NERVE THAT CONQUERS

Hokitika Guardian, 22 December 1928, Page 7

NERVE THAT CONQUERS

AIR. KIPLING ON OUR INHERITANCE FROM THE SEA. LONDON. November 1. Afr Rudvard Kipling was the principal speaker at the annual dinner of the Liverpool Shipbrokers’ Benevolent Society at Liverpool last night. I lie following arc some of the ehictf passages from his address: “ When Lord Hewart was your guest last year lie gave you some interesting facts about maritime law, as that affected freights. Rut I do not recall that ho mentioned a certain saying about maritime by-product, passengers. “So many of us guests are passengers. and so many of our hosts are interested in our passages, that I need not apologise for quoting it. It runs: 1 God made men ; God made women ; and then He made passengers.’ “ This libel is based on the cruel superstition that i'f you put people into a ship, and roll them round Ushant, by the time they are decanted at their first port they look and behave like nothing on the face of the waters except passengers.

“To take one side of our activities, only. Wc arrive in 20,000-ton liners to assault lovely and innocent coast towns—l,ooo of ns, under cover of a gas attack by 200 motor-ears. We roar through the streets, a pillar of dust by day. We come back at night, with our picture postcards, to dance to amplified gramophones on promenade decks, till it is time to call the boarding parties away to carry the next place tjlf interest on the programme. “Some of you here have —like Shakespeare and Aliehael Angelo-—to create masterpieces on approval every few

years. “Even after experience and science have been tried out to the last, it takes nerve to break away and back one’s own judgment against the world. “ But nerve is the cutting-edge of imagination, and it happens to be a quality which, taking one century with another, our country has not altogether lacked. Nerve, which knows risks and faces them, seems to he distributed vertically and uniformly, as far down as we have been able to mine into the grit of the national character. Nowhere has it proved itself more splendidly than in the merchant service. THE CUTTING EDGE. “It was the sea that waited oil us the world over, till our imaginings boeainc realities—till our mud-creeks at home grew to be world-commanding ports, and our remotest landing-places the threshold of nations. “ It is the sea that has given us the cutting-edge to our imagination—the nerve that meets all manner of trouble, with, the inherited conviction that nothing really matters so long as one keeps one’s nerve; and, in that ceitainty, overcomes every handicap without too much clamour.’’