DRIFTING.

Dominion, Volume 4, Issue 1118, 4 May 1911, Page 6

DRIFTING.

Sir,—The following is culled from "The West in the East, from an American Point of View," by Price Collier, and the latter portion of the excerpt is peculiarly appropriate to the present condition of affairs in this country, and to which you have so persistently and laudably directed attention in your leading columns:— "Buddhism has done for the East what Rationalism has done for the West; it makes men doubt the existence, even .deny tho existence, of any Power higher than themselves; but with the abysmal difference, that it prostrates man in tho East, while it puts him on a dangerous pinnacle in the West. Man with nothing higher than himself to obey, to fear, to love, or to placate, becomes, morally and mentally, disorderly. The same is true of the State, which brings itself to tho condition where the voting mail is paramount, and to be feared, obeyed, and placated. With no higher ideal than that, a State disintegrates, drifts into bureaucracy, then into pensioriism, finally into the bread-and-circus stage, and then disappears. Such a failure was Athens. a failure is before our eyes in modern France—Franco, the. land of pose and phrase, egotism, and scepticism.—l nm, etc., R.E.S. Shannon, May 1.