TIMELY TOPICS

Northern Advocate, 18 July 1933, Page 4

TIMELY TOPICS

MANKIND IN COUNCIL. The following message, occupying a full page of “The Times,” was published by Harrods on the occasion c£ Die opening of the World Economic Conference:—To all of good will, forgathered here to ease the burdens of a troubled world, we offer salutation and with a, sense of fellowship pray humbly for the happiest of issues. Civilisation itself stands at the crossroads. Shall this tremendous effort of the nations go down in nothingness or shall it win to universal trust and understanding, blazing anew the trail of human hope, prosperity and freedom? Too well we mark the crowding doubts, anxieties and fears, too well the whimperings of weakened faith, too well we realise the task. But the divinity that glorifies great minds and souls and fires the courage and devotion of great hearts is never proved more truly than in extremity of trial. Under Providence our faith lives on. Beyond the patient sowing shall come the splendid reaping. Out of the days of travail shall come a new world-brotherhood of man. [«1 H g) IS' THE HABIT OF BUYING.

“The purchaser has lost the habit of, and desire for, choice,” writes Mr Hilaire Belloe in the ” English Review. ” “I say that this mental and spiritual disease is more important than the merely mechanieal faet of cheap production. Sueh a statement will sound fantastie in the ears of those who are aeeustomod, as all modern men are, to implied materialism, Yet hero, as in every other department, it is the mind that governs and not the material conditions.. ... It is notorious that in certain districts, in certain trades covering great numbers of people, choice is still exercised, and has a great effect. For instance, I i would quote the demand for Cheshire cheese among the Lancashire operatives. They know what they want and they‘insist upon It; they will not accept, as will men in the south, a sub-stitute-,or an inferior article, See also, the. effect of choice as .it, is exercised, though in a restricted field it is true, by the middle and upper classes in pertain categories of furniture and do-, sign. Here, as in nearly everything else, the right process has been largely reversed; men take what is imposed upon them and. not what , they themselves choose. Supply controls demand and not demand supply. . . . With the exercise of of individual will, of preferring this' to'that and seeing that you get it, you- extend the opportunity for the., artisan, the individual craftsman, the man who makes a thing to order or one who employs and personally 'supervises a few. ”

H II is is WORDS OF WISDOM. “One kind deed a day” is all right as a starter, but not as a finality. USUI! TALE OF THE DAY. Fair Companion (to cricket fan): “Ought our captain to change his batsmen so often?”