FEW GREAT MEN

Evening Post, Volume CXXII, Issue 153, 26 December 1936, Page 12

FEW GREAT MEN

A NEED OF THE WORLD

INSUFFICIENCY OF MORAL RESOURCES

The view that though there are many able men in the world, there is a dearth of great men, was expressed in an interview today by Mr. T. D. H. Hall, Clerk of the House of Representatives, who returned to Wellington this morning by the Orford, after an eight months' trip abroad, during which he made a study of social and cultural conditions in other countries.

"My impression," he said, "is that there is a tendency for scholarship to dissipate itself in minutiae, and that there is a real loss of power to apprehend truth and beauty truly and so

evoke the creative response. More people know about these things than enjoy them.""

Mr. Hall said he was much strucK by the decline in the authority and influence of institutions such as the churches, schools, etc., which had largely created and maintained moral and ethical standards "There has been a great increase of sentimentality which is none the less remarkable because of its tendency to attach itself to vice rather than to virtue. Great conceptions as, for example, 'charity' or 'playing the game,' with a connotation deriving from centuries of human experience, are definitely debased. It is considerations such as these and the interpretation of history rather than any inside knowledge of world poli■tics that lead me to the conclusion that the world today has insufficient moral resources to resolve without conflict the divergent aims and policies of the nations."