When They Come Home

New Zealand Listener, Volume 8, Issue 207, 11 June 1943, Page 3

When They Come Home

HE Prime Minister has never minimised the difficulties with which the community will be faced when the war is won and the fighting forces return to their homes and their jobs. For that we must all be thankful. One of the reasons why so many hopes were dashed after the last war was that we were all too sentimental to face the facts realistically. We were so determined to provide homes and jobs and all other good things for heroes that we would neither count the cost ourselves nor allow any one else to do so; and in the end the difficulties overwhelmed us. Much was done, of course; far more than many people remember now. But so much was not done that should have been done, so much attempted without adequate preparation, that we were still, twenty years after fighting ceased, unable to recall without a blush the glowing and deeply sincere promises made when our men marched away. ‘To-day we have perhaps moved to the other extreme. We are afraid to make promises in case they are not carried out — either becausee we do not know what to do or because we are prevented by world forces from doing what we had planned and intended. Very properly therefore the Prime Minister warned the recent conference of the Returned Services Association that rehabilitation is one thing, reconstruction another, and that the first may be impossible without the second. And this of course means that we are inviting disaster if we plan for three or four years and no longer. If the problem went no further than keeping unemployed off the streets it would be sufficient to adjust demobilisation to the demands of industry and concentrate them on the wounded and the sick. But the whole Dominion is sick, and the whole world wounded, and to ‘talk about justice for soldiers without working for a juster world éverywhere comes perilously near to political false pretence.