The Wanganui Chronicle. SATURDAY, JUNE 13. 1936. IN DEFEAT

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 79, Issue 139, 13 June 1936, Page 8

The Wanganui Chronicle. SATURDAY, JUNE 13. 1936. IN DEFEAT

ARMA , said General Foch, is never defeated until it thinks it is. It is the same with a man. He is never defeated untit he thinks he is. Defeat is in the mind, not in the circumstances. Dr. Johnson had arrived nowhere before he was forty years of age. At fortytwo Carlisle was still unknown. General Grant, at forty-one years of age, was a not-too-successful farmer: the Civil War eame. he left his farm and was appointed a colonel. Before resigning his commission lie had held the rank of captain. Nothing startling fora man who was to save the American Union. Abraham Lincoln, born in 1809. had not gained a national reputation in 1858, at forty-nine years of age. Had any of these men believed themselves to have been defeated the only worthwhile chapters in their lives would never have been written. .Mr. Samuel Instill, the public utilities magnate of Chicago, was a few years ago a fugitive from justice. He stood liis trial, was acquitted, and started life again at seventy-one years of age. Now he is president of a seemingly successful corporation in Chicago. Ohl Sam Insult is dead, said his friends after his trial, but Sam thought otherwise. He refused to believe that he was defeated. * Air. J. 11. Thomas faced a silent House of Commons. He made a statement which was by no means a vindication. It was a declaration of his own clear conscience. He then left while the House sat in silence. A chapter containing twentyseven years of his life closed as he passed from the portals of the greatest legislative chamber on earth to-day. The inan who has played a prominent part in the councils of Empire, who has been feted and feasted until the cost of his boiled shirts became I a standing joke, passed out into oblivion, and the nation which he served so long will know him no more. But is this so’.’ He says to-day that he now has no strength Io tight the by-election which will result from his resignation. Will he continue a limp existence, devoid of all vigour, incapable of rousing liis mental energies? Is he going to permit himself to wither after all of the, exhilarating experiences which have eomc to him in his public life? Have all of the lessons which his day-to-day handling of important problems taught him. meant so little to him that he must needs retire to some quiet spot, and there cat his heart out? Yes; if he so wills it. No. if he determines otherwise. The final arbiter of his fate is not the British public, nor the House of Commons, but Jimmie Thomas himself. Now the world is full of Jimmie Thomases. They live in every suburban street. They ride in every tram. They are the men who have “taken the count.” who have accepted defeat. But to-morrow is a new day, with new opportunities, with the promise of better things to be accomplished. But opportunity never comes to a man. Ho. must go out to meet if. If a man docs not work from himself outward he will never be able even to see the opportunities which present themselves to him. In the United States of America, when the slump came over the country, men lost their jobs. Some men drifted about the country aimlessly. What did the men of high technical training do? They crowded the universities and technical colleges. The same movement occurred in Germany. When there was nothing else to invest in, men invested in themselves. They increased their stock of individual skill. True they did not know where they were going to sell that improved efficiency, but they knew that the market could not continue to go down all the time. The tide must always turn, and they realised that with the ineoming of the tide they would be the advantaged swimmers. This phase of individual history has been exemplified in New Zealand during the depression, and some men have come out of the slump better men and more efficient men then they went into it. They have improved their positions because they have improved themselves. They refused to know defeat despite the shrinkage of opportunity.