Wairarapa Times-Age THURSDAY, MAY 28, 1942. SHAPING THE WORLD ANEW.

Wairarapa Times-Age, 28 May 1942, Page 2

Wairarapa Times-Age THURSDAY, MAY 28, 1942. SHAPING THE WORLD ANEW.

great deal of ground was covered by the Bishop of Wellington, the Rt Rev 11. St. Barbe Holland, in an address to the Wellington branch of the League of Nations Union in which he made a flying survey of the problems that will arise when the lime comes to reshape the post-war world, or at all events to attempt that task. Three points made by the bishop appear to stand out as worthy of special attention.

One of these was that the people of various nations are “not going to wait for the architects of a new universe to shape their destinies,” but are going “to put up their own shanties and whares, for they will have to get on with the job of living and put a roof over their heads.” True, as this is, it calls lor the reservation that a certain amount of planning of an international scope—planning which looks to an extension and application of the principles expressed in the Atlantic Charter, is being undertaken and may be expected to exercise in many instances a material influence on post-war national, policy and international relationships.

e A second vitally important point made by Bishop Holland was that, “as bitter experience has taught us, economic reshaping is our only hope of stability in political reshaping.” His concluding contention —the most important of all—was that the world of tomorrow can be made beautiful, orderly and peaceful only by religious faith as the basis of morality. As to the supreme importance of what the Bishop of Wellington called obedience to moral imperatives, there can be no question, but it is or should be clear too that broad toleration in the realm of religious faith and an avoidance of narrow dogmatism are an indispensable condition of approach to world order.

Tn the domain of material organisation, it is wholly improbable that any large proportion of the nations of the world will be ready, after the war, to adapt and adjust their national policies’in close detail to an international 1 master plan, should such a plan be shaped. The practical question to be determined is whether a sufficiently powerful moral impulse can be developed to establish broad ruling conditions of mutual consideration and co-operation in international relationships and dealings after the war.

The British economist, Mr J. M. Keynes, has said that Britain can lay sound foundations for peace only by a disciplined acceptance during the first three years of many of the existing war time controls in an orderly transition from war to peace, without the disorderly demobilisation which followed the last war.

We have to be (Mr Keynes said) full of plans, unlimited in our ambitions and projects, but rigidly disciplined in the order and pace of their execution.

Much the same no doubt is to be said of other nations, great and small. Assuming the decisive victory of the United Nations and the establishment of firm safeguards against any recurrence of gangster aggression, the world will emerge from the war, not so much impoverished as possessed of a vast mechanism of production, but one needing to be converted and transformed to supply the needs of nations at peace.

Mr Keynes and others have spoken of the imperative necessity of achieving a great expansion of trade. This is wholly desirable, provided the export trade of one country is not made the means of stifling the economic development.of other countries. The material welfare of every nation depends primarily upon an unfettered development of its internal economy and of production within its own borders. Any nation can buy and pay for imported goods only in the extent to which it sells other goods, but the volume of its internal production need be limited only by that of its labour, available materials and productive organisation. It is primarily by wise internal management of the affairs of individual nations that we may avoid and escape the economic disasters of the period between the last war and this war—the desolating and humiliating conditions in which, widespread unemployment and empty markets of vast potential scope existed not only contemporaneously, but in many instances side by side.