THE MAGIC OF CHANGE

New Zealand Mail, Issue 1681, 18 May 1904, Page 10

THE MAGIC OF CHANGE

(By Bart Kennedy.)

Ho! for the magic of change. That fine, glorious, entrancing magic that lifts us out of ourselves, that makes the Mood ruin wild and) free, that clears aindrnakes acute and vivid and active the mind, that discovers to us strange and mysterious and unexplored recesses within the domains of ourselves. Change. How wonderful it is! How fine is its magic! It is a greater and nobler god even than chance. To sit in the one place', to do the same thing, day .after day, is of all fates the fate most terrible. In the end man loses his soul. He becomes a thing—a machine. His eyes become vacant. He is a dtuilll. dead main without a soul. A man working within the sombre shadow of a prison. He is working for gold you say. He is palling up treasure upon treasure. He is laying by a store for thoise that have not yet come. Hid he leave ids prisonplace now his store of treasure would vanish! He would lose the grasp of the threads of his power! Again you say that he is working for famed He is working so that uncome generations null be benefited or struck dumb with admiration. He is aflame with the egotism of the artist. He is a thinker, solemn and deep, and profound. One who is vain enough to seek to define the thing that has not yet come to pass.

Again you say that the mam •who is stuck' in his prison-place is stuck there by an iron fate. H)e must earn his bread. He must stay through the yeans from day into dark, froan day into dark. He must do the same thing—the same thing day in and 1 day out, week in and week out, month an and month out, year in and year out. iSihould he stop he alnd his will perish froan oh the earth. What you say is true. Men are hound to the hadeous wheel of monotony and drudgery by varied Shackles. Men sit and plot and plan and spin for fame. Through the years they do the same thing in the same wiry. And the beet tiling that can be said at the end of it all lis that they will be thought of when they are -dead 1 . Stones will be put up in their honour by those who never knew them. A poor lot is the lot of -those spiders who spin for the will-o’-bhe-wisp that is called Fame. For those that are bound to the wheel of drudgery by poverty one feels pity. Nob theirs is the blame. They are the downcast pitiful slaves of that Moloch —Civilisation. But for the gold-grub-bers alnd the thought-grubbers one can only feel contempt. They are in search of nothing that is worth having. 33.

Change—that is the thing. It is the essence of all life and being. Civilisation is but a state of things that springs out of man’s stupid desire to conserve —to make things stay still. This desire is bom out of his egotism. Civilisation is the fungus of conservation. It® art, its law®, its literature is like itself—a disease. Mian is at his best , a® a roaming savage. Thufe he began alnd tot this state he will go back. The time will come to pass when man will shake himself free from the laws and the trammels and the pomps and shows of civilisation. He will shake himself free from the lying veneer that is called! culture. He will go out and roam and fight over the

whole world. He will once more become a main.

The grand pirates of the North were the*, finest men the world has ever known. They were indeed the sons of adventure and change. They .went out into the midst of the winds and the waves of unknown waters to find l foemen to grapple with. They were great-heart-ed. wild, fighting men. They bore against the press of strange and terrible winds alnd they landed in the teeth of iron-girt shores and fought and conquered. Sons of the sea and sons of change. Great, strong, yellow-haired 1 , terrible men. A debased slave philosophy puts forth the falsity that monotonous labour is a blessing. And there is a cynical saying bo the effect that it contains 1 within it a dignity. Fools are led to believe that work is the great panacea, they are led to believe that to toil and moil -and strive from dawn till dark is a fine and a nohlie thing. And so the world is thronged with slave's. HI. Change is the only condition under which a healthy life can be lived. It is the only condition under which man can attain to the full flower of himself., Change is the law of life and the worlds. Man is myriad-sided. He is the re-, suit of forces and impulse® that halve come from countless directions. A be-' ing of a myriad facets. He contains withiki himself all the powers of the earth from the beginning. He is the final result and the last word of all, the forms and modifications of vitality from the time it first appeared in a dark frightful world of heated slime. He is a being strange,- sulbtle, and wonderful. Within him is contained the essence of the magic L-of all the elements. He is of air and water and rock and fire. He is of the thing that- flies, the thing that swims, the thing that goes slow and the thing that goes swift. He is built up out of the earth and the rock and! the sea and the fire. He is an organism glorious and sublime and wonderful and terrible. He is a thing of light and darkness and hate- and joy. and terror and love. A thing of beginnings obscure and horrible and bestial. A thing of beginnings glorious and sublime. Surely did the genesis of man burst forth long, long ago in a star of unutterable brilliance I And the God that guided man in his destiny was the god that as called Change. Change led him forth from some wondrous state in the Afar dim, profound!—led him doswh through the slime and darkness of the world in the beginning.

Change led him through transmutations countless aind strange.—London "Daily Mail.”