The Taihape Daily Times. AND WAIMARINO ADVOCATE TUESDAY, DECEMBER 31, 1918 THE DYING OF A MOMENTOUS YEAR.

Taihape Daily Times, 31 December 1918, Page 4

The Taihape Daily Times. AND WAIMARINO ADVOCATE

TUESDAY, DECEMBER 31, 1918 THE DYING OF A MOMENTOUS YEAR.

(With which is incorporated The Xfti* hape Po*t tad WalcmU'io News).

During the year of which the last hour will be struck to-night, there have been played upon the world's great stage the most thrilling, most stupendous epoch-marking and era-making dramas mankind wots of. No descriptions ever written commence even to pourtray the unprecedented magnitude, intensity, and savagery of the bloody holocausts that the greed and lust for power and dominion of one man has been allowed to precipitate the whole world, and the descriptive powers of a dozen writers will fall far short of doing justice to the world’s thankfulness, gratification and joy that the termination of four years of almost illimitable war has been in favour of freedom, justice and equality. In the year that is closing great changes have been wrought; the man who thought to make kingship supreme has sounded his own death knell as well as that of all kings. The man that would destroy the last spark of democratic spirit in the world has sent the democratic torch to light up every dark .spot on earth where illgovcrned peoples live; he has done more, contrary: to his intentions, to spread the gospel of government of the people for the jpcople, by the people, and to whatever ; point of the compass one | turns there is., heard the voice; of the people articulating its demands for the establishment in very fact of absolute untainted equality before and under the law. The most daring and imaginative fabulist conlit, hot have conceived and chronicled anything but a mere parody upon what has actually occurred during these last four years, and even serai-miraculous 7i { 7 powers; of prescience are totally unable to unfold an approximate vision of the near bi* distant future. This great war has'vljrQught all mankind to perplexing crossroads, and few there are among governed or governing whe would, or dare, turn back :o travel into the future by the old dangerous ru:lc. with the year that commences to morrow there will be the making of everything new in human life, civilisation and progress; the old order is : changed, kingly war-makers have passed, and there lies ahead the road to the millenium in which the satan of bloodlust, power lust, and consummate greed may be hound down for a thousj and years, and freedom and justice I may reign triumphant throughout the

whole world. To unprecedented war and an equally terrible pestilence, man has, by legalised might of money, wrought a volume of suffering and death unsurpassed for its inhuman cruelty. Never before in the world’s history has there been displayed in trading such destitution of all conceptions of honesty; man by his mere will alone has given incredible, fabulous, conscienceless values to commodities people must have to maintain life. By the simpl dash of a pen a value is quadrupled in some instances fcv the cult of greed, but, as Tennyson has reminded us •'Slowly comes a hungry people as a lion crccpeth nigher, Glares at one that nods and winks behind a slowly-dying fire.” Those hungry people arc the worst signs that hover blackly, ominously and threateningly over the new year. In palaces, churches legislatures and judgment halls the word revolution is whispered, but there are worse things, even, than revolution; nations never die of revolution, but they do succumb to the ravages of squalor, moral filth, degradation, voluptuousness, broken physique, the physical and mental suffering such as has been discovered to be in deadly rampaney by Military Medical Boards. Tennyson’s hungry people have ceased to be creeping lions; thy have commenced to spring in all directions and

they can be depended upon to complete the destruction of all shades of might is right, whereby the few revel in luxury and power over the dead bodies of those they slay. While the world longs for change it w r ants no revolution, it would prefer that the change should come as the season ’s come born from the natural decay of the old. The British getaeral election fully discloses tliat the masses do net desire revolution; they have taken the British Prime Minister's assurances that the New Year shall bring forth the changes he has promised and -which cover their desires. If this newly elected Parliament docs not concede them he has

stated that he will go to the constituencies till a Parliament is elected that will. The masses have demonstrated their unequivocal trust in Mr Lloyd George by 'sondi'ng 'him back to govern them with a strength almost unprecedented in British modern times. It is in the fact that New Zealand laekjs a Lloyd George the danger to society lies; the British people desire the change but they desire also that it shall come as the seasonsj, jthc Jncw (born front {the natural decay of the old. British constituencies by such large majorities that could only result from the votes of the masses have struck a staggering blow at Bolshevism; but they will exact the performance of the last word in the promises of the loader they have placed their confidence in. Wo have no such leader in this young country, and we view with trepidation the largening cloud of Bolshevism that is rising up in our political perihelion. There has yet no effort been made in our Legislature to satisfy the discontent that is visible in all quarters; the constituencies in New Zealand have nothing to choose from between present starvation costs of living, land aggregation and high profits, and the alternative that Bolshevism offers. Change the people will have and if it docs not come somewhat similarly to that promised by Lloyd George, they will, in sheer desperation, rush to Bolshevism for it. Legislation during the year has largely resulted from exigency and expediency, for good or ill it was rushed through the House merely to comply with the constitution, but the fact remains that the country is being governed by Cabinet and not by Parliament. The lust for power of some Minister or Ministers has ridden rough shod over the people’s representatives, some lajws being enacted that Members averred they did not know the nature of. Groat strides in advance characterise the Department of Education, and the Department of Public- Health has boon electrified into useful action by .the terrible plague that it is earnestly hoped will fade from being with the dying year. The past year lias been crowded with with a, nuijtiplicity of momentous happenings which no brief reference could only commence to fringe their far-reaching greatness; they must be left for the historian to exhaustively chronicle. The dyingyear will be famed in future history for the peace that follows four years of war; it will be known to every child attending school centuries hence, and men of this year will figure thousands of years in the future as we know of men who were prominent in days of thousands of years in the past. Buskin has said: “There is no law. no principle based on past experience, which may not be overthrown in a moment by the arising of a new condition.” Conditions that wore sapping the very life and existence of the British Empire have been brought into most lured light through the great war and by the pestilence; will Government land Parliament so shape legislation in time to prevent a third great calamity overtaking us? The two great enemies of mankind are strength and cunning and they arc closely followed by ignorance. The salvation of the race lies in education and industry; there is no more valuable mian in the world to-day than the schoolmaster. In the year that begins to-morrow the schoolmaster must play a most important part if the strength that taxes, imprisons and murders, and the cunning that cajoles and deceives are to he rendered permanently Impotent in preventing the establishment of an irrefragable justice. The past year has closed the book of militarism and with other great events an open hook has been left for this generation to fill, and as there are strong reasons for believing that not a. page of it will be sullied with bloodshed and that not a chapter will record the robbery of the masses which entails slow death by starvation, we venture to wish our esteemed readers a more than usually Happy and Prosperous New Year.