BRITISH-ISRAELITES AND OTHERS.

Evening Star, Issue 21881, 19 November 1934, Page 3

BRITISH-ISRAELITES AND OTHERS.

TO THE EDITOR. Sir, —Will''you permit me a few sad words of protest on some topics that continually occupy much of your space!' I refer to the new, and 1 am afraid growing, itch of every man, woman, or child wlio has been so unfortunate as to contract some weird theory, belief, or opinion, not to be satisfied with or ashamed of having contracted it, but to desire to spread, disseminate, or propagate it, to the great discomfort, annoyance, and boredom of His Majesty's liege subjects, and particularly of the readers of daily papers. Affliction with such weird beliefs is' not a new thing; it is only the manner of bearing the affliction that changes. There was a time when a gentleman wlio, let us say, evolved out of his inner thought the theory that he was a poached egg, and that the prime necessity for his. comfort was .a slice ,of toast whereon to recline, kept his theory to himself and for his intimate or domestic circle. He did not rush into print, or call public meetings, or canvass semi-public bodies, or try to get a royal commission appointed, to awaken his fellowcitizens to the fact that' they also were potential poached eggs, and rouse them to form Poached JSgg Associations and that sort of thing. Nowadays fashions have changed, and any human being who believes himself to have formulated, or has been foolish enough to believe someone who has formulated, some such idea as that the British race is some lost tribe or tribes of Israelites, or_ that Major Douglas’s theories of social credit are the salvation of the nation, or that a glass of beer is a narcotic poison, or that the earth is flat (I take only a few prominent examples), is not content with the satisfaction of believing himself to be right, but immediately takes steps to infect with the virus everyone that has the misfortune to be within talking, Press, or wireless distance of him.

To any sane /and sensible person a comparison of the respective beliefs of the metamorphosed poached egg and the British-Israelite, to choose an awful example, is not without its value. To the credit of the former it can at least be said that he had some objective foundation for his belief. He could with the connivance of his domesticstaff behold a poached egg in the flesh, as it were, and be right in this, that poached eggs do or did exist. After all, a poached egg is a fact, and he at least started out his theory with a fact. But the British-Israelite, on the threshold of his hallucination, is yis-a-vis with more formidable difficulties. First, he has to premise, imagine, or subjectively create some Israelitish tribes that someone, on evidence that the human poached egg would contemptuously reject, believed to bo lost. Next, he similarly subjectively creates a homogeneous 'British race—instead of an at least possible individual poached egg, the most mixed omelette of eggs of every origin, kind, and description that was ever cooked.' This is a feat of imagination at which even a wellinformed toast-dweller who had read a little elementary history would boggle. Is he then deterred from identifying the two? Not a bit of it, and, if we must be fair and just, if he wants to do so, that is his own affair and his own private misfortune. But docs he stop there? Again, and more sadly, no. His final step is to unveil his silliness in the Press, write books about it, give lectures ou it, petition and Presbyterian synod, farmers’ union, chamber of commerce, or other assemblage of a few persons who happen to be sitting together somewhere, to proclaim to all the “ cock-eyed world,” as the Americans say, that he is right and that his unutterably silly and idiotic and contemptible belief, theory, etc., really matters, when every sane person knows that it wouldn’t matter even if by the wildest stretch of the imagination it could be conceived to be right, and is bored to sobs with it anyhow. •

Seriouly, sir. there must and surely ought'to be a limit even to the sacred liberty of being wrong. That limit has nearly been reached in the case of persons like myself who cherish the belief that sanity of thought and opinion is of some value to a community, that it is at least inadvisable to expose the weak-minded (unfortunately to be found in every society) to the seductions cf every weird theory that some moron happens to think of, and who, in any case (and whether it is an argument or not) are sick, tired, bored, and fed up with our inability even to read mu newspapers without being afflicted

with some time-worn or newly-invented silliness. —1 ajn, etc.,. Const’axt Read eh. November 17. • \ .