The other day The Times published a Fourth Leader (it
was bout something to do with ramblers and hikers) in which the titer quoted from " the White Paper recently produced by the oyal Commission on Leisure." The quotation—taken, The Times • id, from p. 1,481 of the White Paper—was as follows: " Over-indulgence in pedestrian exercise tends, whether other things are equal or not, to induce in personnel—and particularly in personnel of the upper and the lowest age-groups—a sensa- tion of fatigue, accompanied often by thirst and almost invariably by a decline in morale." ` day or two later a man rang up The Times and asked or further particulars about the White Paper ; he had een round to the Stationery Office and the London School f Economics, and neither of them, he said plaintively, had been able to trace it. The saddest thing about this sad story is that it is really not the man who looks ridiculous, but the Welfare State in its present stage of development. There. so easily might have been a Royal Commission on Leisure ; and there is no reason why (whether other things were equal or not) its findings should not have run to 1,500 pages, and included the frightful sentence invented by The Times.
Previous page
