A SERIOUS SHOCK

Manawatu Standard, Volume L, Issue 115, 11 April 1930, Page 5

A SERIOUS SHOCK

NO MORE FAIRIES. From the up-to-date American nursery etory fairies are to bo rigidly excluded. The idea is that the infant mind of the great Republic should not be filled with illusions which will give no help to the grown-up in pursuing tho almighty dollar, writes Thomas Courtney in the Sydney Morning Herald. All the dollars that all the citizens of America will ever pouch would not compensate forMfiie destruction of the enchanted castles in which, for a few wondrous years, it is the natural privilege of childhood to dwell.. But we are told that childhood is out of date. It went out with midVictorianism. It belongs to the ridiculous era of long skirts and unpainted lips, when ladies did not smoke cigarettes, or, for the matter of that, pipes; refrained from drinking whisky in fashionable hotel bars and resented being addressed by a chance malo acquaintance as “old thing.” Fairies in tho nursory forsooth. They would be jeered at by many children of the present day who may be seen at the age when their ancestors used to he interested in such foolery, following with precocious gusto the nauseous developments of the “problem play” at the American picture show. Teach them facts say the Grandgrinds of this enlightened age. Something about money-making, something that will help them along in the rush for the dollar Paradise by the short cut which leads through the Stock Exchange. And so the priceless illusions of the child are to go, and be replaced by the “realities” of tho cash book and the ledger. The pathos of it is that these 00-called realities are themselves illusions, the only difference being that they are of a more sordid and unsatisfying kind than those of which the child is to’ be deprived.. There may be no fairies. Who can tell ? If what Hamlet savs be triie, that “there is nothing neither good or bad, hut thinking makes it so,” for what is real and what is unreal there can be no other test either. It is a matter of consciousness, nothing more. To the man in an absolutely sound sleep nothing at all exists. But a nightmare dream, if not a reality to the people standing round awake, has all the effect of what wo call reality on the senses of its victim. It is real to one; unreal to the other. A matter of names principally. Being conscious of their existence is all that makes things exist for the individual concerned. For the men of last a reality, it was a joke. To the people a reality ,it was a joke. To the people on this earth five hundred thousand years hence it may not be called a reality. It may have no existence for them. The world may have lapsed back to the abysmal darkness that is supposed to have engulfed it beyond history’s narrow horizon. These may have been realities, so supposed, to the inhabitants of the buried continent of Atlanta, if that continent was itself ever a reality, but which, because we are unconscious of them, have no existence for the people of the present era. If yesterday was a reality, where is it to-day ? Where to-day will ho to-morrow ? v PLEASANT ILLUSIONS. Carpe diem promulgated Horace. He might os well have said grab the passing shadow. The day he sought to grasp was an illusion, due to the fact of liis then having senses of a particular kind. He may have senses of

andther kind now subject to other illusions. If we are to have/illusions the great thing is to have pleasant ones. The pleasant illusion is that most in consonance with the state of sense development in the person concerned. The consciousness of the child will get more enjoyment in the enchanted castles of fairyland than it could ever know in the “real” domain of bricks and mortar. 'The reformers who seek to destroy these castles are attacking something more sacred than the works of art of which grown-ups were deprived by the barbaric fury of the Vandals at its worst. , Let the child waste no time, tliev say, dawdling amongst the primroses of illusion at the beginning of life’s path; but get out as soon as he is able to toddle on to the thorny road of reality, where the illusions take the form of stories that will bruise his feet and nettles that will sting his hands. Every child will get these soon enough, without being bustled by the false prophet© of “reality,” who are now out to dosecrate the temple of infancy and set up therein the gross idols of the market-place, and still moro hideous gods of-the social dissecting room. The first book every child should have read to it is a fairy story. All illusion, perhaps, but what matter. Illusions quite as grotesque are.reserved for him tp read and believe in after he grows up. To mention only one amongst the many current Here to-day, he will probably bo taught by his political guides, philosophers and friends, that a fairy named Arbitration Court, grotesquely rigged out in a wig and gown, can, by the magic of an award, enable people to get more pay for producing an article than such article will sell for. If the children could cut all that sort of romance out of the illusions of the grown-ups, they would do more good to their elders than • their elders will ever do to them by banishing the illusion of “Cinderella” and “Jack and Beanstalk” from the nursery.