CLASSES AND PARTIES.

Manawatu Times, Volume XLVIII, Issue 3597, 1 April 1924, Page 8

CLASSES AND PARTIES.

To-day everything- is being - arranged in the suburban villa and the workman’s cottage. It is the most amazing change in our time, writes Mr Harold Spender, in the “Daily Chronicle.” A few years ago, colonial governorships were regarded as the presumptive property of a few noble families. But now they will bo open to anyone who can both deserve and afford them. There is one tremendous fact about this great change not yet sufficiently realised. It is that the upper classes, taken as a whole, have failed in recent years in the task of government. That is why the public now turns with a curious complacency to; the experiment of drawing a Government from the untried classes. “May wo not find the root of the matter in the whole system of our higher education, which from early life segregates the boy of the upper classes from the mass of the people? Not merely docs it take him from his home, tautl also from his own town or countryside. Whether ho goes to Eton or to Onndle, he is equally detached for all the impressionable years of his life from other classes, and placed among his own class alone. He passes oni to the University, and there the same conditions prevail. At Oxford to-day the Labour College, Ruskin Hall, stands aloof and solitary from the other colleges, with a different training aijd a different outlook May it noti be that this separation of the classes from early years has had its revenge in the present incapability of the upper classes to understand the ■workers ? What docs the average upper-class boy know of the housing of the working classes? A hundred years ago he lived among them, and saw some of them. But to-day he lives in detachment, and in later years ho is barred off from knowledge by a wall of early impressions.”