OUR GREATEST MEN.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXIX, Issue 21118, 27 February 1932, Page 1 (Supplement)

OUR GREATEST MEN.

BY KOTARE.

Kemal,

WHO ARE THEY 7

Whatever else our generation may lack, it has no dearth of great men. And really great men—men that have moulded tho destinies of nations, that have determined the course of modern history. By any standard, too, Edison, who died the other day, was a great man; so is Einstein, with possibly'his best work still before him: so surely is Marconi. r lhe first essential of any great age in human history is that it should produce its leaders. Leadership is always the sine qua lion. And it is the most ironical commentary possible on our bewildered age that the period of gross darkness has come upon us just when leaders who can both think and lead are bobbing up all over the landscape. Carlyle's cult of the hero has been discredited in much modern thinking, one thing it does not flatter us enough. Demos always wants to be told that he alone matters, that all authority and all wisdom rest ultimately in him. And he never lacks time-servers that will give him the savoury meats in which his soul delights. Is not democracy the sum of the world's wisdom, our magic device for gathering and focussing all the political and social wisdom diffused through the community ? Is not the highest function of the politician to be tho servant of the public? Away with all this exploded Prussian nonsense pbout leadership. Carlyle.

I always find old Carlylc a tonic after this sort of stuff. We have offered lipservice too long to weakness and ineptitude in the name of democracy. Ideas are found not in the crowd but in the individual. A solitary man must think his way through to tho conclusion that matters; he must teach it to the multitude, and he most compel them, however unwilling they be, along the path he has appointed for them. " Universal history," says Carlyle, " the history of what man has accomplished in this world, is at bottom tho history of tho great men who have worked here. They were the leaders of men, these great ones: tho modellers, patterns, and in a senso creators of whatsoever tho general mass of men contrive to do or to attain; all things that we see standing accomplished in the wrold are properly the outftr material result, the practical realisation and embodiment, of thoughts that dwelt in the great men sent into the world." If we were asked to decide which men of our time towered most loftily above their brethren, to say without prejudice who were the three or four most outstanding men of our generation, I wonder how our votes should be cast. We have an absolute embarrassment of riches. The thing that worries me most is a purely sentimental matter after all—can I, by any manipulation, find a place among the final three or four for a man of British nationality ? Have we any soldier distinguished enough to challenge I'och or Hindenburg ? Have we any statesman who can bear comparison with Mussolini ? Have we any man of letters who has won international recognition? Apart, from Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells I can think of none, and both are more famous for the skill of their propaganda than for their purely literary qualities. I should like to enter Lord Rutherford; but I don't know enough science to express an opinion, and here again patriotism is not enough. The Big Four.

Bert rand Russell gives his opinion in his latest book. " The important men in the age just ended are Edison, feller, Lenin, and Sun Yat-sen." He notes that only Sun Yat-sen could be called cultured, and that the other three were contemptuous of the past, self-confi-dent, and ruthless. Traditional wisdom, ho says, had no place in their thoughts and feelings; mechanism and organisation were what interested them. He conceives that each was in a way Ihe product of circumstances and that a different education would have made them all finite different. The work of all suffers because they believed too completely in what they were endeavouring to give the world. " Given a little doubt, their achievement would have been less in volume, but much greater in value." Well, Russell, the English aristocrat, nominates four men that count above their fellows—two Americans, a Russian, and a Chinaman. Edison, .1 suppose, gets his place because he, above all others of our time, or any time for that matter, stands for tlio conquest of nature in the interests of the ordinary man. Edison compelled the mighty forces of nature to minister to the simple needs and comforts of the average citizen. He has enormously added to the conveniences of life. There must he scarce a house in any part of the civilised world that does not have something in its equipment that it owes to Edison. Even with his marvellous achievement I don't know that I should give him a place on my list.. Still one sees Russell s point of view. Electricity is ono of the biggest things in the modern world; in a sense it has made a new world. And the man who has had the biggest part in the application of electricity to the common uses of man must certainly be ranked with tho most significant figures of our time.

Rockefeller presents greater difficulties. Still it is clear that the dominant figure in industry and finance could hardly be excluded. Rockefeller is on this list not bocause ho is presumably the richest man in the world, but because ho typifies that, ruthless elimination of competition which is the only thing in common between Leninism and modern business. There were doubtless combines before Standard Oil; hut it was Rockefeller who first showed the world the real power of money in business. Tliero can ho 110 doubt about Lenin. A man who can fix his will upon 150 million people, who can end, almost with a wavo liis liaiKi, tiio institutions and tbo social organisation built up through centuries of effort and struggle; who, with another wave, can bring into existence a new society, complete in. all its parts and with all its defects, able to function from the beginning, must stand, however we regard his work, as the most stupendous figure of our times. Some may call him sinister; others may see in him the beneficent, prophet of a belter day. _ But all will agree that for good or ill his form broods gigantic over the modern world. Sun Yat-sen represents the most pregnant assertion of nationalism in our time, lie made China a republic. A few years ago one could have asserted with absolute confidence that this was the one political change which could never happen. Not a whole army of supermen could suffice for so incredible a transformation. But Sun Yat-sen did it, And Russell gives him a place among tho Big Four. Dagobert von Mikusch, the biographer of the Turkish dictator Muslapha Kemal, nominates three for the supreme place. There is Lenin, of course. Then comes Mussolini. And last and perhaps greatest, Mustapha Kemal. Kemal almost alone made modern Turkey. His claims to be considered one of the greatest men of our generation I shall deal with next week.