FABRIC OF CIVILISATION

Wairarapa Times-Age, 19 December 1939, Page 6

FABRIC OF CIVILISATION

It requires no imagination lo measure some of the gashes cut by a great war in the fabric of civilisation, writes Professor Allan Nevins, of Columbia University, in the New York Times, We can assist our imaginations if we but reflect on the consequences had a great world war raged in, say, the years 1840-1845, by huge conscript armies. Among the young Englishmen who might well have perished in such a war would have been Dickens. Thackeray, Browning, Gladstone, Herbert Spencer, Huxley, Bessemer and Shaftesbury. Darwin might have been killed like Moseley, and Tennyson like Rupert Brooke. Among Ihe Frenchmen slain might well have been Hugo. Mussel. Sainte-Beuve, Renan. Flaubert and Pasteur. Macaulay would not have been too old to fight, or Turgeneff too young. Wagner and Gogol would have made good cannon fodder, and Hebbel. Freytag and Theodor Mommsen could have laid down their lives in the trendies before their powers were discovered. What would the great Victorian Age in Britain have been like had a quarter of iter young men died in such a war. and had her economic and social life been rudely wrenched from its old channels? To say all this is not to say that war — even another world war—is the worst calamity that civilisation can face. A still more terrible disaster would be the mastery of Europe by the typo of State, society and so-called culture that Nazi leaders have set up in its midst.