“WITH BANDS PLAYING”

Evening Star, Issue 22723, 10 August 1937, Page 12

“WITH BANDS PLAYING”

DEMOCRACY DEGENERATING MODERN GRAZE FOR THRILLS In 1912, the finest and safest vessel that had ever been built, the unsinkable Titanic, struck an iceberg and sank with nearly everyone on board. 11 The staggering fact,” an editorial commented, “is not that the ship went down, but that she went down after 15 hours of radio warnings, her engines at full speed, her band playing, her passengers dancing, and, apparently, nobody caring a damn that ther4 was ice ahead.” And that is the staggering fact about contemporary American warnings everywhere, engines at full speed, bands playing, passengers dancing, and nobody caring a damn. Wo have penalised initiative, ability, and industry to the point at which wisdom dictates that they lie down and play dead. And, as Charles Francis Coe says, “ If we plough under initiative and ability, as we did the bounties of nature, what shall we do when the drought comes? Dollars are only dollars. They can ho replaced. But character may not be imported.” With respect to our changed view of attainment. Dr Butler sums up the situation comprehensively when he writes: “Our whole historic conception of civil, economic, and political liberty, which involves the right to work, to save, and to co-operate ivith others in using our savings for economic and social advancement and development, is now denounced as a form, not of freedom, but of privilege.” Booth Tarkington once observed that by the time our children were 10 years old you couldn’t give ’em a thrill, except by blowing up Brooklyn Bridge. And thrills have become our neurotic necessity; the “ kick” directed at the customary anatomical region, advertised with liquor and literature, essential in every national avocation from movies to murder. All this, of course, does not make for stability, sober thought, or self-discipline. Other discipline, always difficult where every man is as good as his neighbour, is lost in any country that begins turning to tho Left. This is one of the clear reasons for the spread of Fascism. Discipline is essential to individual wellbeing and national progress, and discipline is impossible where the rule of a union or tho law of 'a state intervenes.

lii America almost nobody has ever conceived of education as anything but a means to make money. As many of our best scholastic minds have pointed out, our universities are not really universities at all, but training schools, in which the superstructure of professional proficiency is attempted without any foundation whatever. For years this system has been flooding the country with incompetents and materialists. The man who had acquired knowledge of, or interest in, literature, or the fine arts, or even of and in chipmunks and trees, would not have been among those to enter the struggle for gadgets ns the beginning and end. of the More Abundant Life. He would have been intellectually curious, and eager to be informed in all matters affecting the general good. He would have been an ethical anchorage to defy shifting winds. Instead, hundreds of thousands of him add yearly to the sum of our ignorance, profligacy, and inertia. If all this sounds like a diatribe, re-

flection, may convince the few still cap* able of reflection that the facts justify and the dangers compel it. The time has come to stop, look, and listen. have reached the end of blundering through. Few Democracies have survived more than 200 years, and this is not a propitious time for Democracy, A Democracy militant may survive, a Democracy alert, simple, and Spartan —but not a Democracy more interested in golf than in government, in ] lotteries than in learning, in Bill Powell than in the Bill of Rights America can slide easily into Communism, Fascism, ora combination of both. If it doesn t, soon or late it must face a Fascist world in an armed _ conflict for which it is mentally, physically, and moraJy. unprepared; in which it won t last as long as the proverbial dog with tallow, l e g S chasing an asbestos cat through is ice ahead, and aboard, ami behind, and on every side of ns. Are we going down, like the Titanic, with bands playing and passengers dancing, or are we ready to clear our minds and roll up our shirt sleeves, “ that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth ” ?—Channing Pollock, m the ‘American Mercury.’.