A SPIRIT OF BITTERNESS

Evening Post, Volume CI, Issue 16, 19 January 1921, Page 6

A SPIRIT OF BITTERNESS

Concerning the high cost of living— which is sometimes the cost of high living—and current discontent, the Welfare League points out to-day, in effect, that in the early 'nineties there was more need and less squeal, and to-day there ia more squeal and less need. Querulousness is generally as much a matter of habit of mind as of cause. The Post is not a spiritualist, but can see the force of the spiritualist rediscovery of the doctrine that like attracts like, and that, a " condition " is developmental and cumulative. Progressives in American towns and townships sometimes run " prospeilihy " campaigns; they hold "prosperity" conferences at which everyone talks and thinks prosperity; they try to create a " condition." and atmosphere of prosperity by thought, speech, and writing ; they magnetise everybody into the "movement," and the movement movos, because "as a man thinketh, so fs he." So, conversely, bitter and depreciative propaganda can create an atmosphere of querulousness, class-wav, aud depression. In fact, the misetonaries of darkness perhaps find the human epiil a. more fertile

seed-field than the missionaries of brightness. But this condition is to be resisted, both individually and collectively. It is, as tho Welfare League. says, largely promoted by newcomers who import with them the bitterness of other lands, and who, if they cannot obliterate the generally favourable featm-es of New Zealand life, can smudge it iii their word-pictures. They have not known tin's country's real hardships, and their mission is to deny its comparative comforts. They are, in fact, imported missionaries of the Spirit of Denial, purveyors of a discontent that has ceased to Jbs Divine. Anyone who analyses the situation calmly knows that it is not) as bad ac the wreckers say. Their purpose is not betterment; it is destruction.; and to that end any lie or deception is, in their philosophy, justified if it promotes an infected psychology tending towards national and social suicide. And psychological infection, through the agency of bad spirits, visible or invisible, is so easily effected, that all clear-thinking and clean-minded men and women should arm themselves against it.