TOPICS OF THE DAY

Waikato Times, Volume 124, Issue 20783, 18 April 1939, Page 6

TOPICS OF THE DAY

Not the Crowd , but the Faces “It is a common fallacy to treat peoples—the people, for example, of a nation —as an undifferentiated mass,” says Dr. Rufus M. Jones, one of the world’s best-known Quakers. “They are taken in the lump, so to speak, and are judged and condemned, especially in time of war, under a blanket term, usually an offensive term. In all such situations we fail to see the concrete human faces, the individual persons, with their throbbing human hearts and their unique ways of life and thought. Their inner attitudes of mind and will are overlooked and swamped in the abstract mass. Those human faces, nevertheless, continue to peer out from behind the abstract phrases. They are there palpitatingly real, in spite of the almost universal tendency to forget them, to overlook them. The same thing is true of areas of hate and bitterness and fear, and there are just now many such areas on this planet of ours. It is usually assumed, where there is an atmosphere, a climate, of racial hate and bitterness that it envelops the entire people concerned, and that they can all be ‘lumped’ together under one rubric of hate or fear, with no free individuals, whose human faces stand out uniquely in the general ‘mass.’ That is another instance of this common fallacy—to ignore the human faces that are alvavs there.”