Bay Of Plenty Beacon Published Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. MONDAY, JANUARY 24, 1949 THERE SPEAKS A MAN

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 13, Issue 45, 24 January 1949, Page 4

Bay Of Plenty Beacon Published Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. MONDAY, JANUARY 24, 1949

THERE SPEAKS A MAN

Wide publicity has been given Lord Rowallan’s recent broadcast address, in which he extolled the spirit of “joyous adventure,” and condemned the “dreadful slogan of ‘safety first’ He said: “The spirit of adventure has always been paramount in the British people from the very earliest days; the willingness to launch out into the unknown, confidence in their own powers to overcome their difficulties, confident that whatever may befall they will not fail and even if they do fail, that the attempt is worth everything.” There speaks a man. He gave timely warning that in many cases modern civilisation had so sheltered young people, cramming them full of the sort of knowledge required to pass examinations, often to the exclusion of knowledge of other things that in many cases the ambition and the will to apply that knowledge had been completely eliminated. To a degree that is true. Even in this country, whose citizens pride themselves on their initiative, one often meets the hopelessly vacillating type who seems quite incapable of making a decision about anything, and equally incapable of putting it into -fppH without direction from someone else if he does make it. Too manv of us are developing into leaners, rather than doers. There is a tendency to lean on the Government, on the trade union, on the shovel handle. And that last phrase is not a slap at anybody in particular, or any group in particular. The shovel is purely a metaphorical one, and the phrase is meant to suggest that quite a lot of us would rather spend our time wrangling over trivialities than getting on with our jobs in. a truly constructive and co-opera-tive spirit. Lord Rowallan might have hit a bulls-eye when he suggests that a lot of that comes £• ■'m the frustrations of a sheltered youth that has never had much of a chance to develop self-reliance As he points out, we have magnificent opportunities in this land of ours for the testing of our physical and psychological powers in outdoor adventures amongst the hills, the lakes and the bush. Years back, everyone did just that as a matter of course. We had to. That was what ordinarytravel amounted to for one thing. Those pioneering days were times of opportunity for young men. r ' But all the frustrations of today do not come from the school room. Where is there cheap land today that a .young man with ambition, energy, faith in him-

self and little else can acquire and develop? Where is there opportunity for young fellow with ideas but slender capital to set himself up in business, free and untrammelled? True, to a degree New Zealand is still a land of opportunity. 1 But where once it was a land of opportunity for the man with faith, ambition and the will to work, today it is the land of opportunity for the man with a thick wad in his wallet ... Provided he knows how to slide past the restrictions that fetter almost any kind of enterprise.