Men of England

New Zealand Listener, Volume 9, Issue 232, 3 December 1943, Page 3

Men of England

T is not specially The Listener’s business to explain, or ask, why three prominent newspaper owners visited New Zealand last week. It is sufficient for us that they did come and saw as much of our way of life as could be seen in five or six days, The simplest explanation, if we wanted one, would be Sir Walter Layton’s statement that they came here to thank us for our services in the war and to get a realistic view of our problems and backgroundgood reasons, both of them, for a hurried visit if the alternative was no visit at all. But there Was one important result of the visit which everyone would have grasped if it had been possible for everyone to see these men

and talk to them. They were themselves England-England in their poise, their confidence, and their humour. If they felt after two or three days that New Zealanders were now people and not statistical abstractions, we could feel before they went away why the Battle of Britain remained a battle and did not become a stampede. Meeting them and listening to them was not meeting and listening to the average Englishman, for the average Englishman knows. what anxiety and poverty are and not one of these three had ever been within two: generations of the bread line; but it was meeting and listening to average products of an English liberal education, and it gave us something to think about. We perhaps can give England something to think about too, but that concerns England more than it concerns us. What concerns us is the fact that three totally . different’ types of men, representing different interests and following different philosophies, all had the qualities that carry men calmly through crises. We began by calling it poise. We could have called it a sense of proportion or educated self-control. But whatever name we give it the quality was there; it was the expression of @ tradition; and the younger a nation is the more it requires traditions to hold it steady in advergity.