DR. FRANK CRANE’S DAILY EDITORIAL

Sun (Auckland), Volume 1, Issue 107, 27 July 1927, Page 14

DR. FRANK CRANE’S DAILY EDITORIAL

UP STREAM (Copyright, 1927.) ■yyHEN Bishop Mclntyre stood on the Canadian bank of Niagara Falls he said that everything in the universe seemed to be going down. Yet a closer scrutiny revealed the little steamer Maid of the Mist going up. Pessimists tell us that everything and everybody is going to the dogs. We have the authority of the realists and the gloomy philosophers that things are getting worse and worse. Yet somehow the world seems struggling upward. It has made much improvement in the last 18 hundred years or so and It is liable to make more in the next few years. The stream of traffic on Broadway is ceaseless, but occasionally a policeman raises his hand and the traffic stops while he leads a little child or an old woman in safety from curb to curb. The newspapers are filled with accounts of murders and all sorts of crimes until it seems that the country is afflicted with a crime wave, but every once In a while you hear of a kind deed done by somebody who is not at alt afflicted with crime motives. Doubtless there are many kind deeds not recorded all through the world. Many hearts are going up stream. It is pretty hard on them at times and the struggle is pretty severe, but taking all in all the company of those who are struggling to make the world better is considerable and they have the cosmic laws in their favour. Whoever does what is right may be peculiar, but he belongs to a long line of beneficent forebears. He may know that his labour is not wasted. For there are always a number of people who are going up stream just as there are many people who are laying down their oars and going with the stream toward the deadly waterfalls of disaster. There is something in the human breast that inclines men to struggle, to push onward and upward, notwithstanding that the stream of things seems to bear them down.