BRITAINS RACE

Wairarapa Times-Age, 5 April 1938, Page 2

BRITAINS RACE

IMPERIAL RESPONSIBILITY. Let us remember that upon us and our immediate successors depend the peace and welfare of a great part of the earth's inhabitants, and that we cannot abdicate from that responsibility or evade it by neglecting it. says Sir Ed.ward Grigg, M.P., writing in the London “Observer.” It is a fateful load, and we must bear it, like Atlas, or be destroyed by it. For it is not our insular freedom only that is at stake: it is the future of a world-wide political system which is building up. slowly, maybe, but steadily, the right and capacity, of men to govern themselves, together with the institutions, delicate in their infancy, which will enable them to do so. If that system were to weaken and dissolve, the struggle for its • heritage would be far vaster than that which marked the decline and fall of the Ro-

man Empire; and who can say that in the struggle another age of darkness would not overwhelm our Christian civilisation? It is therefore no rhetorical exaggeration, but a pKiin statement of. inescapable truth, that the peace progress of the world will depend in this 20th century upon the character of the British Parliament and electorate. We are but fortyfive millions, we upon whom it principally rests, and our numbers will soon be diminishing. But we have the quality, if we will use instead of wasting it; and the key to its use is early education, both moral and physical, not only in worklime, but in leisure.