GOVERNOR SUGGESTS “REAL HARD WORK”

Press, Volume C, Issue 29508, 9 May 1961, Page 17

GOVERNOR SUGGESTS “REAL HARD WORK”

(New Zealand Press Association)

DUNEDIN, May 9.

“Is it not time for us all to get down to a bit of real hard work, in schools, in offices and in industry?” asked Lord Cobham, when giving the graduation address at the University of Otago capping ceremony yesterday. It was time that persons ceased to look to the State for their salvation when all experience and all history proved that the path to contentment was lone and personal. he suggested. The democracies had achieved reasonable equality of opportunity and wealth, a high standard of living, and increased leisure, but Lord Cobham Questioned whether persons knew what to do with these benefits. He suggested that something was missing—“a new vision, a new revolution in goals, a change in what we value, what we preserve, and what we pursue. "We have to learn somehow to unite the old with the new,” said Lord Cobham. “We have to learn that we who believe in God cannot afford to neglect the revelations of science, but equally that science is a mere dangerous toy unless it is used in the service of God.” In the last analysis, a country was not composed of hideous collections such as ’ “Labour” and “Capital" living in “accommodation units.” but of men, women and children living in homes, with much the same aspirations and joys, and sorrows and fears as their ancestors experii enced before them. 1 Lord Cobham gave the graduates the following message:—

“You are citizens of no mean country, a country with a fine tradition of initiative and loyalty. Preserve those traditions faithfully, and weld them into the scientific knowledge which is unfolding year by year—and quicken the whole with integrity, and hard work.”

The nations which had put mankind and posterity most in their debt had been small States—Athens, Israel, Florence and Elizabethan England. He asked that New Zealand’s contribution, already a most significant one, should grow as the years unfolded.