“THE COMMON MAN” OBJECTS.

Hokitika Guardian, 6 February 1929, Page 8

“THE COMMON MAN” OBJECTS.

“No ono wants war,” says Mi' Delisle Burns in “A Short History of the World, 1918-1928,” “least of all the common man who has in model'll times to fight in it. But what no one wants may nevertheless occur, if in the first place, men want, as some of them certainly do, what cannot be had without war, and if, in the second place, the drift towards misunderstanding is allowed to continue without attracting the attention, not to say the control. of the common man But, worse still for the future, a generation is now entering into a. share of the control over policy which never knew even the armistice. They do not know the evil smell of" battlefields, nor the cries of wounded or maddened men. They are separated from those to whom experience has shown that modern war is clumsy in the process and, in the result futile—war in the process a waste of heroism by incompetence, the idealism of youth harnessed to the mean ambitions, for themselves or their nations. of men whose desire to lead is untroubled by any doubt of the direction in which they are leading; war in the end—for individuals, medals or monuments, and For the nations either the enduring resentment of defeat or ruinous victory. But the memory of war is fading.”