POTS AND KETTLES

Wairarapa Times-Age, 23 June 1939, Page 3

POTS AND KETTLES

ISSUES BETWEEN RIGHT AND WRONG. When the issues between right and wrong are sharply defined ,a nation’s duty is clear, writes “F.C.S.” in the “Birmingham Post.” The teeth must be set, the brow made hard. If there is but one way of achieving victory, that way must be taken. To hesitate is at once to accept cowardice and to commit suicide. But things are very rarely so sharply defined as that. With the good there is mixed some evil, and with the evil some good. It is the old dilemma of the wheat and the tares. The good must not be plucked up, whatever happens to the tares, whose fate, sooner or later, is certainly assured. The question of compromise inevitably arises, and from this the moral problem emerges. Today no nation is entirely good or entirely evil. The best of nations have their shameful episodes, and the worst their times of real greatness. When irritations arise between nations, the tendency is for each to select the worst adventures of the other and magnify them to the obscuring of all else. The kettle re-engages in the ancient game of calling the pot black. That is as unjust as it is stupid. Yet it is the game which is now being played, and a dangerous game it is. The kettles combine against the pots, and the row is deafening. There the imagery breaks down, for it is not imaginary pots and kettles that are at war, but men, made in the likeness of God, who drive themselves to think in terms of slaughter, and see in blood and destruction the end of their quarrels.