The Daily News. MONDAY, APRIL 22, 1912. MAN'S POWERLESSNESS.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LIV, Issue 250, 22 April 1912, Page 3

The Daily News. MONDAY, APRIL 22, 1912. MAN'S POWERLESSNESS.

Modern man, acting on the experience of ancient man, noting his successes and avoiding his failures, almost achieves miracles. In the past century the achievements of man have been past all individual understanding. One hundred years ago a full-rigged ship was considered to he the acme of construction for fast and comfortable sea-travelling. Today in many New Zealand harbors these greyhounds of the past lie dismantled and awkward looking—mere coal hulks. Man progresses, and from the quaint little steam kettles of CO years ago has evolved vessels like the Titanic, capable of packing New Pl}Tnouth and its poople comfortably away—a veritable town-de-luxe containing many devices unknown to shore towns. Human ingenuity devises every conceivable appliance for the comfort and safety of a floating leviathan—makes her "unsinkable," in fact. In her first voyage the ineffectiveness of all human preparation is shoim. The Titanic strikes an i.ceberg—the remotest possible chance —and makes all man's work of no effect. Nature takes no count of man's devices. A rock or an iceberg doesn't care whether a ship costs two million pounds or twenty-five shillings. Man tmilds great palaces ashore, erects a San Francisco, makes its buildings of steel (unburnable steel) and rests in perfect confidence. Nature oscillating the earth triflingly shakes San Francisco down like a card house, fire consumes the "unburnable," and it is again demonstrated how futile are all man's plans, his growing genius and his wonderful works. Man has planned to divide a great continent by a canal. He has looked far into the future. Because every sane human being is an optimist the Panama Canal is planned to carry ships for the centuries to come. Countless millions have been sunk in the canal. Nature has merely to shake the Panama country, as she is so fond of doing, to upset every plan of every great brain that has thought out this gigantic scheme. The one cheering point about great and terrible disasters caused by natural visitation is that man does not remain dispirited. "Hope springs eternal." No sooner is a city shaken to the earth than the builders begin regeneration. No sooner does a gigantic steamer on which the care, the ttiought and the affection of innumerable people have <been lavished than the same people turn to and build something better if possible. Disaster and disappointment are humanity's most useful spurs. No people have become great without a calamity. Without something to fight man is a spineless creature. Those who allow Nature to carry on her process of destruction—for Nature destroys as persistently as she builds—themselves become rusty and useless. Wherever there is trouble there are great hearts to meet it. Great hearts are rarely known in times of piping peace. It is the opportunity of disaster that produces the world's heroes. If man in | realising how futile are his works when ! Nature intervened "downed tools" and

asked, "What's the good?" he would soon be as extinct as the moa. It is because the world is 'bustling and hopeful that it progresses, despite the small army of lugubrious folks who find in all catastrophes an occasion for preachments. There is less time for preachments than for deeds in this busy old world; there is 119 room for pessimism or prolonged sorrow. Human nature is just as buoyant after a catastrophe that kills 1000 odd people (as in the case of the Titanic) as in a catastrophe that kills 80 (as in the wreck of the Penguin). If human nature were not on the whole unsinkable in its buoyancy the world's repeated gigantic, disasters would unnerve the world's people. But Nature destroys and man builds. Work is the world's finest panacea for sorrow.