BROTHERHOOD AFTER WAR.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXXVIII, Issue 1504, 1 February 1916, Page 2

BROTHERHOOD AFTER WAR.

Sknsk of fellowship and joint membership of the British Commonwealth should be carried here in the Mother Country down into the sphere first of the class, then of the person, says Laud and Water. We fight not as servants led by masters, but as brothersin arms. With us, as with our allies, the relation between officer and man is more comradely than in armies of our chief enemies. It is the best hope of our future. For, most surely, this is the fullness of meaning of this fellowship, that we are not only brothers, but our brothers’ keepers, not in war merely, or chiefly, but in peace ; not at the gates of death alone, but in the common way of life. It has never been an easy thesis to grasp. But there is no escape from the remorseless logic of it. You cannot summon simple men in the name of freedom to a common'danger ot death and mutilation, and send their broken remnants back to disabilities that by no too great exaggeration may, in many instances, be called slavery. You cannot rally them as brothers in the day of danger, and turn from them or against them as strangers when the danger is passed. If these words have any significance it is because they are not hastily adopted from the picturesque vocabulary of the impatient agitator. Our conviction is that the way to social justice is a long and difficult and by no means a clear way ; that a civilisation which has taken many centuries to shape by gradual and laborious processes of trial and error, cannot be shattered at a stroke, and at a stroke refashioned nearer to the heart’s desire ; that there are no ready-made or permanent solutions as our glib extremists aver ; that it is change of heart and head in the many rather than change of plan by the few that is wanted ; that at the worst surgery, not dynamite, is the proper cure for the sick body —and the Stale is surely a sick body rather than a dilapidated or unsanitary house. But in the proportion that we deprecate dynamite should we be eager to welcome the acceptable and necessary surgery. It we feel the danger of sudden transformations, it Is incumbent upon us to set going, not to block, the processes of wholesome change.”