"Fight for Your Country”

Dominion, Volume 24, Issue 144, 14 March 1931, Page 20

"Fight for Your Country”

message to the rising generation is short. Four words sum \ /I it up : Fight for Your Country!” writes Dr. L. P. Jacks, D.D., %/ I D.Litt., Principal of Manchester College, Oxford, in the “Daily ..VI Mail.” “She is sore stricken and in great peril. Fools have misled her; quacks have given her poison; parasites have sucked her lifeblood; men without souls have defiled her beautiful garments and clothed her in their own ugliness. These are her enemies, deadlier . than any she encountered in the Great War. In her extremity she calls upon you, her children, to fight them and save her. “Fight, first of all, against the Reign of Talk, where the word of the wise man is incessantly' beaten down by clamour and clap-trap; where the deed that needs to be done evaporates into futile discussion; where selfseeking political parties manoeuvre for positions behind the smoke-screen of words while the people perish; where the leaders cancel one another out: where paralysis takes the place of action and the roaring of the talk-mill is the only business that is done. , ’ . .

“Fight, next, against mass-bribery, now shamelessly practised by all political parties, and vastly more demoralising to the people . than the straightforwhrd bribery of old times, when the .town-crier went round at four o’clock in the afternoon offering twenty pounds for a vote—as my grandmother used to tell me. How to get rid of the dole? 1 know of one way only. . . - “Let the young rise up in their millions and tell the cowardly btibers to their, faces that they will die of hunger rather than touch the poisonous thing. Finely-spoken, you will say, by one who is never likely to be in that position. “Well, be as nasty as you please, but strike, and strike with all the strength of self-respecting manhood and womanhood at the damnable system which has brought .into existence this stagnant mass of State-sunported idleness.’ Make no speeches about it, or only short ones, but do it! “Make revolution on these lines and shut your ears to the fools and scoundrels who would make revolution on any other.