UNKNOWN

Taranaki Daily News, 10 February 1916, Page 4

UNKNOWN

Vv'lIAT AFTER THE WAR? I " THE DEAD DO NOT DIE." (By Maurice Maeterlinck, in the Daily Mail). When we behold the terrible loss of so many young lives, when wo see so many incarnations of physical and moral vigor, of intellect and of glorious promise, pitilessly cut on" in their first flower, we are on the verge of despair. Never before have the fairest energies and aspirations of men been flung so recklessly and incessantly into an abysn whence comes no sound or answer. Never since it came into existence lias humanity squandered its treasure, its substance, and its prospects so lavishly. For more than 12 months, on cverv battlefield, where the bravest, the truest, the most ardent and self-sacrificing are necessarily the first to die and where the less courageous, the less generous, weak, the ailing, in a word the less desirable, alone possess some chance of escaping the carnage—for over 12 months a sort of monstrous inverse selection lias been in operation, one which seems to be deliberately seeking the downfall of the human race. And we wondev uneasily what the state of the world will be after the great trial and what wil! be left of it and what will lie the. fi-.Uire of this stunted race, shorn oi all that was best and noblest in it. A DARK PROBLEM. The problem is certainly one of the darkest that have ever vexed tlu minds of men, it contains a material truth Ibefore which we remain defenceless, and, if we accept it as it stands, we can discover no remedy for the evil that threatens us. But material and tangible truth are never anything but a more or less saliant angle of greater and deeperlying troths. And on the other hand mankind appears to be such a necessary and indestructible force of nature that it has always, hitherto, not only survived the most desperate onWl's, but succeeded in benefiting by them and emerging greater and stronger than before.

We know that peace is natter than war; it were madness to compare tlis two. We know that, if this cataclysm let loose by an act of, unutterable folly had not come upon the world, mankind would doubtless have reached ere Ion? ;i Kcnith of wonderful achievement whose manifestations it is impossible to foreshadow. We know that, if a third or a fourth part of the fabulous sums expended on exterpiination and destruction had been devoted to works of ipeace, all the iniquities that poison the air we breathe would have been triumphantly redressed and that the soeial question, the one great question, that matter of life and death which justice demands that posterity should face, would have found its definite solution, once and for all, in a happiness which now perhaps even our sons and grandsons will not realise.

NO IRREPARABLE LOSS. We know that the disappearance of two or three million young existences, cut down when they were on the point of bearing fruit, will leave in history a void that will not be easily filled, even as we know that among those dead were mighty intellects, treasures of genius which will not come back again and which contained inventions and discoverits that will now perhaps be lost to us for centuries.

Evarything is transformed, nothing perishes, and that which seems to be hurled to destruction is not destroyed at all. Our moral world, even a* our physical world, is a vast but iicrmetieally sealed sphere whence naught can issue, whence naught can fall to be dissolved in space. All that exists, all that comes into being upon this earth remains there and bears fruit; and the most appalling losses are but material or spiritual riches flung away for an instant, to fall to the ground again in a new form. There is no escape or leakage, no Altering through cracks, no missing the mark; there is not even waste or neglect.

REINCARNATION OF 'MORAL FORCE.

All this heroism poured out on every side does not leave our planet; and the reason why the courage of our fighters seems .so general and so extraordinary is that all the might of the dead has passed into those who survive. All those forces of wisdom, patience, honor and .self-sacrifice, which increases day by day, and which we ourselves, who are far from the field of danger, feel rising within us without knowing whence they come, are nothing but the souls of the heroes gathered and absorbed by our own souls.

It is well at times to contemplate invisible things as though we saw them with our eyes. This was the aim of all the grent religion l !, when they represented, under forms appropriate to the civilisation of their day, the deep, instinctive, general and essential truths which are the guiding principles of mankind. AH have felt and recognised that the loftiest of all truths and given it various names designating the same mysterious verity: the Christian knows it as revival of merit, the Japanese as ancestor-worship, while in India it appears as the transmigration of souls or reincarnation.

It was observed that after tlie great battles of the Napoleonic era the birthrate increased in an extraordinary manner, as though the lives suddenly tut abort in their prime were not really dead and were in a hurry to return among us to complete their career. If 1» could follow with our eyes all that is happening in the spiritual world that rises above us on every side, we should no doubt see that it is the same with the moral force that seems to be lost on the field of slaughter. It knows where to go, it knows its goal, it docs not hesitate.

All that our wonderful dead relinquish they bequeath to us; and, when they die for us, they leave ns their lives not in any strained metaphorical sense, but in a very Teal and direct way. Virtue goes out of every man who falls while performing a deed of glory, and that virtue drops down upon us, and nothing of ihim is lost and nothing evaporates in the shock of a premature end. He gives us in one solitary and mighty Stroke what he would have given us in a long life of duty and love.

Death does not injure life; it is powrless against it. Life's aggregate never changes. What death takes from those who fall enters into those who are left standing. The number of lamps grows loss, but the flame rises higher. Death is in no wise the gainer so long as there are living men. The more it exorcises its ravage*, the more it increases the intensity of that which it cannot touch; the more it pursues its phantom vietnries, the better docs it prove to us tb«t man will end by conguerins death.