NOTES AND COMMENTS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXIII, Issue 19503, 6 December 1926, Page 10

NOTES AND COMMENTS.

POPULAR PASTIMES. "To watch an offender at the stake or on the gallows was for centuries a ! popular pastime. Modern sport is civilisation's substitute for barbarous pleasures," says the Manchester Guardian. "It need not and should not be idealised or given any crude monopoly of attention, but it deserves at least as much justice as any other institution in the dock The 'great concourses' have become greater because there are more people to assemble and more ways to reach the place of assembly. The much-criticised football crowd gives only two hours a week to its hobby The idea that the games and the watching and study of games are a horrible accompaniment of the factory system is quite unfair to the men and women of to-day. The happy craftsmen of past time did not find sweet content simply by mixing art with their labour. They too liked their fun, and they liked it bloody. The lowliest supporter of a local team is something of a moral example to the medieval connoisseurs of pleasure. A little ecstasy over goals is surely preferable to glee over the gibbeted felon and the burning witch. If to stand and stare be a disease, then it is endemic, not epidemic, and its symp- j toms are far less vicious than of old." j

THE ECONOMIC CRISIS. "Since the war an inertia seems to have set in, as though the effort at adaptability which the war demanded—the doing, time and again, of unusual things in unusual ways—had exhausted the people," writes Mr. Norman Angell in the Daily News. "Immediately the peace came the idea that duchesses should sweep floors or Government co-ordinate the nation's trade —became preposterous, and so we cannot get, either from duchesses or trade unionists, the same real effort to meet the crisis. Revolution, if it comes at all, will come from exasperation, hopelessness, want, hardship. And those things will come not from any material reason, not because there is a scarcity of wealth in Europe, but because we cannot in peace time all pull together as we do in war; are not agreed as to what ought to be done; fail utterly in really effective social co-operation. Prophecy in this matter always tends, and ought to tend, to falsify itself. One of the hopeful features of the situation is that men are now so commonly prophesying evil. This means that we are increasingly conscious of the dangers about us, and being aware of them, bave a chance to avoid them. Of itself, however, the fact that revolution will be futile, and will in the end achieve little for any worlcer, does not mean that it will not take place. The folly of a given course is no argument for its improbability in human affairs. To achieve that realisation the mass of men must see precisely why the proletarian—or Fascist—dictatorship must in the long run fail of its object, fail to work, especially in a country situated as is Britain."