Nobody in his senses expects a panacea for the comparatively
simple and trivial business of playing chess. Nobody wants to be told
to "rely wholly upon your pawns," or "never, never move your rook";
nobody clamours "give me a third knight and all will be well"; but that
is exactly what everybody seems to be doing in our present discussion
And as another aspect of the same impatience, I note the disposition to
clamour against all sorts of necessary processes in the development of a
civilisation. For example, I read over and over again of the failure of
representative government, and in nine cases out of ten I find that this
amounts to a cry against any sort of representative government. It is
perfectly true that our representative institutions do not work well and
need a vigorous overhauling, but while I find scarcely any support for
such a revision, the air is full of vague dangerous demands for
aristocracy, for oligarchy, for autocracy. It is like a man who jumps
out of his automobile because he has burst a tyre, refuses a proffered
Stepney, and bawls passionately for anything--for a four-wheeler, or a
donkey, as long as he can be free from that exploded mechanism. There
are evidently quite a considerable number of people in this country who
would welcome a tyrant at the present time, a strong, silent, cruel,
imprisoning, executing, melodramatic sort of person, who would somehow
manage everything while they went on--being silly.
Pages:
90
91
92
93
94
95
96
97
98
99
100
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
108
109
110
111
112
113
114