JULY, 1913

PLAIN TALK

5

“leaders” into struggling for the imposition of fads through the medium of the ballot-box.

The idol of the nineteenth century was (and is) the rich man, who manipulated laws no less than he manipulated finance. The ideal of the twentieth century is the free individual —man as man working his way towards complete moral, intellectual and spiritual emancipation. Hence the tendency to rebel to-day which was unknown a generation ago! Whatever is fixed or established, whether in thought, religion or morals, excites distrust. The attempt to vindicate an act or a cause by quoting a nineteenth-century maxim is to condemn it. The spirit of rebellion is taking the place of the old spirit of simple obedience; the Don Juan spirit is abroad working tumult in the earth.

In vain do politicians, financiers and the Churches cry out for peace. There can be no peace when the seeds of war and injustice are at the roots, and “the spirit of murder lurks in the very means of life.” Indeed, the time has come when peace can only be secured through the breaking up of laws. The very things which a short time ago would have marked a man out as possessing the highest virtue are now fast becoming signs of ignorance, moral impotence, intellectual enslavement. To live virtuously and intelligently to-day is to live rebelliously.

If we are in need of any particular law to-day, it is a law whereby about a thousand of those already in existence might be abolished. The laws are but men's tempters, luring them from the Law of Freedom. They interfere with their consciences, tempt their acquisitiveness, and provide protection for evil-doing—so it be clever and big enough.

The breaking up of laws is the most urgent need. Their multiplication makes thought tedious, right action difficult, and self-control seem anti-social. Laws (rules) are necessary only as sign-posts to the purpose and significance of Law. The prevailing zeal for law-making, which has developed into a fever, is destroying the surviving shreds of liberty and personal security, making virtue treasonable and the outlaws' den a place of refuge.

The lawyer is the historic enemy of the prophet. People therefore who find their teachers and heroes in lawyers and the makers of many laws have need to be anxious about their future. The presence of many lawmakers forebodes “red ruin and the breaking up of”-Law.

## WANTED: THE PLAY-SPIRIT

WHAT is it that drives us, the bulk of us, ordinary, undistinguished humanity, to Places of Entertainment?

What human characteristic is it that decides the crowds in the theatres, music halls and picture palaces? A number of motives may be mentioned and may account for certain sections of the vast army of humanity which is steered nightly in all our large towns through the magic doorways. But motives which vary, which can be distributed here and there amongst the crowd and depend upon circumstances, cannot account for the blind, uniform, instinctive movement of the increasing herd of “pleasure seekers,” as they are sometimes vaguely called.

There must be some fairly universal decisive factor, some inner urgency, conscious or unconscious, to account for the punctual delivery of this meek, well-drilled body of all sorts and conditions of people into the hands of the amusement caterers.

A keen student of human psychology, and a lecturer in English literature, offers this possible explanation: that young people in their teens like to have both prose and poetry read to them without comment or explanation. They will retain what interests them and be able to reproduce the salient features, certain pictures standing out in the narrative and comprehensible by them. They will remain happy and interested as long as these alternating processes, the reading and the recollecting of interesting bits, form the main work of their “literature class.” Older students, however, though also capable of interest and appreciation of things read to them, like best of all the teacher’s commentary on the thing read, a process which the younger people will scarcely tolerate.

The lecturer in English literature concludes from this experience of his that the cinemas are, roughly speaking, full of “children”—those who like a mere presentation, without comment, of life’s whirligig, and that the theatres are full of those who like life, life not as they live it in single moments and days, in slow-forming months and years, but condensed, played out before them in the form of drama, which is, even at its crudest and roughest, a sort of Commentary on Life.

But how many of us, how many cinema and theatre “goers” get “lively” satisfaction out of their evening’s entertainment—how

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PLAIN TALK

JULY, 1913

many come home roused and interested, with quickened circulation and heightened consciousness—how many sleep soundly with the sense of having taken a fresh hold on life?

We are not, as a whole, interested in life, we are driven hither and thither in the hope of getting away from it. We want stimulants and drugs. There cannot, surely, be any doubt of this. Walk down the queue outside any London theatre, watch the crowds streaming into the picture palaces, and the strongest impression left with you will be that of the expression of emptiness and boredom on most of the faces—emptiness and boredom varied here and there by that wretched strained look in the eyes that means expectation of excitement. But for the most part emptiness—absolute emptiness.

And it is the creation of this emptiness that is the worst result of spending our leisure in "Places of Entertainment." The picture palace, the theatre which could be no doubt wisely used, both a vision for "children" and a "commentary" for others, and, we might add, a thing of beauty for both; because, once we allow them to be an occupation—nothing less than a drug, something we must have to give our empty or over-strenuous existences some touch of something we lack, a glow, a distraction—we miss the whole point of life, we miss life itself, for we have no time to live, we who spend four-fifths of the day in work and the rest in "looking on." We remain undeveloped, our faculties grow first dormant, then atrophied.

We must learn to play. We must be personal in our amusements. They are, for most of us nowadays, all we can call, even in the narrowest sense, our own. They are our one opportunity of developing our faculties, of learning about life and about ourselves—they are our one little plot of "freehold."

Amusements, as most of us have them at present catered for us, at so much a head, are dead loss of life. Life, indeed, has grown to many of us a poor thing—because we ourselves have grown poor. We have no stake anywhere. We are tired, helpless bits of the machinery of business life, tired, helpless bits of the machinery of home life. We are dying, in so far as this is all, dying individually and collectively. But there is the margin, there are the divine faculties hidden within us, and there is—leisure, be it ever so little, for some. If we will, we can, with that little lever of leisure, transform ourselves and move away in

time the mountains that obstruct the way to freedom. People who can "play," who know the joy that comes from faculties trained and controlled and used, will not long tolerate slavery.

# THE THIRTY-NINE ARTICLES OF PATRIOTISM

## I. OF FAITH IN THE FATHERLAND

THERE is but one true country or Fatherland, whereof the Patriot is the rightful son or citizen; of pre-eminent beauty and goodness; the Parent, Nurse, Teacher, and Sole Proprietor of every human creature born within its boundaries.

## II. OF LOYALTY TO THE CONSTITUTION

Of old and from time to time, the Fathers of the Country have, according to their wisdom and the necessity of the times, established Governing Offices and Institutions; which things the true Patriot accepteth without question, holding sacred any such Constitution that hath endured the storms of time upwards of a century, no matter how patiently the same may, in the light of reason and experience, call for amendment.

## III. OF THE GOVERNMENT

The Government is that Person or Persons—whether King, Emperor, President, Sultan, Oligarchy, Aristocracy or Parliamentary Assembly—for the time being sitting in the seat of Absolute Authority, from whose judgment there is no appeal; and although the Patriot may not seek to displace or oppose such Government without committing the sin of anti-patriotism, yet it hath always been held that the Success of the Anti-Patriot's Enterprise fully redeemeth such sin.

## IV. OF LAW

Law is the Will of the Government for the time being, compounded with such Wills of preceding Governments as have not been revoked.

It is not necessary that Laws be in all Countries one or utterly like, for at all times they have been diverse, and may be changed according to the diversity of countries and men's manners. But until the Laws in any country be so changed by Authority it is the duty of a Patriot to maintain and obey them.

Nor is it necessary in order to command observance that any Law be just and reasonable; therefore whosoever through his private judgment willingly and purposely neglecteth the Laws approved by Authority ought to be rebuked, as one that hurteth the Authority of the Government and woundeth the conscience of the weak.

HAROLD E. HARE.

MS VAULT
RICHARDSON
SER. III - BOX 2
FOLDER 35