MAN’S MODERN ENORMITIES

Wairarapa Times-Age, 16 April 1941, Page 6

MAN’S MODERN ENORMITIES

MASTERY OF MACHINES

I There are those, not clever nor such I as indulge a taste for cheap unexpectedness. but simple souls who retain the faculty of Seeing straight, who thank God for the bombs of our time, asserts Dr George Glasgow, writing in the “Contemporary Review." The machine has temporarily mastered man. From the machine itself, however, comes the herald of salvation. The “deus ex machina” who could cut a primitive- dramatic knot can also cut the apparently inextricable knot of man’s modern enormities in actual life. When the last war started, the first British aeroplane that crossed the Channel could carry only enough petrol for the 20mile hop. When the next war begins, the whole world will promptly go up in smoke. Therefore —is not this

good enough in reason? —there will be no next war. The machine has become too terrible for its authors to use. At the least, wo are given as good a chance as we ever had of bringing war on earth to an utter end. We either take it, or the next time the world will cease to be. The, only way in which this chance can be taken will be to agree on total, immediate.and permanent disarmament (not "limitation" of armaments, leaving open a back door) of the, whole world. As the bombs fall and hearts as well as lives are broken, this may be our solace: that from this evil will come infallibly the salvation of the world from the world's greatest scourge. For it is not possible that the world shall decree its own destruction. Man can do many tilings;

but. he cannot decide things that are not his to decide. The Juggernaut of misapplied science will merely have consummated its own immolation.