IN PRAISE OF OBSTINACY.

Horowhenua Chronicle, 5 February 1936, Page 8

IN PRAISE OF OBSTINACY.

There is something curiously appealing about Jap, the elephant which, after being spilled out of an automobile trailer, took one long ] o ok at the contraption and decided that he was not going to ride in trailers any more, says the Now York "Herald-Tribune." Why should this simple decision on Jap's part excite the interest of millions? It is, one suspects, because the world still, .harbours a deep, if secret, admiration for its obstinate persons, and obstinacy in an elephant raises that engaging quality to epic proportions. Jap made up his mind and stuck to it. He was not angry or unpleasant about it; he was just shecrly obstinate. It cost him a night in a garage, it cost him a twenty-five mile tramp home next day, astonishing the automobile traffic, exciting regiments of school children, bringing out the reporters and the camera men, and ending in a case of sore feet. This was irrational of Jap, but he made up his mind that he would no longer ride in trailers, and he did not. That was the situation; the world would have to adjust itself to the fact and the world made the adjustment. Now it is all wrong under the rules of a modem society to take pleasure in obstinacy. It is a highly anti-social characteristic. The obstinate men at 3 hard, unassimilable nodules in the smooth-running streams of community life. They make other people miserable and cause an enormous amount of unnecessary trouble for themselves. They block the traffic —that sacred life—'force which the integrated age of machinery

has defied and set up in the place of the older divinities which it has cast out with contempt. But they commit this sacrilege with impiuiity. They insist on having' their bacon crisp or their beer chilled, and in the process they send things back to the kitchen, scarify the waiters, upset everybody, and make the party late—but they get their crisp bacon and chilled beer. They get tiway with it, in short, while the vast body of more malleable mortals whose pliancy they must exploit, admire and envy the recalcitrances by which they are victimised. Jap is a hero to us all, for there is not one who wouldn't like just once to be in the impregnable position of an elephant that had put his foot down.