Hokitika Guardian & Evening Star MONDAY, JANUARY 19th, 1920. WHITHER WENDING.

Hokitika Guardian, 19 January 1920, Page 2

Hokitika Guardian & Evening Star MONDAY, JANUARY 19th, 1920. WHITHER WENDING.

In the world war the civilisation and stability of the whiftj races have just escaped utter disaster through supreme efforts. The glimpse which the Allies, victorious at last, got of the precipice towards which they were heading, gave a most sobering shock, and the covenant of the .League of Nations hears witness to it. The League of Nations may still seem to some of us to he such stuff as dreams are made of, but we live in hope that the covenant is already a living force, and that the Great Powers cjjiqiot afford to deny it. even if they would, its spirit has permeated the whole Peace Treaty; it lives in every clause, not merely in those special paragraphs which name jt as the inspiration. If the Great Powers renounce the League now they must renounce their own conscience. They know the right course and have

declared it. To recant menus to challenge our white civilisation; it will herald a decline in the white status in ,tha world. \Our distant forefathers, says a. Sydney paper reviewing the year’s ffros]>ects, established the. beginning of the law against murder, when, for the security of each small community, they condemned the blood feud; for the security of civilisation, “to make the world safe for democracy,” the Great Powers have laid down the principle of rnternntional •law jn the condemnation of war over an unarbitrnted cause. Australasia, has signed the Treaty and has elected to take her stand with the great nations of the world. Do the people realise how, with that improved status, they have adopted new and important responsibilities? Our national behaviour henceforth affects the outside world more closely; a sense of propriety and an added interest in the affairs of foreign peoples will be expected of us.

T>en our home political activities will echo abroad more loudly than they did. From mow onwards we and the other dominions of .the Empire shall illustrate to the world more clearly than ever whether in our- own growth and progress we have refreshed and stimulated or merely exhausted, the . vitality of that British civilisation the British ideals and institutions of liberty and justice, in which the mother country trained us and developed our freedom. Our responsibility is quite definite, and no assertion of the now independent status can free us from it. We

are apt to regard our local unrest as a purely local matter. It is not; the earn© unrest is everywhere, derived from much the same causes, demanding with equal insistence in all countries wise, broad-minded, and temperate settlement. This country has long boasted of her progress in democratic institutions; the state of affairs to-day reveals those institutions as very little advanced on the methods of other countries. The modern strike is civil war; the Arbitration Courts Act have condemned it as illegal in precisely the same fashion as the 'League of Nations lias condemned war. D’Annunzio at Flume was a strike agitator on a larger scale. ’ We, as a nation, have declared for the League of Nations; the Labour party is against war and against, military armament. Is industrial war to be unlicensed, to he worked up at the whim of union bosses, regardless, of consequences to the whole community? Industrial workers are no longer sweated here ; if they have a grievance they have legal means to ventilate it; the ' “lightning strike” is amply running amok. We shall have small

hope, of creating tne real neague ui Nations if we foster belief in the “right to strike.” There is now-a-days no such right. Labour has the full sympathy of the great mass of the people in practically every nation of the world. This mass-sympathy, this democracy of progress, concludes the Sydney paper, will supply in the coming generations in every country the men and women who will lead "The nations in the League. But this cause of democracy has no hope from firebrands, “Red feds”, and I.W.W. organisers;, and the problem of eliminating Labour’s fascination for them, and the urgency for bringing employers amt' workers to an honest understanding, are the same outside Australia as within it. Writ-

ing of the Miglisn crisis, ivir oetbohm Rowntree, in the “Contemporary Review,” says: “The nation to-day. has reached the parting of the ways. It must choose between a far deeper unity and sheer disintegration, between industrial peace and commercial decadence.” We want, he says, some clearfaivslighted, and inspiring and comprehensive policy to guide us in the next few years. . . . We must undertake it, or fail in our destiny.” Those words are as clear and particular a warning to Australasia as to England.