STATE OF TRANSITION

Manawatu Standard, Volume XLVII, Issue 92, 16 March 1927, Page 2

STATE OF TRANSITION

4 P.M. EDITION.

DEMOCRACY OF THE AGE. BEGINNING OF GREAT EVOLUTION. (By Electric Telegraph.—Copyright.) Received March 16, 1.10 p.m. PARIS, March 15. Mr H. G. Wells, the well-known writer, lecturing at Sorbonnc on “Democracy under Revision,” declared that democracy at present was in a state of transition. Parliamentary dcmocracv since the war had been responsible for Italian Fascism, Russian Communism and the Chinese Nationalist movement. There was now a desire for political, social and intellectual reorganisation, which was beyond the capacity of the ordinary voter or politician to deal with. A democratic government. had failed to deal with postwar problems. Who would solve them ? All around there were active minorities trying to reorganise democracy. There was such a need for reorganisation that the man in the street submitted thereto without protest. Was not that a beginning? What was there to hinder a groat political and religious movement recruiting all these active, audacious minorities in an effort towards a social world of unity? “We are at the beginning of a great evolution. The first heralds appeared in literature and art in , Bernard Shaw’s ‘St. John’ and Ernest Toller’s ‘Masses of Men.’ ” —A. and N.Z. cable.