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The New Zealand Railways Magazine, Volume 4, Issue 2 (June 1, 1929.)

Will and Won't

Will and Won't.

Will-Power is great, but steam power is greater.

If you doubt this assertion, meticulous reader, gird up your Bulldog braces, plant your Bostocks firmly on terra permanenta—or the permanent way—and stand immutably, inscrutably, and imperturbably between the rails, taking care when doing so to project your psycho-cylindrical jelly-beans outwards and onwards impinging on the oscillatory onrush of the nearest approaching train. Grasp a volume on “Mind Over Machinery” between the first finger and the thumb of the right hand, and concentrate all the fifty-seven varieties of your psychological hardware upon the charging victim. Raise the left hand in a gesture of contempt, like that of a traffic inspector rampant, or of Wilhelm Hohenzollern, senr., reviewing a battalion of Dutch cheeses at Doorn; then await developments. There are sure to be developments. Either you stop the train, or you subject your wife to a severe attack of galloping widowhood. If you succeed in halting the engine it is because the enginedriver is an understanding man who probably served his apprenticeship to a donkey-engine. But in the double event of your psychological outfit developing an air-choke in the uptake and the engine-driver mistaking you for a magnetic disturbance, mind and matter henceforth will be of equal indifference to you, for your destination will be a place where mind doesn't matter and matter is out of mind.

No, sir, the hypnotic retina may be effective for restraining the homo-voracious complex of a zither or of a man-eating antimacasser; but can it, for instance, restore the departed youth to a senile breakfast egg, bring back that schoolgirl complexion, or induce respiration in a wind-broken vacuum cleaner? The “Noes” have it, I fancy.