OUR SOCIAL SYSTEM

Rotorua Morning Post, Volume 2, Issue 306, 20 August 1932, Page 2

OUR SOCIAL SYSTEM

PROFESSOR HUNTER DECLARES IT HAS BROKEN ■ DO^Vm. WEALTH, NOT MEN. Professor T. A. Hunter, of Victoria University College, Wellington, delivered a very interesting address up- 1 on social problems at Palmerston . North recently. "We can all agree," said Professor Hunter, "that we are living in difficult and abnormal times. Though the times are difficult, the situation is wholly man-made; the situation in which we find ours'elves is in no way due to natural phenomena. Human beings alone are to blame. The second point II wish to make is that every person who lives through a period of disaster or difficulty feels that that time is the most disastrous and most difficult the human race has ever been through." During the first half of the 19th : century, the speaker proeeeded, among the leaders of the British paople there was an epitome of woe, but the latter half of the century saw a period un- , paralleled in the history of human achievement, and it should not be imagined that the race had not been through situations like the present before. Three Requirements. If we, wish to come through, it seem to him that there were three requirements to be observed. In the first place, an open mind should be kept for new ideas. Man came to be very traditional in his way of looking at things and failed to sea new possibilities. The second requirement, if th'e eommunity was going to weather the crisis, was that there must be an ext'ension of human sympathy, an attempt by tbe masses of the people to have the same appreciation of the difficultiqs through which other members of the eommunity were passing. Thirdly, th'e problem would have to be tackled with courage and honesty. Wealth Put First. He wanted to suggest that we were at another crisis in history — the social system was in a muddle. We were in a social muddle because we were putting wealth first and the man second. We no longer livedin an age of scarcity; to-day the problem was one of marketing, not of production. The machine had made it possible to lift a big load off the lives of the people. If the benefit of the diseovery and invention of the 19th century was not coming to use, it was not the fault of the machine; it was our. Dicoveries No Benefit. As at present constituted our social system had failed; it had completely broken down. With all the acbievements of the 19th century it might be expected that something better would have heen achieved in the opening years of the present century. If one asked why this had not heen done, oue reason undoubtedly was the increasing population of the world. No iUiliteJiytfiUiiHti

the increasing population at Home had become a burden on the nation. Bad health, mental and physical, had become a real burden to society, aud waste was a real menace. The contradictions in the present social system were such that sensitive per^pns were concerned whether they should make new discoveries. Man, it could h'e said, had heen concerned with wealth and not with welfare.