The Manawatu Daily Times The Average Man

Manawatu Times, Volume LIV, Issue 7239, 19 August 1933, Page 6

The Manawatu Daily Times The Average Man

Sir John Marriott wrote to the British Press not long ago a most significant letter on stabilisation of currencies. It was remarkable not for what it said, but for the way in which it was headed. Sir John is an erudite historian, a former member of Parliament, and was once an Oxford don. But his letter was titled “Some questions by plain men,” and the whole tenor of his communication showed that Sir John was proud to include himself in this category.

So, in fact, is Mr. Stanley Baldwin, Prime Minister of Great Britain at the most critical moment of its internal history, when the general strike temporarily dislocated the work of the entire nation. Shortly after the war Mr. Baldwin made the Treasury an anonymous gift of half a million pounds, yet he insists that he is a plain man. This attitude is typical of the twentieth century. When feeling in the mood to pay himself a compliment, the modern leader of industry or politics invariably announces that he is an average man.

This is something that could never have happened at any previous stage in the world’s history. One can hardly imagine AVolsey identifying himself with the common people, in whose presence, in fact, he was wont to hold an orange under his nose; nor Wellington, either, who considered the men with whom he fought at Waterloo the scum of the earth. Mark Antony, indeed, did call himself a “plain, blunt man,” but that was for a special purpose. He tickled the people’s ears, as it were, only to pull their legs.

Sir John’s phrase is an epitome of history. It shows that the common man, from being an object of insult, has become the recipient of praise. It is eloquent of the rise of democracy, and the gradual, growing recognition of the essential dignity and worth of mankind. It reveals the progress of humanity. Perhaps, also, it indicates a slight danger. It is well that the ordinary man should not be despised; but it is not desirable that the extraordinary man should be apologised for. The tendency to pretend that remarkable people are really only the same as the unremarkable can be carried too far. The ideal of democracy should not be the average man, but the bringing of the average man into closer approximation with the ideal.

The Soul of England

“You have already spent five or sis fairly crowded days with us. You have before you 10 more in which to look over some of the possessions and verify some of the title-deeds of your unpurchasable inheritance here,” said Mr. Budyard Kipling, when addressing Canadian authors touring Britain. “The things that you will see and the atmospheres you will realise are not, as aliens might regard them, archaeological curiosities or ineffective echoes out of a spent past. Whether they be the work of men's hands or men’s souls they bear witness to the instinct—it is more than tradition —the immemorial racial instinct toward unbridled expenditure on matters material and spiritual for the sheer joy of the exercise. They are proof of our land’s deep unconscious delight through all ages in her own strength and beauty and unjaded youth. That same headlong surplus of effort and desire goes forward, along other paths, to-day. But our eyes are held. Like the generations before us, we cannot perceive among what new births of new wonders we now move. All these things out of our past, in our present, and for our future, are yours by right. They are doubly yours, since the dominant strains of your blood draw from those twin races—French and English—which throughout their histories have been most resolute not to be decivilised on any pretext or for any gain,”