Wairarapa Daily Times [Established Over 50 Years.] MONDAY, 14th MARCH, 1932. THE ETERNAL DEMAGOGUE.

Wairarapa Daily Times, 14 March 1932, Page 4

Wairarapa Daily Times [Established Over 50 Years.] MONDAY, 14th MARCH, 1932. THE ETERNAL DEMAGOGUE.

On many occasions lately we have been warned —and, it must be confessed —with considerable reason —against the methods of the demagogue. And in every ease wherein the term has been used it has carried with it a sinister significance. This is a curious example of those philological changes, not uncommon to our tongue, whereby a word is gradually divorced from its original meaning and acquires one so different as in some cases to become altogether antithetical thereto. The word “let,” for instance, which now is synonymous with “allow” or “permit,” originally meant “prevent,” as we may very easily deduce from Hamlet’s use of it in his excited command from those who would deter him from following his father’s ghost: “Unhand me, gentlemen. . . i’ll make a ghost of him who lets me!” And although the word “demagogue” has not entirely lost its simple primal meaning of “a leader of the people,” yet it is safe to say that in not one case in a thousand does its user mean it to convey, nor do his hearers take it as conveying, any interpretation but its acquired one of “a political agitator who appeals to the passions and prejudices of the mob in order to further his own interests —an unprincipled or factious orator.” The quoted meaning is the one ascribed to the word by that philological court of last appeal, the Oxford English Dictionary; and, in almost every extract which is given there to illustrate the word, it carries that significance and no other. It may, therefore, be taken almost for granted that when, here or elsewhere, a man is termed a demagogue, the inference is that he is deemed by the speaker to be nothing but a loud-voiced blusterer whose selfish arguments are addressed to the senses rather than to the sense of his hearers. Strangely enough, although the demagogue in early days was generally so termed because of the altruistic aims of his leadership, it was not unusual even then for the significance now almost universally associated with the word to be applied to it. For the blus-

terer, the specious promiser and promise-breaker, the appealer to the passions, the instigator and supporter of faction, has been known to human affairs ever since the Stone Age. And ever since that era, too, his methods have earned a following among the unthinking and desperate. Like the poor, the demagogue is always witli us; the raucous voice and reckless posturings which evoked the satirical attacks of Aristophanes and roused the illiterate plebs of Rome to the ruin of her government, still work their mischief in our midst. And, so far as one can judge the future from the past, they will continue so to do, while men are as we know them. The prospect is hardly a pleasant one; in regarding it one cannot but feel that sinking of the heart that Macbeth knew when he descried the hated line of Banono stretching, as it seemed to him, “out to the crack of doom.”