RESPONSIBILITIES

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 54, Issue 3899, 10 May 1937, Page 18 (Supplement)

RESPONSIBILITIES

WHAT WOULD THEY HAVE DONE ? Yet among the idle speculations with which thinking men and women play in their minds, at leisure, not without advantage to their intelligence, there is one, unuttered, that must have been submitted spontaneously and privately thousands of times: How would they, the great Victorians of the later class, have

dealt with the dilemnas that have lately confronted us and others gathering around? What would Mr Gladstone have done in the matter of Abyssinia? What Lord Salisbury, solid

and safe Foreign Minister, in the tangled skein of European rivalries and hatreds? We should hesitate before answering, remembering Mr Gladstone’s religious zeal and the violence of his enthusiasms, and in the end we might close the private and perplexing argument by agreeing that no such man could have lived and tvrought that way in this present time, and so the proposition is double sterile, and “the question does not arise.” The soil produces the plants and the flowers. There seems to have been this great difference, that in the main the Victorians believed in goodness in various measure, past, present, and future, and although large numbers of them inclined towards the mystery of an actual personal devil, equipped with a dreadful tail, a fierce yet cunning and seductive glance, and a favour towards scarlet in costumes, they always felt that with their own good and wellsalved consciences, together with church and chapel, they had him well in hand and quite innocuous. But the devil now appears more real and dangerous.—Henry Leach in “Chambers’s Journal.”