The Voice in the Wilderness

New Zealand Listener, Volume 5, Issue 119, 3 October 1941, Page 5

The Voice in the Wilderness

|1OTHING has impressed me more in the life of Carnegie than his constant advocacy of an ideal which is only now being realised-namely, the necessity of closer relations between Great Britain and the United States of America. He was an eloquent, and indeed, a passionate advocate of world peace, and supported his views with lavish donations to institutions which propagated this ideal. If he could not find an institution completely to his liking, he created one; but his native shrewdness convinced him that universal peace could never be anything but a dream unless, in the first instance, there was a close linking-up of all the English-speaking peoples in the world. He was a voice crying in the wilderness; it has required a great world catastrophe to awaken these English-speaking peoples, and if Carnegie were alive to-day, he would see the dream of his life slowly but surely materialising. It is- difficult to believe that the following brief extract from one of his speeches was delivered exactly fifty years ago; it reads more like a quotation from a current review of the world position by one of our present statesmen. Addressing a meeting of the.New York St. Andrew’s Society in 1851, Carnegie said: " A federation of all the English-speaking peoples would hold

in its hand the destinies and peace of the world. It would banish humanity’s deepest disgrace-the slaying of men under the name of war."-(" Andrew Carnegie," A, J. Sinclair, 1ZM, September 21.)