BOMBING AND HUMAN ETHICS

Hawke's Bay Herald-Tribune, Volume 81, Issue 37, 6 November 1937, Page 4

BOMBING AND HUMAN ETHICS

"There can be no common ethic in a world wherein death in its mofet frightful forms can be rained from the sky, systematically and mercilessly, upon harmless folk whose only crime is that they are of a different nationality or political colour," says the Inquirer. "So far have we sunk in our ethical code that it is scarcely possible to sink lower. The bomb has ripped and crushed it way through more than steel and stone, and flesh and blood; it bas shattered the moral order that for centuries lias been slowly broadening its scope and streiigthening its control over the anti-social impulses of man. t "Bombs are only the agents of personal motives, and if those motives be cbanged they will not be used. Counter- attack is no solution of the problem; it is at best only a reaction of desperation for bombs cannot be destroyed by bombs. It Seems probable that the most insidious evil that has been wrought is in the destruetion of the sense of personal worth that has taken plaoe. A civilisation that tolerates and fosters the death-rain from the sky cannot attach high value to the lives that are thereby to be destroyed, while the potential victims for their part find it difficult to assess their own worth as of much importance. It thus seems to many people that the - hlghest wisdom is to have as good a time as possible to-day, and not ' to ttorry over-much about a to-morrow that promises little but stress and tragedy. There is much in common prudenee to justify such an attitude, but no thing in high morality. When a race loses faith in its power to shape its own destiny it hao already begun to decline, and its irresolution will inevitably hring it to the very evil it dreads. And so a way out from so pitiable a state of things must - jlwui kft.fpugkt jjy yjgOTfiui Aad