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Old Lamps For New

The older of the Irish, in their intolerance of youth, have a saying concerning the foolishness of teaching one's grandmother to suck eggs. It is a weighty, almost a ponderous pronouncement, and it rises in my mind as the only fit phrase for the recent attempt by several young men to upset the quiet state of affairs which latterly seems to rule at the College whenever Extravaganzas are not the subject of discussion, and to give ruthless publicity to themselves notwithstanding their natural (and very proper when one considers their age and intelligence) tendency to remain in the comforting twilight of mediocrity. There was a day, when these young men were even younger, in which College rows were a thing of daily occurrence, when scandal succeeded scandal—J.J. quite indelicately avowing that he had lost faith and therefore must resign from the Presidency of the Christian Union; H.G.M., for all his brilliance, confessing that he was approaching the state of mind in which he could only hold that property was robbery; or J.S. shamelessly driving several of his rivals from "The Den" by flooding it, and then carrying the day by direct assault and the use of a couple of fire extinguishers.

In this manner was youth served in the closing stages of the war, when we were all, in our small ways, endeavouring to help the Empire out of the mess in which it had plunged us, and to pick up a little learning between whiles. But to-day it is different. We must follow in the footsteps of the principal comedian in our House of Representatives, who ordained that teachers should salute the flag, and who bestows a daily blessing on the service as almost efficient enough to work "his" system of education. We must confess our loyalty with fervour if not with fanaticism. Why not a daily parade by five brass bands from different portions of the city, so that all who wished might converge upon Post Office Square a midday, and there with heart and voice render the National Anthem in approximately one key? Why not, as an irrepressible Irishman once suggested, require tram conductors to bow to the King's head on each penny they take, or civil servants to salute all public buildings? It is just as reasonable and nothing less amusing.

These are the demands of the young gentlemen who set out, as one of them informed me, "to prove that we are not all Bolsheviks at Victoria College." Now I do not know any of these right-thinking students personally; but I will hazard the statement that it would be a great deal better for them if they were "Bolsheviks"—whatever they understand by the term.

"The Communist Party," said H. G. Wells, in a similar connection, "gets hold of some of our brightest young men at an early age and does them an enormous amount of good." All young men, all thinking young men, should be Bolsheviks. If they are not dissatisfied with the existing order of things when their pulse is strong, their impulses at their most generous, their idealism at its height, then they must be pretty poor creatures. The calm acceptance of the conditions of life should be impossible to the young unless they be cold-blooded in the extreme. it is in the tremendous urge of adolescence towards a better state of society, its refusal to see that any factors can triumph over the will of man, its immense and fervid sympathy with the oppressed, the underpaid, the page 41 wreckage of the industrial system, that we see hope for the future. It is the direction of that incalculable force into "the right channels" that makes the continued existence of our society at all possible, and it is often the task of the old men to discourage those bright youths, to dampen their enthusiasms and smudge their ideals, or else by promotion and affluence to convert them into "right-thinking members of the community."

Not all our youth comes under this category, of course. These juvenile reformers who recently have suffered so signal a defeat bear testimony to that fact. It is only the best and brightest, the clear-sighted and the emotional, cast higgledy-piggledy in one heap for once, and all possessed of a fervid faith. In those days, and in those days only, I fear, does the College motto apply; then truth seems something to be sought in no matter what morasses, or on no matter what hill-tops of dream; and being found past any Cerberus, through any fires of Loki, to be esteemed, perhaps, the starting-place for another goal. In those days we are all busy generalising as to the rest of humanity from our own imperfect natures, ready to scrap the existing civilisation without a pang and remould the world nearer our heart's desire. And our vain gropings, our searchings for a little mound upon the level plains of thought, are stimulated by discussion. Always we talk; talk the sun down and up again on imperfectly comprehended problems called by the names of God, ethics and the Iraq. Discussion invariably leads to the assumption, implies the fact that there are two sides to every question, whether of war guilt, Bolshevism, or even the sweating system. And a continued search brings the first hint of disillusion, a suspicion of authorities.

No one knowing the "Daily Mail" for what it is, for instance, would treat its Russian news as anything but exercises in the imagination. No one with the merest knowledge of the career of Lord Rosebery would pay much attention to his ideas of Empire; or, knowing Birkenhead, would hearken to his opinions on the balsam needed for Europe's convalescence. This some of our young men seem to have realised, and (heinously, of course) to have affirmed on a Debating Society platform. Two excessively juvenile and backward students named Campbell and Davidson, I understand, were the principal offenders, and it was only meet that this disrespect for authority on the part of undergraduates should call for wrath. And I am told that but for a wholly shameless "packing" of the meeting called to consider the matter, and the unexpectedly liberal opinions of many students whom one would not have suspected of being capable of independent thought, the offenders would have been cast headlong. These two ill-read 'and ill-advised individuals, it seems, have been foolish enough to use the information bureau of the Labour Party because it has been thoughtlessly run on up-to-date lines. They have not hesitated to hint that the present state of affairs will not last for ever, that even governments change their minds. Worst of all, their distinctly "Socialistic" (oh, maltreated and misused word!) ideas result from a study of the subects on which they speak.

There is no need for surprise that, such an attitude raised the wrath of young men who had devoted no study whatever to politics or economics. For these young men were loyal; they have said so repeatedly and we must believe them. It is not an outstanding virtue, for it takes a good deal of courage to be otherwise. But it page 42 simplifies thought; they do not want to have anything to do with these new-fangled ideas that a thing may be only partly true. What was good enough for their fathers and big brothers is good enough for them. To this they are welcome. But one of these lads has openly expressed his intention of spring-cleaning the College. This is alarming; it is very disturbing to me to be told that I am about to be reformed. At my age my bad habits have already become a comfortable part of my personality. And one of them always has been an attempt to see a problem sharp in outline as either black or white. Latterly—it is my distressing conservatism, no doubt, or perhaps the sudden descent of the years—the world has appeared a uniform grey.

But if the attack on the Debating Society has been of an unusual childishness, the Society has been asking for trouble. It has wasted its time and talent on a large number of stupidly worded motions concerning unworthy subjects; as when it invited Sir John Luke and myself to spend an evening justifying the daily salute of the flag, and shocked Mr. Vivian Potter by deciding that the salute was unnecessary. The Society includes two bright young lights, Mr. J. W. G. Davidson and Mr. R. M. Campbell. Mr. Davidson is a perfectly honest supporter of the Labour Party, and is entitled to respect. What Mr. Campbell is I do not know, and I suspect that Mr. Campbell does not either. He is a keen and able critic of our present society, tempering a profound disrespect for authority with a philosophical calm and unusual tolerance when authority happens to be prominently represented at Society meetings. And, as I understand it, these two gentlemen have had a hand, "or at least a main finger," in the syllabus since the Society's rise to fame.

Now I can remember the Society in three stages. Immediately before the war ended and in the first post-war year the members endeavoured to make themselves audible in a hailstorm of interjections. Then followed a period of respectability and of shrinking audiences. Then came the great year, Mr. F. H. Haigh's famous interview with the one-time Commander-in-Chief of the Grand Fleet and the flaunting of a red banner by one or two intensely loyal members of Parliament, to whose country minds it came as a severe jar that students in the early twenties should have opinions. And so the Society was launched on its glorious career. The members, being young and not long used to reading the newspapers, were pleased and flattered at the unexpected publicity which fell to their lot. The separate vote as yet was not; and so, with an increasing number of Labour Party supporters at each meeting, some of the motions passed easily may not have been representative of student opinion. But in any case the motions went through; Mr. Davidson very naturally seized upon the opportunity afforded of setting forth that his beloved Labour Party was necessary to the salvation of the country; Mr. Campbell went on in genuine Mephistophelean fashion rather enjoying the sensation of shocking the bourgeois; and the generality of speakers continued when given a motion to read up one side or another and recite their authorities to a remarkable assemblage of slightly bored students, eager intending speakers and mildly interested canaille.

The unfortunate side of the whole affair was the popular view-that the Society was a wing of the Labour Party, and the uncritical attitude of the majority of students towards that growing organisation. Many of them, no doubt, supported it as seemingly the only page 43 opposition to a confessedly incapable Government, others because they believed that the Labour Party was genuinely Socialist, most, I have no doubt, because they had a dim idea that the Party had ideals which were on a plane with Mr. Davidson's. Almost every one of them, I fancy, must have lacked a first-hand revelation of the ability and eloquence which go to the making of the. Parliamentary Labour Party, and could have known nothing of the aggressive Mr. Roberts. The Society was so busy shouting British battle-cries that it was, no doubt, an additional recommendation that the New Zealand Labour members (as one of the Society's most brilliant adherents has said) fought its elections on British issues, that their economics were several decades out of date, that they had no land policy and no leader of ideas. And so it went on. But the members of the Society did make a genuine attempt to see matters for themselves, and few things could give one greater pleasure than the severe discomfiture of these local Comstocks who plunged rudely into affairs which they did not understand, and had the impertinence to attempt to make a virtue of the fact that they did not understand them.

C.Q.P.