The Gisborne Times. PUBLISHED EVERY MORNING. SATURDAY, APRIL 8, 1911.

Gisborne Times, Volume XXIX, Issue 3190, 8 April 1911, Page 6

The Gisborne Times. PUBLISHED EVERY MORNING. SATURDAY, APRIL 8, 1911.

According to a writer in the “Atlantic Monthly,” the type A Challenge to of men not uncomHusnph Worth, mon half a century / ago, the big-framed, big-hearted “old Roman” men, whose integrity was as unquestioned as their a! #jty is almost extinct. Their places (Jp declares) are filled by smaller, less jjble, often much less honest men. To #he rising generation he says:—“lt i .may easily happen that the next 20 i yeai's will prove the most interesting in b the history of civilisation. Armageddon is always at hand in some fashion Nice lads with the blood of. the founders of our nation in your veins, pecking away at the current literature of socialism, taking out of it imperfectly understood apologies for your temperaments and calling it philosophy—where will you lie if a Great Day should really dawn? What is there in your way ol thought to help you play the man in any crisis ? If the footmen have wearied you, how shall you run with the horsemen ? In one way or another every generation has to fight for its life. When your turn comes, you will be tossed on the scrap-heap, shoved aside by boys of a sterner fibre and a less easy, life, boys who have read less and worked more, boys who have thought to some purpose and have been willing—as you are not—to be disciplined by life. Force, personality, the power to endure; these our fathers had, these you are losing. Yet life itself demands them as much as it ever did. Life is not, and is not meant to be a cheap, easy matter, even for flat dwellers. It is a grim, hard, desolate piece of work, shot through with all sorts of exquisite, wonderful, compensating experiences.” He proceeds to ask the “rising generation” to consider their existence and support that they accept with such nonchalant ease. “Every child born into the world,” he says, “is paid for with literal blood, sweat, tears. Tha: is the fixed price, and there are no bargain sales. ears of toil, months of care, hours of agony, go to your birth and rearing. What excuse have you, anyhow, for turning out flimsy, shallow, amusement-seeking creatures when you think of the elements in your making? The brain-specialists and the psychologists between them have given in the last ten years what seems con- [ elusive proof of the servitude of the body to the self; they have shown how, by the use of the appropriate mechanism ill our make-up, we can control to a degree even the automatisms of our bodies; they have demonstrated the absolute mastery of will over conduct. Those ancient foes, heredity and habit, can do very little against you to-day, that you are not in a position to overcome. Since the world began, no human creatures have had the scientific assertion of this that you possess. Many wise and many righteous have longed to be assured of these matters, and have agonised through life without that certainty. Saints and sages have achieved by long prayer and fasting the graces that you, apparently, 7nay attain by the easy process of self-sug-gestion. Coming as this psychological discovery does, in the middle of an age of unparalleled mechanical invention and discovery, it is almost—is it not?

as if the Creator of men had said, ‘lt is time that these children of mine came to maturity. I will give them at last their full mastery over the earth and over the air and; over -the spirits of themselves. Let us see how they bear themselves under these gifts.”' Thus, according to the writer of this article.

the responsibility of the rising generation for themselves is such an utter re-

sponsibility as the race lias neve.

known. It is the ultimate challenge to human worth and human power. “You

dare not,” he adds, “fail under it. think the long generations of von

fathers hold their breath to see if vo

do less with certainty than they have done with faith.”