MODERN SENTIMENTALITY.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XLVII, Issue 14465, 3 September 1910, Page 2 (Supplement)

MODERN SENTIMENTALITY.

CAUSE OF RADICAL DECADENCE. "Do past educational and social influences in the direction of an unwise sentimentality tend to a weakening of the moral fibre of children, and are they becoming a serious social and political danger to the State?" were the questions Lord Meath set himself to answer in a speech before the annual congress of the Royal Institute of Public Health. Asserting that there was undeniable proof of the existence of a widespread alarm lest the present laxity of discipline among British children should lead to natural decadence and the ultimate effacement of an imperial race, Lord Meath said the peril was real. A grave danger to the State would mostcertainly arise if any appreciable number of the British race were to be infected by the moral flabbiness of the hysterical, sentimental school of thought. _ _ It was an unwise sentimentality which prevented the Stato from dealing effectually with systematised idleness, which endeavoured to weaken the arm of law and justice in the protection of society against the violent, the criminal, the idle, and the cvid-doer of all kinds; which pampered the criminal, the thriftless, and the loafer at the expense of the honest and the hardworking; which unnecessarily interfered between parent and child and between teacher and scholar in the maintenance of a reasonable discipline. All these influences were tending to destroy the moral fibre of the raceto produce soft, flabby, self-indulgent, conceited, self-centred men and women, discontented with the world and attributing their failures not to their own faults and weaknesses,'but to the injustice of the world in which they lived.