A Prime Minister once complimented me on a casual saying of mine at his luncheon table. I was accounting for part of my success against
“Many giants great and tall,”
and I ventured to state that:—
“The secret of successful administration was the intelligent anticipation of agitation.”
Anticipate the Revolution. Do the thing yourself in your way before the agitators get in before you and do it in their way. Get rid of the present obsolete Forms and Antique Ceremonies which grate on the masses, and of Figureheads who are laughing-stocks, and of sinecures which are exasperating—and so anticipate another Cromwell, who is certainly now coming fast along to “Remove another Bauble!”
I forget what they did to the man who tried to import poisonous snakes into New Zealand (finding that happy island unblessed with this commodity). It was something quite drastic they did to him! They killed the snakes.
The Canadian House of Commons adopted by a majority of 33 a motion by Sir Robert Borden, on behalf of the Canadian Government, asking that no more hereditary titles should be bestowed in Canada, and declaring that the Canadian Government should make all recommendations for honours of any kind. This motion was a compromise designed to damp down the popular outcry against titles which has arisen in Canada. In one debate Sir Wilfrid Laurier offered to throw his own title on a common bonfire. He urged that all titles in Canada should be abolished.
Why should Great Britain lag behind Canada and the United States? Hereditary titles are ludicrously out of date in any modern democracy, and the sooner we sweep away all the gimcracks and gewgaws of snobbery the better. The fount of so-called honour has become a deluge, and the newspapers are hard put to it to find room for even the spray of the deluge.
The war has not begotten simplicity and austerity in this respect. On the contrary, it has made what used to be a comedy a screaming farce. There was a time when the Birthday Honours List could be printed on one day, but it is now a serial novel. The first chapter of the latest Birthday list was long, but the Times warned us that it was only “the first of a series which already threatens to outlast the week—quite apart from the gigantic Order of the British Empire.”
Chicago’s great Professor of History, Mr. McLaughlin, made the statement at the Kingsway Hall, in his address to British teachers, that now the United States have over 100 millions of people, and fifty years from now they may well have 200 millions—a great Atlantic and Pacific Power. The Professor added that this great War was “to protect Democracy against the greatest menace it has ever had” (in the present rule of Kings and Secret Treaties, etc., etc.). Another points out as a striking example of present old-time conditions (so pernicious to freedom and efficiency) the positive fact now existing that our Military Leaders, by a class distinction, were only selected from one twenty-fifth of the ore which we have at our disposal though we had brought five million men under arms, as all our generals commanding armies, army corps, divisions, and in most cases brigades, were drawn from among the Regular Forces who handled our small pre-War Army of two hundred thousand men. And the writer adds: