Youth and Politics

Dominion, Volume 30, Issue 255, 24 July 1937, Page 1 (Supplement)

Youth and Politics

“The complaint is general that new men fit to be the political leaders of the future are not in sight. Yet there never was so much youthful talent spending itself on writing, talking, lecturing, and theorising about politics, and yet failing to find any practical outlet; failing in the main because it has got harnessed to theories and ideologies which cannot be fitted, and never will be fitted, into the British way of life.

“I read the literature produced by these young men and find it full of ideas which in due proportion would be extremely useful, but I find them accompanied by a contempt for practical politics and a scorn for the compromises and adjustments without which government simply cannot proceed in a free country. “They demand all or nothing. Since ‘all’ means that their ideas would need to be imposed here, as elsewhere, by measures which would be fatal to freedom and democracy, they get nothing. “Constant denunciations of everything and everybody lose their effect by mere repetition. Those who can see nothing jolly or happy in the life about them become mere misanthropes and no one listens when they scold. “The last thing to be desired is the rule of the aged in any country, but when the young seem prematurely old, and talk and write like embittered and disillusioned grey-beards, they fail to give us the special contribution for which we look from youth.”

—J. A. Spender, in the “Yorkshire Observer.”