MORALS FOR VICTORY

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 6, Issue 19, 30 October 1942, Page 2

MORALS FOR VICTORY

'Many persons to-day are expressing regret over altitudes too noticeable not only in regions of great war activity, but elsewhere throughout the United States. At the same time, those concerned with the home front hear a growing protest against the apparent indifference of some Americans toward success in the war. Less, however, seems to be said about the fact that moral attitudes and the winning of the war bear a close relation to each other. Either because too many fear that they may be called puritanical if they take a stand for a high morality, or because they have not considered the matter at all, they act. as if morality, temperance, temperateness, were without vital bearing in military enterprise. Yet the "fast" living about which there is complaint results logically in just the kind of languid passivity that hampers war effort. When men and women crowd night clubs and saloons and the cheapest kind, of theatrical exhibits in a perpetual effort to forget everything, and bet millions on the races, and make existence hideous for anyone whose business oblige. l : him to> sleep in hotels, we cannot expect them the next day to be physically or mentally prepared for winning the war. For some the war is at best a kind of Miami Beach enterprise in which everybody has to come up from the water long enough to give Hitler a span'king, so that he will thereafter let them alone. Hitler would, like nothing better than to hear that their number is increasing. War calls for a great integration of energies, not the lassitude that follows the frittering away of energy. Unless we free peoples are stirred by moral demands, and supported by them, we will not soon Avin th,e war against Hitler and his powerful allies. But if we are constantly guided by something that Ave know is in keeping with the best in us, we shall gain the concentration and the drive that successful Avarfare requires.