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Salient. An Organ of Student Opinion at Victoria College, Wellington, N.Z. Vol. 1, No. 9 June 01, 1938

Doctrine of Despair

Doctrine of Despair.

Such an argument Is familiar enough—along with the circumstances that prompt it. As a doctrine of despair it has always risen into prominence side by side with an unwillingness to face the unavoidable inconveniences of social change. It has unfailingly been the gambit of the spokesmen of the propertied classes, who have never been able to reconcile justice with any lessening of their material power. Thus when, according to them, reform from without is clearly impossible, they satiate their uneasy consciences by In sisting on reform from within. It is this situation which provides the ribald spectacle of plump captains of commerce (their week of exploitation through), who rest their india-rubber buttocks on the red-plush of church news, offer up their vows to God and assure themselves that wealth and poverty are only mental pictures, and that really the misery of the poor is just a rumour—and slightly funny.