SOCIAL CREDIT MEETING

Evening Star, Issue 23666, 28 August 1940, Page 4

SOCIAL CREDIT MEETING

At the monthly meeting of the Dunedin women’s branch of the Social Credit Movement the speaker was Mrs S. Townend, and her subject ‘ Man, the Reformer.’ Social Creditors, she said, were loosely referred to by the public as monetary reformers, but it was not the commonplace and narrow sense of the word that they should exemplify, but the high and comprehensive role assigned to the reformer by Emerson in his essay from which the title of the talk was taken. The speaker then enlarged on three main extracts from the essay. The first dealt with the call to reform which should be heard by the deepest self; an impulse to bo a benefactor and to make it easier for those wiio followed after “ to go in honour and with benefit.” The second gave Emerson’s magnificent conception of the true reformer as “a remaker of what man lias made, a renounce! - of lies, a restorer of truth and good.” Here Mrs Townend thought that Social Creditors tried to fulfil this high calling. Social Creditors strove to restore one of the greatest truths—namely, the supremacy of the individual as opposed to that of the State and its institutions and the right of every individual to economic security and freedom. The final extract set out what Emerson thought should be the qualities of the great reformer. These consisted in the ability to act consistently and equably at all times and in the courage to act always on high principles regardless of immediate results. To do this, the speaker concluded, we must believe that the future was not determined, but determinable. and wo. must have faith in our own ability to shape events.