CONFESSIONS OF A COLONIAL

Otago Witness, Issue 2914, 19 January 1910, Page 13

CONFESSIONS OF A COLONIAL

Bv Guy H. Scholefikld,

ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH.

No. VIII.—HAPHAZARD AND APATHY. Another feature or the English character which can hardly be commended is a general disinclination, to “ turn to ” | in the interests of a cause. I cannot help 1 feeling that if his critics had had the J same opportunity of observing the mental ' condition of the English people, Sir I Robert Stout’s remarks about the lack of ; national ideals would have been much 1 less severely dealt with. What particuj larly strikes me is the manner in which 1 the educated middle class, who are really the people who matter in any I country, divorce themselves from - prac- | tical politics. The ignorant ana thy of j the lower classes and the unselfish indifference of many of the wealthy could well be overlooked if the middle class, to whom England has owed so much in the past, were only sound in its moral i support of political and social prin- | ciples. Month after month some great i movement, patriotic or social, comes into the forefront, flourishes, and recedes ; again without ever awakening the active sympathy of the general public. The press and the public are quite separate. There is no confidence or sympathy between them. The press of England does not reflect the feeling of the English nearly so closely as that of New Zealand represents the New Zealanders. Even at this moment of great political bitterness the general public is more or less indifferent to the issues. It leaves that to the politician and the press. It is this lack of mental organisation, the impossibility of focussing the whole attention of the people upon any matter | of national importance that seems to me such a serious augury for the future of the nation Public opinion, if it exists at all, is inarticulate. Thousands of young men have never been through any sort of discipline; they are not even organised in sports clubs. Irrespec- ; tive even of the under-fed, who cannot , be expected to read, the mass of the • people take an absolute minimum of interest in the affairs of the country, and none whatever in that Empire of which—the greatest, the freest, the hardest won that history has any record of—it is the moral duty of the English peonie to be not only the heart, which it still is, but also the head—which it has never yet been. It is in reality the spirit that is lacking in England. That there is a widespread pessimism you have heard. Equally widespread is the feeling of resentment against England’s chief rival, Germany. There i§ a characteristic impression that Germany’s efforts are unfair, hitting below the belt. Sane, thinking men who are not in the habit of speaking lightly, are almost all convinced that a conflict between the two nations must come sooner or later. Many sane men, too, aware of the tremendous efforts that Germany is making and of the highly-organised stats of the German people, are impatient for that conflict to begin. They realise that it is in organisation that England fails. Here the liberty of the subject has been invoked to resent any infringement upon the sweet hanhazard of the individual, and the result —we cannot blink it—is a menace to the safety of the mass. It is a distasteful thing to say that a nation is blundering along without leaders, without morale, without a sense of responsibility. Yet so it is. It is our good fortune in New Zealand to have been brought up in, a society moulded and leavened and influenced in its thought by the local politics of the- old provincial days. To the hard-fought political differences of those clays we owe it that the people are such keen individual debaters. Every little township has some interests, some hope before it, some ambitions to satisfy beyond the mere ambition of living and eating. That is why colonials find it so difficult to understand the English apathy towards great matters. In England, on the other hand, the irony of history and the hand of poverty have gradually stifled the sweet spirit of hope, and it has given place to fatalism. The colonial has a light in his eye, as if he is on the track of something good. How different the average Englishman! To-morrow is no part of Ids vocabulary. He lives in a long yesterday. Perhaps the aimlessness of thought to which I refer will be best understood by one or two instances. At the time of the j University boat race I was much struck ! by the manner in which the public sported ! the colours of the competing crews. It ; was a foregone conclusion, that Cambridge ■ would win, and practically all London showed the Cambridge colours. Here and , there a malcontent cabby had tied a piece ! of dark ribbon on his whip,, but it was ! not the popular colour. Cambridge had : won two years running; but Cambridge j had made ail sorts of changes in the boat j at the eleventh hour, while Oxford had ; been steadily plugging" away and doing well. Apart from form, altogether, I shall never believe that the display of emblems before Hie race- represented the popularity of the two crews. Nor did it agree with the betting. The fact is that the great majority of the public, having little opinion, or predilection of its own, accepted anticipations and, as the poet has it, -'barked with the top dog.” Cambridge lost. I have seen the same phenomenon a dozen times, in political contests, in prize fights, in football matches. A political party which can only discern about two of its own rosettes amongst a sea. of its opponents must feel humbly grateful when -the polling figures are only as bad as, say, two to- three against. Is it a phase of Old-World fatalism that prompts the to breathe TCho sara eara,”-

don the colours of the side he thinks will win instead of that ha wishes to, and be cheerful? The colonial would have his own opinion and his own preference, and the candidate or the crew that want down hopelessly would be just as sure of his own supporters afterwards as before.