VISION OF THE FUTURE

Greymouth Evening Star, 9 November 1935, Page 9

VISION OF THE FUTURE

DULL WORLD LIKE THE ANTS. LONDON, October 1. “Life to-day tends to be the orderly, sheltered, featureless existence of the ant or the bee,” said Major lan Hay Beith, the novelist, addressing Westminster Medical School students at Caxton Hall, yesterday. “An architect told me recently that in 50 years there will be no dwellinghouses left in London. We shall all be living in flats or modern tenement houses, in neat central-heated, airconditioned cells. “But perhaps that dull new world is not so imminent as we think. If science and evolution try. to flatten us down into one dead level. Nature will have a word to say, and Nature always has the last word. The more the life of the ant and the bee are forced on us the more there will be a reaction. “A passion for notoriety, publicity and personal advertisement is the outstanding feature of modern life. Fifty years ago the average respectable English family had only one ambition, to (keep themselves to themselves and,at any cost to ‘keep out of the papers.’ “But now everybody wants the world to know that they exist. No sooner is a murder discovered than innocent men and women ‘confess’ to the crime. They will risk even the gallows to get into the spotlight. “The most recent way of bringing yourself before the public is to join a movement requiring the wearing of a coloured shirt. Or you may wear no shirt —or, indeed, no clothes at all—and become a nudist, and you will have reached the ultimate and final stage of self-expression.”