LEVEL HEADS

Evening Post, Volume CIX, Issue 101, 2 May 1925, Page 16

LEVEL HEADS

SIR PERCY SCOTT'S INJUNCTION.

Sir Percy Scott, the Admiral, left a clause in his will enjoining his executors, with regard to his children, to endeavour to keep their heads straight."

I do not know anything about Sir Percys children, writes "John Blunt" in the "Daily Mail," but, speaking generally, the supervision suggested would help many of the younger generation in these times when such numbers of people are perpetually losing their heads and being led away by all sorts of unsound ideas. The curse of the age is really an unrestful- desir 0 to experiment with life in every direction, rather than think out for oneself what is the sure road to follow.

The air is full of new theories about lilo and society, and many young persons are entranced by their mere revolutionary newness and do not stop to consider whether they will, so to speak, hold water. Ihey do not realiso that newness, is, in itself, no virtue and that somo of the oldest truths are the mo<=t profound.

]:outh is naturally adventurous and naturally, perhaps, contemptuous of what is usually accepted, but that is no valid reason for so often flinging l O "ic to the winds and following wills o' tie wisp which lead only to disillusion and disaster.

To have your h.ead screwed on right is- ono of tho most fortunato things anybody can be born with. It means that you have been gifted with instinctive judgment and sense of proportion and that you are not going to be carried off your feet by specious faulty arguments or emotional., unsound appeals. It means, in short, that you will not accept as gospel the ideas either of the old generation or the new, but will think tilings out for yourself in a level-headed nianner.

_ Some people are governed almost entirely- by tradition, others almost entirely by a desire for tho latest novelty. Both such types are often equally unthinking, and, indeed, both are assured in their attitudes by the attitude of the other. Tho conservative mind distrusts the revolutionary mind and becomes more conservative in consequence, whereas the revolutionary mind is_ contemptuous of tho conservative mind and becomes more and more revolutionary out of sheer bravado.

But if people, and especially young people, would only . keep their 'heads straight we should avoid this clash of extremes, because we should all have a more common-sense conception of the problems and difficulties that face the world to-day.

Humanity has ticcnmo very self-con-scions and temperamental, and in the desire to express ourselves many of us are selfishly oblivious to the. fact that society is not a more experimental ground for our personalities but is something for which w e all. have-to work. If at . the start of adult life young people would clearly envisage 'what their obligations arc' uacl what they owe to their country and to society us a whole, there would be fewer victims of insane • doctrines and subversive ideas. But nowadays so many people think it clever to show what" they are pleased to consider originality " that everything is at sixes and sevens and the world is full of false prophets. Cut, if. we can. .Uucp our beads straight w». 'sliitU Mov) be iiblc lv tlruisuteu yut '^a. ujyyetso.