FOR THE QUILT HOUR.

Manawatu Times, Volume XLIX, Issue 2346, 16 January 1926, Page 7

FOR THE QUILT HOUR.

OF TOLERANCE. We must beware of intolerance; but we must be mindful <ost tolerance, that most splendid of virtues, degoa-1 erates into a vice. One has known] people so ‘tolerant’ that they hadn’t a scruple left in the world! People who are so afraid to say what the> think —lest they be accused of intolerance —that they will sit silent in the presence of sorrow and shame. Not very long ago there was a most painful case in court. A little two-year-old boy had fallen from the top most window of a block of tenement buildings. It subsequently transpired that the mother was out, drinking; that the neighbours had known of her ‘little falling,’ and that they had also heard her, night after night, threatening to ‘do in’ her children. Yet they had never* approached the authorities who safeguard the right of little helpless children. They ‘made allowances’ they said, for the mother’s hard life. They were ‘tolerant’ to a criminal degree. n u n tt n «

tt n a n « « A Dlfflout Task. It Is admittedly a difficult task to make a firm stand between tolerance and moral cowardice. We are averse from interference with other people*' lives. But what a misnomer Is ‘tolerance’ when It looks on in silence at the impending ruin of a youthful caret,,. —some act of folly that might be averted by a word in season. ■ Also, we tolerate, too easily the) attitudes and actions of people In j whose good books we wish to re- j main. That is one of the commonest forma of this aspect of moral cow.l -nice. We are ‘tolerant’ of the worthless or anti-social streaks in So-and-so because he or she may prove useful to us. A Just ‘lntolerance.’ There are times when a just intolerance of Intolerable things would be good for our own souls and lire souls of others. We all know how to distinguish between narrow-mind-edness and righteous Indignation; between a smug self-satisfactipn and al divine dissatisfaction that has no thought of self, but is wholly mindful of the rights of others. In a word, we know when ‘tolerance’ is -another name for indifference, cowardice and shame. S.H.