HAPPINESS AND ILLUSIONS

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume LXVI, 16 April 1932, Page 12

HAPPINESS AND ILLUSIONS

LECTURE BY MR BALDWIN “This modern movement, if closely examined, will reveal new disguises of old familiar faces in the moral history of mankind—the confusion of pleasure with happiness, impatience with obstacles and difficulties, a search for tangible rather than spiritual satisfaction, a desire, in other words, to eat your cake and have it,” said Mr Stanley Baldwin in a lecture on “Happiness and Success.” “Fundamentally, the disease is a failure on the part of what has been termed a scorched and cynical generation to accept openly and joyously the world as a moral world where spirit and sense mingle inextricably, where passions are not to be escaped from, but to be tamed, and where work, pleasure and wealth will find their proper places if they are subdued to proper moral ends. We always cherish the illusion that, if only obstacles were removed—die-hards or left-wingers—our happiness would be complete, but it is an illusion. Courage, hazard and hardship can give a quality to human happiness undreamed of by those who sit secure and at ease in Zion. The things desirable for happiness are very simple—food, shelter, health, love, and work. That is why happiness is so often found among ordinary folk and is so often absent from those who have those elements, but have not learned to sit loose and detached from their possession. There is no question that the State can do much to produce favourable conditions, but how far you can go in enforcing order and imposing the quality of possession without endangering liberty and thereby imperilling happiness itself will continue to be a matter for disputation and experiment.”