PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE

Hawke's Bay Herald-Tribune, Volume 81, Issue 69, 14 December 1937, Page 4

PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE

" Let this age take confldence in itself," says Viscount Samuel, in his hook, " Belief and Action." "It is too diffident. Ashamed of the Great War, angered by the course of events that followed it, recognising its own bewilderment, the age has been ready to plead guilty to any accusation. If a sehool of economists say that material factors rule events, we all confess ourselves materialists and the pursuit of wealth the aim of our social system. If a sehool of psychologists lays stress on primeval instincts in the aetermination of conduct, we see ourselves irredeemably primitive, and develop a crude sculpture and painting and a barbarous music to suit our sub-human characters. If dictators, or would-be dictators, proclaim that we are unfit to govern ourselves, we perceive all around us the faults of our democracies and forget their virtues. " Perhaps a later age may form a differcnt judgment. Perhaps our posterity may see in the Great War, not something sordid and mercenary, but — for all its fundamental folly — an episode that was in essence idealistic; a stupendous event, in which 10 millions of men laid down their lives, not primarily for materialistic ends of any sdrt, but most of them for duty as they understood it, for patriotism, for liberty, or the vindication of law among nations; in which multitudes of ordinary men showed greater courage and endurance, in the face of greater perils, than had ever been recorded in the annals of mankind. Perhaps posterity may see this time as one of the formative ages in history; when science was effulgent, knowledge was diffused throughout the world and among all classes as never before, and an unprecedented effort was made to rid mankind of poverty and to spread the amenities of leisure and culture. Let us not be so ready to idealise past and future to the detriment of our own age, but rather ehow oyselves gatrigt^ oi the presenU" x'"