World Wants Wisdom

Northern Advocate, 9 August 1938, Page 5

World Wants Wisdom

Earl Baldwin, at the Cheltenham Ladies’ College speech day on July 15, said that he had had wide experience of speaking to all kinds of people, but he had never before addressed an audience of girls. They might well ask what it was that moved a septuagenarian to undertake such a task. He was going to refuse, as he had refused more than 100 invitations during the winter to make speeches, but when he met Miss Popham, the college principal, there was a look in her eyes that made him realise that she would never leave his library until he consented.

In her opening address Miss Popham had struck a chord that always appealed to him when she said that what the world wanted was good judgment. That was a rare thing anywhere. “What the world wants,” Lord Baldwin said, “is wisdom and not cleverness. Wisdom is found in all ranks; it is found among the educated as is absence of it, and also among the uneducated, and it is what is wanted. “There is an old satirical verse or phrase about the time of the clever being taken up in correcting the mistakes of the wise. Some of the biggest fools I have ever known were as clever as monkeys. It was not the clever virgins who put oil in their lamps but the wise.” Chances of Service. Real education only began when they wept in/to the world of men and women. The youth of today had opportunities of service that were denied to all genex-ations before the time of their parents and grandparents. They owed much to those who had gone befoi’e, but they also owed a great deal to countless people they did not know.

They were getting much more dependent, one on another, in the complicated form of civilisation into which wo had been born.

Dealing with the question of voluntary service, Lord Baldwin said it was voluntary organisations and voluntary propaganda that brought to an end the slave trade, began education, started the friendly societies, and started the trade unions.

He knew of the feeling there had been in certain classes about trade unions and industrial troubles, but as an old statesman he told them that in the present state of industrial evolution if there were no trade unions there would be industrial slavery and chaos. Neither could be tolerated in this country for one moment, but trade unions, like the Government, like a school, like everything else, required wisdom in their leaders, and where there was wisdom all would be well. When disaster came it was always the work of fools.