SENSE OF PROPORTION

Evening Post, Volume CV, Issue 25, 30 January 1923, Page 6

SENSE OF PROPORTION

South Africa shares with other Dominions the disadvantages of criticism from people woefully lacking in sense of proportion, and to these critics General Smuts last week made a strongly-worded reply. He claimed that South Africa was a paradise compared with older countries, and he likened the European situation to a sleepwalker on the edge of a precipice. The reply is a corrective to dismal prophets who see naught but disaster for their own country. Without doubt the jeremiads of these critics are as dangerous and as'false as the self-satisfaction of optimists whose tendency is to the other extreme. In both a sense of proportion is lacking, and the result is equally harmful whether the balance falls on the side of pessimism or of optimism. 'Their failing is similar in effect to the failings of those critics who contemplate one small section of the Empire' and, from what they soe there, ■ pi-onounce judgment upon the whole. They take.a narrow view of an Empire which demands above all breadth of vision. It is such people who have been largely responsible for magnifying the rights of the Dominion on the

subject of Empire privileges while saying little or nothing of the responsibilities which must be maintained if the privileges are to endure.