves with announcing that 'Mr Blowhard also spoke.' But it is not only this conspiracy of the capitalistic press which is to blame. Hansard itself, at considerable public expense, while chronicling every syllable he utters, and many aitchcs he doesn't utter, fails to reveal any of'his old fire. There is no use trying to explain the fact away. The depressing effect of the Legislature acts like a neutralising acid, and leaves him a plain, ordinary, uninspired human being. Not only is he divested of the incandescent personality which led to his being hailed as a superman, but he loses much of the sturdy fidelity he had exhibited to his Cause.

"Sad to relate, it has to bo admitted that he begins to sec that there are two tides to every question; that the man irho holds contrary opinions is not "by h\ason of that fact a liar, a thief and a blackmailer; that the man who holds similar opinions is not necessarily a saint or a phophct. In other words, lie drifts perilously close to the line where tho backslider is declared bogus. At best, he is no longer a superman, and little need is there to wonder that the newest and most obscure, union begins to wonder whether after all they have not made a mistake, and that he, not Blowhard, M.L.A., is the genuine superman who should be upholding their rights in Parliament, So the secretary turns up his little handbook, / How to Become a Superman in Five Lessons/ starts out to persuade his listeners that lie is a duly qualified one, and when the time is ripe babbles o' green benches until he boxes the compass by reaching the splendid obscurity of Macquarie Street, to go the way of all supermen. '' The soap-box of the Domain is the Pandora's box of to-day. Nobody can guess what it may bring forth. The lid oft', and it may release blessings to spread over the countryside, bringing comfort and happiness to every home; the lid off, and it may disseminate disorder and plunder and pestilence to devastate the country. Its very uncertainty makes a peculiar appeal to the Australian temperament. Gamblers, no less in politics than in sport or on the field of battle, we delight in taking a chance of big profit, no matter what the error of judgment may entail. "So it is that we suffer the soap-box, and that majestic figure, the superman of . the moment, which it supports. The

figure changes frequently, /but the plinth is eternal, and no matter how

many supermen we may depose by entrusting them to the care of either the

warder or the Speaker, the following Sunday afternoon will find it upholding another stalwart upholder of something else, the tortoise which supports Atlas, who in turn supports the world. "Such a reflection is encouraging, for a simple mathematical calculation suffices to satisfy ourselves that it is only a matter of time when we shall all have our turn at supermanship. We have just to sit along the wall reading last year's sporting papers, and sooner or later Fate, the barber, will call, 'Next, please.' "