In Front of Your Nose   Many recent statements in the press have
declared that it is almost, if not quite, impossible for us to
mine as much coal as we need for home and export purposes,
because of the impossibility of inducing a sufficient number of
miners to remain in the pits. One set of figures which I saw
last week estimated the annual ‘wastage’ of mine workers at
60,000 and the annual intake of new workers at 10,000.
Simultaneously with this — and sometimes in the same column of
the same paper — there have been statements that it would be
undesirable to make use of Poles or Germans because this might
lead to unemployment in the coal industry. The two utterances do
not always come from the same sources, but there must certainly
be many people who are capable of holding these totally
contradictory ideas in their heads at a single moment.  This is
merely one example of a habit of mind which is extremely
widespread, and perhaps always has been. Bernard Shaw, in the
preface to Androcles and the Lion, cites a