WHERE THE ENGLISH CHARACTER FAILS.

Otago Witness, Issue 3006, 25 October 1911, Page 88

WHERE THE ENGLISH CHARACTER FAILS.

By Constance Clyde.

From the King downwards, persons of high official standing and experience have been trying to put their finger on the weak spot in the English character. Some get near it; few quite touch it. ' 'Efficiency," King George's watchword, is perhaps needed, but not in all classes of society. The want of enterprise put forward by other critics also conveys a truth, but not the absolute truth. So far as the great foody of the working classes are concerned, there is another canker, or, if this is too harsh a word, defect. It is a certain dielike of responsibility, a hatred oi being master, strange as this last allegation may seem. This curious dislike of responsibility is noticed largely by that class of men who are near to the so-called w T orke-rs, but not quite of them. Shopkeepers, landlords' agents, police officers are far better critics th.an certified psychologists, and as a rule they are not too severe. They agree that the true failing in the English working man's character is his shrinking from personal responsibility. Said a landlord's agent apropos of the railway strike : "The porters don't want to be anything except porters; it's not they're kept back at all." Must the old phrase "Hope of bettering oneself" be replaced by the new, "Fear of bettering oneself"? It would seem so.

This man certainly could give instances where working men had really stepped down from positions of trust rather' than shoulder a responsibility which should not have seemed too great. Thus a foreman has given up his foremanship because it necessarily entailed some work not hard, but, worse than hard, responsible. A curious instance of this occurred in a firm the other day where vats were to be cleaned. Down, one vat 20ft deep and correspondingly wide three men descended at intervals to clean it out. The signal for their ascent by a rope ladder was given by, the ringing of a bell, 10 minutes after which boiling pitch descended into the vat. The man who gave the order for the pitch, had to "give up the job" through nervousness. He was afraid lest some day he should give the order too soon, and be responsible for some fellow creature's death or terrible injury! Curiously enough, the men do not lack courage on their own account; their nerve fails at the thought not merely of killing some fellow creature, but as being "pointed out" as the man who has done so. Sensitiveness and conscientiousness are, of course, concerned in this failing. It is not too much to say that many a burly working man put into a position of comparatively small authority comes as near having a nervous breakdown as it is possible for him to do. This idiosyncrasy, this fear of responsibility, shows itself in other and less striking ways. It shows itself, of course, in that lack of enterprise already noticed and a dislike of getting out of the rut. _ The English working man finds it very difficult to take up any work except that to which he has been accustomed. It may be quite as easy, but "it's not my line," He will work hard —few better —when the Avork is handed out to him; but the AA'ork of searching for work is going beyond the Adamite curse, he thinks. What is the reason of this deficiency, which is increasing? It may not be too much to consider the constant emigration towards the colonies as one reason. Men of am opposite temper anient, not afraid of responsibility, are naturally draAvn to the life of the young lands-; hence England is populated, and tends evermore to be populated, by the Much-afraids, no longer leavened by the daring spirits Avho now go abroad. In process of time will this very fact create a neAV nationality in each country, the colonies creating a New England even as England created the new colonies ? It may be so.