Tribute to Britain

New Zealand Listener, Volume 9, Issue 227, 29 October 1943, Page 3

Tribute to Britain

ENERAL SMUTS was perhaps the only man in the British Commonwealth who could safely remind the world last week what it owes to Britain. He was certainly the best man to do it, and he did it with great dignity and plainness. He did it because it was right to do it, and necessary; and Britons must not be squeamish about accepting his tribute, Nor should any one in the British Dominions have felt sore if it had been the people of the United Kingdom rather than the British nations overseas of whom at the time General Smuts was thinking, We know what we have done ourselves. We know what Australia has done, and Canada, and South Africa. But we can’t know fully what the English, and Scots, and Welsh, and Irish have done, and endured, unless we have been in Britain during the last four years and worked and suffered there; as very few of us have, General Smuts did not in fact exclude the Dominions: he spoke of the con-|

tribution of the whole British Commonwealth of nations, But we in the Dominions know who has suffered most, who has given most, and who has made the biggest sacrifice of material and spiritual possessions. We know it, but we do not say it: and because we do not say it we often forget it. We even forget sometimes that gratitude to our allies can drift very easily into ingratitude to our own kith and kin; into neglect of them if we do not slip so far as to be ungrateful; and into something short of active remembrance if we avoid gross neglect. This is unworthy of us and unworthy of them. It is something that America and Russia do not do to their own people and do not expect us to do to ours. They know far better than we think they do how difficult Britain’s position has been, and how magnificently in general her difficulties have been overcome, But even if they did not know we still should, and there are times when truth as well as charity should begin at home.