THE MENACE OF SOCIALISM

Otago Daily Times, Issue 26046, 9 January 1946, Page 7

THE MENACE OF SOCIALISM

Sir, —A well-known anecdote tells that once Mr Churchill, after reading the draft of a statement, put it aside with the comment that it employed every cliche in the English language except one. Mr W. T. Morpeth, who contributed the article entitled " The Socialist Menace ” to Monday’s Daily Times, can claim the distinction of having equalled this. The turgid splendours of his highly tautological style do not conceal his almost total lack of matter. At the risk of appearing impertinent, I would suggest to Mr Morpeth that he abandon the use of his dictionary of synonyms as a stylistic guide, and read instead the prose of, say, Gibbon, Hazlitt and Newman, or even of Bernard Shaw or H. G. Wells. He would then perhaps be capable of using words economically and to some point.

But, although Mr Morpeth manages to say very little in the course of most of his article, he does in his last Brobdingnagian sentence, came down to earth. It reads in part: “ An economy, in which, believe it or not, service commanders, highly qualified professional men, State department administrators do their own menial household work, and whose wives scrub their own floors, while watersiders and miners roll round in taxis, go for expensive tours, stay at the best hotels, and openly defy the country’s Government and the country’s laws.” Here his vague platitudes are crystallised in a genuine “ cri-du-coeur,” and Colonel Blimp rears his hoary head. The audacity of the lower orders! While tliev roll round in taxis and stay at the best hotels, Colonel Blimp and his civilian cousins have to soil their hands with menial household duties, and Mrs Blimp has actually to get down on her knees and scrub her own floors. The plain inference to be drawn from Mr Morpeth's last sentence is that the insufferable working class should be humbled, and the Blimps enabled to have plenty of cheap domestic labour again.

Mr Morpeth has involuntarily revealed the implacable class-animus of so many of those who denigrate the Government of this country. Perhaps, after all, he would be' better to remain at the level of his adjectival nebulosities, and not come down to earth, even in his final sentences.—l am, etc., Wotan.