[To the Editor of THE SPECTATOR.]
Sin,—Who are the real revolutionaries ? Your contributor of March 8th wrote : Thus the thinkers and writers are the true revolutionaries, Marx and not Lenin, Rousseau and not Napoleon ; and the revolutionary's battle is really won at the moment when his ideas have received general credence."
May I point out another aspect covering the same ground, and it is a coincidence of parallelism, if I give my exact words written in 1929:
" The real revolutionists are not the writers of books nor the talkers in the streets or the senates; because emancipation comes from the inventors and the industrialists ; it is Lodge, Edison, Dunlop, Courtauld, Mond, Wilbur Wright, Restall, Cooks and their legions which create the new conditions and bring the new perceptions. In the final Utopia there will be statues to these known and unknown gods who make the world for civilized man to live in, while the Fabians and the Marxes and the Maxtons will have been forgotten."
The values of tradition must be obsolescent in a community which now grows in complexity so rapidly ; tradition must loSe its Caine just in far as it develoPs into a taboo.'
„Does it not seem the problem today is (a) to perceive the rate of obsolescence in all_ departments of life, and (b) to define the proliferation (potential and actual) of all new discoveries and inventions ? In future the function of states- men will be to . adapt and adopt the new conditions earlier than now obtains. It is sad, if not mad, for example, that recognizing the cumulative effects of wireless (which brings all peoples into hourly contact), and of flying (which has
made the earth the cabbage patch of all peoples), research is still the Cinderella in world statesmanship. Einstein is banished while Hitler is canonized, and in our own country
loss . and reaction is caused • by belated: acceptance of what is --hap-iienfrijraiciund as handled by the mathinery, of Royal .Commissions which take so long in arriving at -their conclusions-. that their terms of reference are out of date
befoie they have finished their sittings. . ,
So far 'as Youth and the future is Concerned, there seems a little danger in attaching too :much iMportance to intro- spection and personal psychology and a tendency in their work and pleasure to liVe Upon :their emotions. Psycho- analysis is becoming a substitute for the old Victorian church- goingr—Yours faithfully,: , • "A. ANTHONY. Cambridge.
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