THE VICE OF OUR AGE.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 1847, 31 July 1907, Page 13

THE VICE OF OUR AGE.

A PROFESSOR'S PLEA FOR SELFSACRIFICE. “I confess (said Professor Lodge, of Edinburgh, recently) that I look at this question of defensive training primarily from a moral point of view. The vice and canker of our age is selfishness—the love of ease and amusement, only tempered by the need of food, by ambition, and by eagerness to gain money tor more luxurious ease and more costly amusements. There is an urgent need of some discipline to impose upon our generation the higher duty of self-sacrifice, of devotion to the country, of the service of one’s fellow men.

“We trust to volunteers; to volunteers for political life; to volunteers for municipal work; to volunteers for the defence of our country. I do not deny that we get good men—perhaps the best Tnen —in this way. But I do say that this trust in voluntary effort encourages and panders to the selfishness of those who stand aloof from all. pul*iic service, and who have the insolence to sneer at any other men who cbey any other law than that of self-gratification. “These skulkers are the men who should be taught—and if necessary made to learn —a lesson as to the real purpose of life. And I do not refer only to the hooligans and corner-men of our streets —that growing danger and disgrace cf city life. I refer also to those young men, possessed rf superior advantages of birth and education, who spend their leisure time in the music-halls, in the billiard saloons, or in watching paid professionals—better men than themselxes—play games for their entertainment. In the spread of these low and debasing ideals are to be seen the germs of an insidious disease, which is sapping both the moral courage and the physical strength of our race. “But —say my friends, and especially my friends of the Liberal party—you are encouraging a bellicose, a jingo spirit; a 'Nation in arms' will be a nation eager to use its arms; you are striving to turn the tide of progiess, to throw us back to the ages when fighting was the primary occupation of all men. “This seems. to me the most colossal of misconceptions. As long as individual men refuse to sit placidly by while their wives or daughters are insulted or attacked, so lo lg States will decide their vital quarrels by war. And in war the jingo spirit at its best—i.e., the sympathy with, the national honour and the instinctive thrill of patriotic fervour —will never be eradicated from humrn nature. But jingoism at its worst —the music-hall patriotism which effervesces in songs and drunkenness, which shouts with delight when men go forth to war —that spirit will bo checked and not encouraged when the sense of reckless ii responsibility is removed. Men will be far less ready to exult in war and bloodshed when service and hardship may fall upan themselves than when they merely send out others to fight for them.”