TRADITION AND PROGRESS
RETURN TO PRACTICAL REALISM. What is disturbing more and more citizens of this British democracy is the suspicion that,, in the Government’s mind, our way of life is purely on the defensive, says the “Economist.” If so, then the prospect of victory is a relapse into the blindness, the cowardice and the stupidity that brought us to our present pass. Then, indeed, Britain is an elderly and declining nation, making one last'brave spasm of resistance before it yields to those who are younger and stronger. But the British people reject this notion with a firmness second only to their rejection of the idea of a truce with Hitler. They are not on the defensive; they are determined to reconstruct. There is a mountain of anger throughout Britain against the ideas and the men who brought the country to September, 1939. By general consent, following Mr Churchill’s magnanimous leadership, recrimination has been deferred —but on the unspoken condition that nothing of that spirit shall survive. There is no question of seizing the opportunity of war to foist on the people the views of a minority or by some Procrustean tactic to force a free people into the rigidities of some doctrinaire ideology. On the contrary, one of the great gains of the past two years is the defeat and disruption of the ’‘isms” that have plagued British politics for a generation. There is a chance now to return to the native tradition of practical realism, to that mixture of tradition and progress which Mr Churchill gave as his political philosophy 18 months ago,
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Wairarapa Times-Age, 23 January 1942, Page 4
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265TRADITION AND PROGRESS Wairarapa Times-Age, 23 January 1942, Page 4
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