SOCIAL JUSTICE ONLY CURE FOR COMMUNISM

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 14, Issue 93, 3 February 1950, Page 5

SOCIAL JUSTICE ONLY CURE FOR COMMUNISM

A highly thought-provoking address concerning modern trends of history as they affect our nation and Empire was given by Dr G. F. Morton, of Leeds, guest speaker at the Whakatane Rotary Club’s weekly gathering on Tuesday evening. Dr Morton, who is leader of an English party of six touring this country sponsored by Yorkshire Rotary Clubs, expressed the opinion that' Communism and class war, both symptoms of weaknesses in our civilisation, were directly caused by social injustice, and curable only by social justice'. From that point he dealt forcefully with the spectre of famine that stares the world in the face unless food production can be substantially increased by the utilisa-

tion of every potentially productive aCre of land and by the arresting eof the drift of population from rural to urban communities. This spectre of hunger was very real, Dr Morton pointed out, and had been aggravated by the development of medical science to the point where the average span of life had been increased and infant mortality decreased. The menace could never be banished from a progressive and war-free world until all' possible land was under cultivation. “Red Skies” Entitling his address “Red Skies”, .Dr Morton recalled the old saying, “red sky at tnorning, shepherds’ and wondered ,if the “red sky” in the East right now was a warning to western civilisation, and to New Zealand and Australia in particular. He pointed out that in China, where for over 2,000 years soldiering had been regarded as the meanest and 'most despicable of occupations, Chinese armies were today marching the length and of the land and being hailed with garlands of flowers and honoured in their communities. That ancient land, with its traditional pacifism submerged under a new political idea, now had its military academies, its munition factories. Did those facts, and others related to the spread of Communism in the East, •constitute a challenge to the nations of the Pacific in particular, and. to all those who shared our ideals of civilisation?

Lessons of History One of the first things history had to teach, Dr Morton said, was that every civilisation was the •result of a challenge to the will of the human race to surmount an obstacle. If the challenge developing today were not met, then the future would indeed be black. Britain had proved herself capable of meeting such challenges, -and perhaps the greatest example •of it in all her history was when, in Queen Elizabeth’s day, she stood alone against Spain, which - then dominated all Europe and South America. Victorious, the British race moved on to America, to Australia, to New Zealand. New Zealand, in its infancy, as a nation, must be prepared also to meet challenges, to overcome obstacles.

Most Offensive Habit Over and over throughput history, the speaker said, one would find examples of barbarians acquiring civilisation’s most offensive habit—warfare —and rising up to smash civilisation. Discussing the way civilisations had gone rotten in the past, Dr Morton said our own civilisation was showing some of the symptoms—inter-state wars, class war, with vast proletariats and small minorities on top, with virtually no middle -class, people leaving the land, vast cities sucking the country dry of its young people.

New World Balance As a result of inter-state wars, he said, present-day Europe counted little in international affairs, and it looked as though the supernational continental powers'were the only ones that were going to count for much. If the civilised world were to escape American economic control, it must redress the balance of the world by building Australia and New Zealand to strong nationhood be filling up their vacant spaces. And the only hope for the survival of western civilisation lay in the union of Europe. * Faced with the challenge of the New China, Russia, Japan and, in a different way, the United States, little New Zealand now stood in much the same position as was

England’s in Queen Elizabeth’s day. Yet the genius of a virile nation >. had risen to that challenge he believed we, the inheritors of that tradition, could rise to meet the challenge of today*