AN AGE OF QUACKS

Press, Volume LXXII, Issue 21707, 14 February 1936, Page 20

AN AGE OF QUACKS

to in aoixos' or th» mm. " Sir,—A very old esoteric story informs us that when the gods, in proper council, decided to give Man an opportunity to find - his own salvation, they ' were"* *pusled . where to find a suitable hiding place for the solution of his problem, as one of the characteristics, of evolving Man was that of inqutsitiveness; and no place, from.the very depth of' the angry ocean to the most inscrutable corner of sky, was safe from his prying propensities. So the best hiding place, decided the Gods, was Man's heart! Simple as this story appears it shows us a phenomenon of übiquity of time and place in the history of humanity. When faced with dangers, with plagues, natural calamities, wars, and the terror of. the unknown, Man at once tried to find a solution by studying the heavens with ' all their astral denizens, because he could not go any further.. Then astrology became a science of quackery, just as much as its present iniquitous sister, political economy, which is a quackery science, to-day. It is a fact that cannot be gainsaid that man has always looked without himself for the cause of his problems and sufferings, and political, economists have successfully exploited this human weakness, for if they have not solved and cannot solve our problem, they have certainly, showed, a marvellous acumen in making it extremely complicated. Beginning no further back than Malthus, who impudently blamed God for our poverty by" inventing some non-existent infernal law. to-day his successors have continued his nefarious work by inventing such laws of inflation, of wages, of diminishing returns, of rent, etc., etc., which laws only exist in their perfervid imagination and they are but the material results of something wrong in the human heart which one might call greed, acquisitiveness, and possessiveness. Eradicate those weed-like propensities from evolving man and our pseudo-scientific economists will have to go in some other equatorial heavenly regions to sell their quack remedies. These quacks have no sense of right or wrong, but they always try to find a justification for any existing injustice. For instance, when a learned man writes a classic, society says to him "The book is really the result of your genius and work. The book is yours for a short time; after that it is mine." Society applies the same reasoning to a great inventor, but when a speculator, a gambler of the deepest dye, becomes possessor of God's land, which no man ever produced, society says to these angelic monsters, "The land is yours for eternity!" The private ownership of land is the basis of all evil. It is the real cause of inflation, but speculators and political economists apart from poor Henry George and Marx, have sanctified it and called it "The sacred right of private property." John Stuart Mill had to confess that his most brilliant pupils had to forsake the study of political economy as ungodly and sterile; and became philosophers or students of ethical science. Now one of our most brilliant scholars. Professor Allan G. B. Fisher, of Dunedin, in his latest book, after belabouring our awful capitalistic system, tells us that Man to-day could provide for all his material needs with very little effort and time, and that it is high time that we concentrated our energies not in grabbing and acquiring what turns to ashes and dust, but on enriching the eternal in us Dy the study of literature, philosophy, arts and sciences, by the acquisition of which we do not only enrich ourselves, but the whole world, while taking from none. To grab is the sign of backward races; to serve, that of civilised man. Service and political economy exclude each other and have nothing in common.—Yours, etc., ■ , UMBERTO COLONNA. February 11, 1936.