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Religion Death and the Supernatural Peoples, Races and Ourselves The Birth-rate Education Broadcasting Culture Politics War, Wickedness and Science The Post-war World WESTHOUSE LONDON 1945 Contents Religion page 9 Death and the Supernatural page 25 Peoples, Races and Ourselves page 43 The Birth-rate page 61 Education page 73 Broadcasting page 103 Culture page 119 Politics page 145 War, Wickedness and Science page 165 The Post-war World page 181 Authors Preface This is misleading, for I am not the author of OPINIONS. dont mean merely that Mr. Izant has tacked together the discursive obser vations with which week by week 1 enlivened the columns of the SUNDAY DISPATCH with such admirable deftness 0s to have produced a reasonably palatable omelette out of a heap of broken eggshells I mean that his materials are in a very literal sense eggshells - not eggs. They were eggs all right, good, addled and indifferent when Friday after Friday I laid them, going of an afternoon to the SUNDAY DISPATCH office and there being confronted with such questions as the fertile brains of m irQftn w staff had been able to contrive jEor my bedevilment and discomfiture. Later I got them to tell me ver the telephone in the morning what they were going to isk me in the afternoon and sometimes during lunch I thought about the answers. But never, I insist, did I get them up, 9 which explains not only why some of the eggs appear to have proceeded from an addled brain-for, as I have no breakfast, the lunches were sometimes very good lunched-but why those of them which are good seem so often to have been laid by birds of a different feather rather determinedly not flocking together. lou see, I ought to have checkedwhat I said one week with what I said another. But I did not. Tet all the eggs are, in fact, mine. But now, I repeat, they are only eggshells. Psysiologists tell us that the sub stances of our bodies change every seven years. In wartime, what with the general wear and tear to which our bodied are exposed and the odd substances which under the name of . food we put into them, the process is speeded up, s that only a small proportion of the atoms of my body are the same as they were when I began to answer questions for the SUNDAY DISPATCH three years or more ago. But it is from the mind - or so, at least, I like to think - rather than from the material molecules of the body that the substance of this book has proceeded and my mind has during the last five years changed out of all recognition. have sometimes maintained over the wireless that the minds of middle-aged and ageing men dont change that all their owners do, when they think, is to restir the mud of old material. A so often, I was wrong, wrong, as I have proved in my own person. I can still remember the modestly prevaricating letter I wrote in answer to the proposal that I should undertake this feature. I am, I said in effect, a disgruntled intellectual who disagrees with three quarters of the British public on every conceivable topic and whose views most of your readers will consider to be silly when they dont think them downright wicked. For example, I have been a pacifist, protesting against all wars on principle and you are very patriotic. So, dash it, am I, but our patriotisms are not for the same things. I love England with a passionate intensity, but my England is a little England of small country towns and villages, gentlecontours and a general haziness of outline and atmosphere an England where feelings are mild and life and speech are slow while you are all for speed, progress, size, industry and the Empire. Now I care very little about the Empire and I certainly d nt want England to be a f great power I am a Socialist, am, or rather was an agnostic, who cares for books and music, hates jazz, cars and advertisements and wants a smaller population...