IS IT DEFEATISM?

Evening Post, Volume CXXIII, Issue 135, 9 June 1937, Page 10

IS IT DEFEATISM?

(To the Editor.)

Sir,—A lot has been written and spoken lately on the ever-present problem of the falling birth-rate. Many of the reasons given by young people for their failure to respond to the duty laid upon them by the Creator—to be fruitful and multiply—breathe a spirit of defeatism that is the ' outcome of an entirely materialistic philosophy. It is the fashion today to sneer at Victorian ideals as foolish, but had the world seventy years ago been peopled by the folk of today I wonder what would New Zealand have been like now. Parents, or those who should be parents, ask for several things to happen before they are willing to bring children into the world. The first thing they ask for is "security from war." Has any other age ever had security from war promised for the next generation? War is dreadful, horrible, but if war comes again and takes my five sons I am richer far, in spite of my pain and anguish, than if I had never had them, and for them life does not end with the body. Here is where belief in immortality prevails over troubled fears.

• Then the next thing asked is financial security—or, as it is called, "the right to earn a living." Well, no generation yet has had any security offered to it, and surely instead of sitting back in an attitude Of defeatism and saying that there might be no chance for the next lot of children, why not go ahead and work for a better age? We were told twenty-five years ago that we were made to bring a family into the world, what chance did we as working people have of placing them out in life? Well, five of them are in steady work, none of them placed by influence, and two more are preparing for work. And people who are prepared to work and trained to be steady and useful will never have to live long on charity. My children may never have high positions, but there, are plenty of pleasures easily won to make their lives of hard work bearable, and believing in a future life after this one makes duty a grand and noble thing instead of a burden. Did the pioneers who founded this and other colonies ask for security of life or work? They took life as an adventure, trusted in their two hands and trained brains for their support, and in a Providence who ruled over them for good. Are there still no untilled lands to conquer? Yes, but the present generation wants not hard work but a soft job and the word duty is not in its vocabulary. Hence the shrinking from what they call "their responsibility."—l am, etc.,

HAVE COURAGE,