STRAWS AND SEERS

Otago Daily Times, Issue 23004, 6 October 1936, Page 8

STRAWS AND SEERS

It would be a dull world in which man no longer tried to peer into the future. The history of prophecy is rich and strange, and every people has numbered its seers and oracles. From the witch doctor, muttering strange incantations over the entrails of a fowl, to Mother Shipton. foretelling dire happenings in rhyming couplets, they make a motley and picturesque parade. But it is not to be expected that the United States, which has improved even on the language Shakespeare spoke, would accept unchanged your oldfashioned methods of predicting the unborn event by stars, by crystal gazing or consultation with a palmist. When the question of Panurge's marriage was to be decided, Rabelais invoked sibyl' and poet, monk and fool, philosopher and witch, but the Literary Digest makes that canvass appear small. For the pleasure of telling the United States people a few months before election day who will be President, the Digest has put prophecy on a big business basis. Ten million electors are now being asked to name him, and the million or so replies' the Digest may expect to receive will represent its contribution to the art of prognostication. In the past, it must be said, the Digest's - " straw votes" have been surprisingly accurate. As the apple, picked at random from a case, may indicate to the inspector the condition of its hundred neighbours, so the unofficial vote, spread over a cross-section of the community, may show the trend of opinion. In 1924, the Digest has proudly proclaimed, its poll returned Mr Coolidge with 99 per cent, accuracy; in 1928 it gave the political pundits the first knowledge that Democracy was losing the "Solid South; " in 1932, the landslide that put Mr Roosevelt into office was forecast with disconcerting precision. It may be expected that the trend of the poll which the Digest is at present taking has more than a casual interest for the United States party men, now lined up in vociferous array. It will please the Republicans, whose candidate receives a nice majority of straws; it will annoy the Democrats, who will assert that the telephone directories, from which the Digest takes its mailing list, do not. name a fraction of Mr Roosevelt's supporters. It may definitely discourage the other presidential candidates, if they are entered in the contest with any real expectation of occupying the White House. But there will be many Americans, inside and outside politics, who will receive this message of the straws with equanimity. If it is a preoccupation of man to seek to read the future, it is equally his disposition to ignore the writing vouchsafed him. The wind bloweth where its listeth, and none can tell the direction to-morrow of the straw, caught up in its embrace, which to-day is whirling north or south.