AUSTRALIA'S PROBLEM.

Taranaki Daily News, 30 June 1917, Page 10

AUSTRALIA'S PROBLEM.

NEED OF HIGHER MORAL TONE. DANGER OF THE EMPTY CRADLE. Some of tlie social problems awaiting solution in Australia were reviewed by the moderator, Rev. .John .Paterson, in his address to the fifty-second annual session of the New South Wales General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church of Australia. Every other organisation-in the Empire is preparing itself to meet post-war problems, he said. The Church would be doing less than its duty if it did not prepare to meet and deal with the new situation which the war has created for it. Before the war we divelt in fancied security. Lord Roberts and a few others who had eyes to see strove to rouse the people to their danger. We have had a rude awakening. Milton prayed, "O Thou who of Thy free grace didst build up this Britannic Empire to a glorious and enviable height, with all her daughter islands about heiy stay us in this | felicity." If that prayer is to be answered in our day we must awaken, as Australia assuredly has not, to the greatness of our danger, and the causes which have led to our present peril; lb is not difficult to see how real our danger was of sinking down into a condition of slothfulness so great that a hundred years more of ease and luxury would liavo made us as efl'ete as tin Germans believed we were. Even now |>e can add to our supplication thanksgiving for the purifying influence of present danger, and sorrow is giving us the opportunity to escape from a peril worse than that of German frightfulness, the peril of national suicide. INDUSTRIAL UNREST. Restlessness has been on the increase during the past ten or twenty years. In Australia this restlessness expressed itself in 320 strikes, and the loss of over £700,000 in wages. The desire for higher wages or shorter hours of work were the cause of most of these strikes, but not of all. (Not a few were due to difference of opinion as to iwhat work should be performed by men belonging to different branches of the same tnCde, Bueh as joiners and shipwrights. Only crass iguorance\of the tremendous character of the conflict in which we are engaged, and the peril-in which we stand, aan account for the wheels of industry Ibeing stopped at the present time. /The unrest of which I have spoken is miinly a demand' for equality, a protest against those barriers which divitle class from class. But those who are loudest in their demand for their removal are amongct the most guilty in their erection. Go into any (workshop you please, and you will speedily find lines of demarcation which separate the skilled from the unskilled, and the more highly skilled from the less highly skilled workers. Even could we abolish these barriers by a| mighty conflagration, as was done in the French Revolution, haidly would the fires have burnt themselves out than they would rebuilt. BRIBERY IN PUBLIC LIFE. What is wanted more than anything else in public and industrial affairs is a liighcr moral tone. Two generations ago Mr. Gladstone disfranchised a city in England for the term of that Parliament because ■bribery had been freely used by both sides during the election. It is commonly reported, and I partially believe it, that bribery prevails in both our politicaland municipal life. The trouble is not merely that a few prominent men have been accused of corrupt dealings that we might suffer and' yet preserve the health of the body politic. The trouble lies in the fact that a large and apparently ever-growing section of the community looks upon these things as venial offences, "and dismisses them with a shrug of the shoulders or a smile. Thus the moral tone is lowered, and men lose faith in their fellow-men. Honesty down to the fraction is the standard' of Christian piety, and that standard we must maintain.

POPULATION' NEEDED. The most clamant evil of the day is the empty cradle. In Australia the birth-rate has descended to 10 per 1000. We have laid it down as an unalterable policy that the continent shall be a white man country. How are we to keep it such if we do not populate it? The days were when we spoke of the yellow peril, and we have bolted and barred our doors against the teeming populations of Asiatic countries. To what purpose if our birth-rate hardly makes good our death-rate, and the waste places cry aloud for population? Terrible as it would be to fall under the German yoke and be crushed by his ruthless tryanny, far more terrible would it be if the British race perished by its own selfishness and love of ea=c.