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Hokitika Guardian, 4 September 1926, Page 2

“There will be few in the rflnks of Labour who will be found to disagree with Mr Baldwin’s ultimate aims, or the temper, often enough, in which lie approaches them,” says Mr H. J. Laski, in a review in the Labour Magazine of published collection of Mr Baldwin’s speeches “On England.” He gives the Prime Minister full credit for his sincere zeal in rebuilding the England that has been maimed and scarred by the war, but says the central problem to which, so far Mr Baldwin has devoted none of his utterances, is the translation of his ideals into practice; the proof that lie and his supporters are prepared to make—not merely to invite—sacrifices for their realisation. “Ilio fact, after all Mr Baldwin has said, still remains that the lives of the many lie at the disposal of the few, that those lives are used not for the common good lnU a perversion of it,” says Mr Laski. conservatism as that ‘disposition to preserve and ability to improve.’ of which Burke spoke, is a philosophy that has cradled attractive men before Mr Baldwin’s time. It has a natural affection for the great inheritance of the English race. If it desires that inheritance to survive it must, for the first time, genuinely seek to make it accessible to the common man. It is not enough to bring,; us great words and high hones. The test of systems now is the happiness they bring to ordinary men and women. Mr Baldwin has done nothing yet to show that lie means to apply that test. He is still occupied ardently with the protest that he wills the good and the beautiful. It is time that lie began to show us how lie proposes to achieve them.”

Seeking a new way to the ancient East, Columbus “pushed his plows into the setting sun,” and reached the Now World of the west to which the name of America was to ho given. The other day the eyes of Australia were turned towards the western sky to see Cohliain’s seaplane come out- of what used to he the east, says a writer in tlie Sydney “Sun.” A little later we may he looking towards the east to see T)e Binedo come across the Pacific from that western world upon which Columbus and his immediate successors stumbled without knowing it. Barely four centuries have passed since, first of all men, the companions of Magellan sailed round the world. .Since those days the face and aspect of the globe liava changed. Men go round the world as a matter of course, and now they are beginning to lly round it. That air travel will speed up the process of change there can he no doubt. During the last decade things have moved more than they did in the century that preceded that decade, and the last four centuries have seen greater changes than the millenniums that went before. A few thousand years ago the valleys of the Nile and of the Euphrates were the centres of civilsed life. Then the centre moved westward to the basin of the Meditteranean. Till the great discoveries of the fifteenth and .sixteenth •centuries Britain was in the world’s end. For practical purposes there was nothing beyond hut the “sea of darkness.” Presently the centre of gravity was shifted to Western Europe, to the lands facing the Atlantic. To-day it tends to move farther and farther out. Civilisation has become oceanic, and the Pacific, the greatest of oceans, is the ocean of the future. Air travel is lii'orally bringing the ends of the earth together.