RANKED BY WEALTH.

Taranaki Daily News, 8 March 1924, Page 5

RANKED BY WEALTH.

A MATERIALISTIC AGE. HUMAN VALUES LOST. LURE OF GOLD BRAID. By Telegraph—Press Assn.—Copyright. London, March 6. “'What do people do when they want appreciation? They buy honours and their names are printed for the first time in their lives in the Honours List. That is the first association they have ever had with anything honourable,” Mr. Ramsey MacDonald (Premier) told a Brighton audience, whom he addressed under the auspices of the National Council of the Evangelical Free Churches .

The Premier said: “People who are rich, who give great dinners, who are ostentatiously vulgar and extravagant and who have none of the finer sense of gentlemen, are too often powerful people in these modern times, of which we are so rashly inclined to boast. In this materialistic age we mostly value each other by material possessions. There is every indulgence in recreation, there is incapacity to spend a quiet Sunday. Whether you have a Tory, Liberal or Labour Government you cannot do much with people who can do nothing but be amused by somebody else or a gramaphone, people who have not th? capacity to spend their time profitably with themselves. We are losing the sense of what real human value is. We are going too much after superficialities, gold braid and decorations, after right honourables who are wrong dishonourables. “The essence of Christianity is human quality. We do not want equality, but quality. We are threatened with strikes, lockouts, disputes and disturbances. How childish it all is. What has happened is that the two sides have lost confidence in each other. We must put materialism aside and remember that man. does not live for his pocket, but for his soul and for justice,”