TOPICS OF THE TIMES

King Country Chronicle, Volume XXX, Issue 4873, 21 July 1936, Page 4

TOPICS OF THE TIMES

Dangerous Optimism. A civilisation is dependent on the quality of the citizens who compose it, states a writer in the “Hibbert Journal” (Oxford). The greatest need of to-day is that we should make up minds as to which are the abiding satisfactions in life, that we should be right in these decisions, and that we should guide our lives accordingly. Public opinion is with mass demand, with the man in the street, with urban man as against country man. But alas! the man in the street is drifting according to the conventions that happen to come along. It is widely believed that education can save us. But mass education has raised the means of education, but education in turn depends on the quality of the people who are in it. The newspapers tell their own tale. The books pour out in such mass that few of worth become widely read. It is strength of character that alone can use education to good ends. Blindly we are allowing trades and professions to be closed to all who are not apprenticed to them in their youth and by the authority only of those already in them. Soon it will be that every child will be imprisoned in a school to such and such an age and then sentenced for life to _ one trade or profession, and if he fail in that will be thrown on the dole or his own resources. What is needed is greater mobility in passing from one occupation to another. All this is being done to us not by foreign enemies, but members of our civilisation.

Tribute to Mr. Thomas. “Mr. Thomas has had a very remarkable career,” asserts the Sunday Times; “and as it closes we may well remember its points of distinction. As a trade union official he combined courage and negotiating capacity to an extent that is rare in that or any other walk of life. The bargain by which he closed the national railway strike in 1919 was, from the standpoint of the railwaymen’s interest, one of the wisest and most foreseeing ever achieved by a trade union leader. It ought to have saved him from the

gross ingratitude of his union years later, But the signal instance of his courage and ability to take a large view was his conduct in 1931. Nobody who took part in forming the National Government risked and renounced more than he did. Nor can it be questioned that the motive of his action was the good of his country. The public, which was shocked by his union’s ingratitude, must not now imitate it.”