THOUGHTS FOR THE DAY

Dominion, Volume 34, Issue 259, 29 July 1941, Page 6

THOUGHTS FOR THE DAY

Comments—Reflections

The winds and the waves ore always on the side of the ablest navigators.— Gibbon.

“Dominion troops have never been overaddicted to saluting, and judging from what one sees in London streets, British troops—sailors and airmen, too —are taking a similar view of what is necessary off the parade ground. To compare today’s custom with that, of the first few months of the war is to come to the conclusion that the British Army, meandering from precedent to precedent, is gently approaching the position formally established in the United States Army, that there shall be no saluting save on duty.”—Manchester “Guar’dian” London correspondent.

“Hitler’s Germany is in the situation of a harpooned whale. The barbed spear is in the whale’s side; its blood flows slowly but inexorably. For the time it has still a giant’s strength, and in desperation it lashes this way and that with its terrible tail, smashing boats and killing men in them. But it cannot long survive if the harpoon holds.”—“Scrutator,” in the “Sunday Times,” London.

“In the old days when people took up arms for the ashes of their fathers and the altars of their gods they were not apologetic about it. They did not find it necessary to confess that their deceased parents were far from perfect examples of humanity and that their gods left much to be desired. When people took their stand for a cause they omitted the footnotes and the parentheses. So we still cherish the hope of finding some day a speech or a book in defence of democracy that does not strike the note of ‘A poor thing, but my own.”’ —“New York Times.”

“We recognize three kinds of Christian duty: duty toward God, duty toward one’s neighbour, and duty toward oneself. The first can be represented by worship, the second by the effort for social justice, andi the third by personal and. private morality. But we have only to think for a moment to realize that each kind of duty implies, and in a sense comprehends, the others, and that none is wholly itself unless it is the others too. We are not doing our duty toward God if we are indifferent to social injustice, or if we neglect our own moral and spiritual developments; we cannot truly cultivate our’own. moral and spiritual nature and remain indifferent to God and to our fellow-men; and, finally, we cannot build a Christian social order if we neglect worship or belittle the duty of self-improvement. This is obvious; but in point of fact we always tend to emphasize one duty to the neglect of others, and from this lopsidedness many of our troubles spring.”—Mr. T. S. Eliot, the poet.

“What strikes us first about the Victorian. Age is that, in. spite of its being the beginning of that bewildering speeding-up of invention, it seems so stable from our point of view on looking back upon it. It was a period of immense confidence in the future of the world and of England in herself. Never, too, did a British subject’s confidence in himself rise to a higher pitch. It was the reverse of a nambypamby era as some afterward supposed it to have been; it was robust, fullblooded and enormously prolific and active. It may have been hypocritical (specially in economic matters), but it abhorred cynicism. Never, too, did any age breed fiercer critics of itself than Ruskin and Carlyle, who lashed the Victorian Age unceasingly; Ruskin, the hideousness and barbarity of its industrialism, Carlyle its lack of leadership and plan. Yet they were applauded and admired. Why? Because they possessed the quality which the Victorians valued above all others, moral earnestness.” —Mr. Desmond McCarthy.

“It is illogical to proclaim on the one hand our passionate faith in individual freedom, and at the same time to hint that we hope to see that freedom restricted by some supranational organization to which European nations are to be compelled to belong and which will therefore deprive men of political freedom at its highest potential. We have, thank goodness, done nothing so foolish and we shall not do so. We have yet, however, to make clear to our potential allies in the struggle against Germany that we repudiate such ideas emphatically and finally as part of our war aims. If it took half a century of controversy, and a bitter civil war, of which the scars still remain 70 years after, to maintain the American Union, where the conditions were the most favourable ever known in history for a federal experiment, and if even our own British Commonwealth contains dissident minorities in two Dominions, what chance is there of creating a European Federation in our day and generation? In Europe there is no common tradition, there is no common language, the economic interests of the different regions are entirely different and there are cleavages of race, religion and culture which have deepened steadily for centuries. The history of Europe during the last live centuries is the history of the birth, growth and consolidation of nation states. The era of nationality may be an interim stage in the long process of historical evolution, but it is certainly not a stage which has yet been passed in Europe.” —Mr. Douglas Jerrold, in his new book, “Britain and Europe, 1900-1940.” Homeland. Let me today forget. A little while. The evil leaguer set About our Isle; To watch the budding may, The crocus bloom, The great stone rolled away From winter’s tomb. A new world now puts forth Divinely planned In this the embattled north, Our brave home land. —I.B.