The Guardian And Evening Star, with which is incorporated the West Coast Times. FRIDAY. APRIL 17th. 1925.. H.M.S. GREAT BRITAIN.

Hokitika Guardian, 17 April 1925, Page 2

The Guardian And Evening Star, with which is incorporated the West Coast Times. FRIDAY. APRIL 17th. 1925.. H.M.S. GREAT BRITAIN.

Run yard Kipling, the Empire writer, has a happy knack of applying analogy. Speaking lately at Home to the Cham her of Shipping, he spoke of the British Isles as iieing a vast ship of the seas, and pursuing his analogy further, went on to say: So we have, now H.M.S. Great Britain crowded to the rails with passengers, some of them storm-sick, many of them ship-stale—-who get in each other’s light at every turn and 'grand their time telling eaeli other how the ship ought, to he run. To argu with them is useless. It only sends their temperatures up. Our sane attitude towards each other must Ik? that of goodwill a goodwill just a little more persistent, just a little moro indefatigable than the ill-will which is being fabricated elsewhere. If goodwill c-an once more be made normal, with it must return that will to work which is the trade mark of establi. ■'

health in a people. If the will to work he too long delayed, then all that our race has made or stands for must pass into the hands of whatever nation first recovers that will. Our recovery has been held back by the propaganda, of ill-will and despair that it meant to wreck all effort at its source. But do you think the engines of H.M.S. Great Britain can he adapted to burn this kind of fuel? I don’t. Onr lives for £he past few years pmy have done for

some of us what Government control of trade in the war did for some big firms • —knocked us off taking risks in the >pon market on small margins. There is no denying that a good many men have ceased to quote fine, hut the old individual instincts in us are not smothered. At heart we arc all gamblers born and the odds in favour of self-chosen de-rontrclled lives lire more anti-more worth taking. For men have grown a little tired of being told UI to hate their neighbours, bv numbers, at the word of command. This re-ac-tion may or may not mark a turn of the time, hut at least it gives a time of .slack water during which fI.M.S. Great Britain may begin to get under way ag-'in and work up to the highest pleasure. And think of the stakes ! 'I hink too, with what an astonishing equipment we are now able to play for them. By comparison, it was only yesterday that, when a ship was once under the horizon she passed beyond help or tall for, perhaps, half a year. To-day, a tramp) cannot report a cockroach leg in a slide-valve without half the North Atlantic coming to her help. Months have been cut down to weeks and weeks to days in the transport oi men and things, and, unless all signs fail, we are on the edge of further unbelievable cuts in time. The transport of thought, which carries with it man’s most intimate association, has outstripped not only belief, but the speed of thought itself. .Even now, it is nn accepted diversion for men and women half across the world to listen to Big Beil strike in London. Before long any man in any quarter ol the Emf ire will he able to call tor and bo answered by the voice ot Ids own biitbpbue by its work or play. Everywhere time and space, are coming to beet round us to fetch and carry tor our behoof, in the wilderness or the market, and that means that it will he possible for us now , as never before, to iu.se our Empire together in thought and understanding a.s closely as in the interchange of men and things. And it was the shipping industry which from the first sought out. found built, and bound together the entire fabrics ot what is now our Empire. This it did at hazard, unsupported, in hope ol trade, or led by some dream of new reads across new seas. The shipping industry is the mother of the old navy as it is the sister of the new. in sober daily fact the mainstay of our prosperity a.ml our very lives, and in law, I believe, a common carrier. What burden it hears now, what heavier burden the future may lay upon it. you members of the Chamber of Shipping, who inherit its present direction know trotter than the careless world you serve. We see only that there has never keen any malice of wind or weather, or of the King’s many enemies, or ol the turn ot the markets in a thousand years that the shipping industry has not met and ridden out? And now H.M.S. Great Britain l-ides to cross seas. Is it any wonder that we look t> you menibeis of the mercantile marine once more to help us build up and hind together against the new day those old individual qualities which gave our race its ability to see far, and its audacity to quote fine?