The Henson Journals

[115]

Saturday, June 1st, 1929.

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The result of the election has placed 'Labour' in office, and perhaps also in power. It is already known that the Liberal Party has only succeeded in helping the Socialists. It is sufficiently evident that the party itself has faded out of English politics. That a very large proportion of the electors – perhaps as much as one third ̭fourth^ – abstained from voting at all is also apparent, and that the victorious followers of Ramsay Macdonald polled a minority of the votes actually cast is certain. It is probable that the new Labour Government will have no more than one fourth ̭two sevenths̭ of the electorate behind it. Such is democracy up to date. It is an anxious question what may be the effect on the Church of this dramatic political change. The large patronage of the Crown in unfriendly hands might, in a very short time, inflict irreparable injury on the Church. Nor need the hands be intentionally unfriendly. Ignorance & folly may be not less I injurious than hostility itself: and beyond all reasonable question the Labour Party is incredibly ignorant and foolish in the ecclesiastical sphere.

[116]

'The real question is not whether illiteracy disqualifies, but to what extent literacy qualifies' for the exercise of civic functions says Ld Bryce. He leaves the question unanswered, and, indeed, the answer is not easily found. For education, class, property, partisanship are no less fertile roots of disqualifying prejudice than ignorance itself, Heraclitus said long ago. 'Much knowledge does not teach wisdom' (πολνμαθίζ νόον ού διδάσκει). We are shut up in a hopeless dilemma – leave the people uneducated, and they are the easy victims of their own fears and appetites: educate them, & they become the slaves of class & interest. Is there any way of escape from this impasse? Assuredly we have not yet found one. The discovery that education may be made the instrument for fashioning men's minds according to the will of the Government enshrines a formidable menace to human independence. A sedulously propagated fiction may acquire the authority of an elementary truth, & the intellectual movement of a nation may be made to run into artificial channels. As Bryce says darkly, 'an Ice–age may await the mind of man'.

[117]

We lunched with Sam. Storey and met his fiancée, Miss Woodcock, a pretty & pleasing young woman. They asked me to marry them in July, and I promised to do so if a convenient day could be chosen. After lunched we returned to Auckland.

I wrote to Noel Lamidey, and sent him a copy of 'Disestablishment'. He seems to be resolutely determined to go forward in the world.

"At present I am not too widely possessed of this world's goods, but I then I have youth (for I am only 34 on the 19th), ambitions and ideals, which I hope may one day carry me over the top. It is, however, a long tussle out here (sc. Australia) and the average Englishman has many handicaps to overcome, but strangely enough he usually does, tho' sometimes he often thinks

I am sick of this blazing sunshine

That burns thro' the weary hours

With the gaudy birds singing never a song,

And the beautiful scentless flowers".

That is equally natural and well expressed: but the lad would have had no kind of a man's career in this crowded & decadent island.

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