THE NEW WORLD

New Zealand Listener, Volume 10, Issue 256, 19 May 1944, Page 20

THE NEW WORLD

(1) PLAN FOR ACTION. By John Russell Hancock. Whitcombe & Tombs. (2) WHITE ELEPHANTS. By G. Valentine Howey. Valentine Publications, Wellington. O one can say in advance that a world plan will not work. It just may work, or it may lead to something else that will. Nor should New Zealand be afraid to rush in where older and bigger countries fear to tread. New Zealand rushed in against Mussolini when Great Britain compromised; and also against Japan; and New Zealand was right. It was a joke, of course, but wisdom was with the joker. And who knows that the writers of these two books are not right, though the wise and prudent will laugh at them. The theme of the first is as unassailable as it is simple: world order will depend upon world citizens who see their way clearly through the international tangle because they think in terms of the common welfare. That is the theme, and the justification for a book about it by a citizen of Wellington is just as simple: international disorder affects all and therefore reorganisation is the business of all. But Mr. Hancock is bolder than that. Reorganisation is

not only our business: it is something that we cannot escape. "In the past," he points out, "the unity of man existed as a thought. .. . To-day it is a physical fact, because the geographical barriers have been swept away." We have become one, whether we like it or not, and therefore we must begin functioning as one. We must unify our law and our politics (in all major issues), abolish trade barriers, and make ourselves world citizens. To help us to do this Mr, Hancock offers some strange devicesa diagram that will make most of his readers dizzy; creeds, and pledges, and manifestos that a Boy Scout might have written after he had qualified for Rotary. But the Roman who first read the Sermon on the Mount must have laughed too. And what has been said about World Plan I. applies, mutatis mutandis, to World Plan II. Miss Howey is not quite so coherent, or so lucid, as Mr. Hancock, but she is not a whit less bold. "There is only one way," she declares, "to achieve a true League of Nations and that is to eliminate National Government for Inter-National Parliaments. (Her italics and capitals.) ... To the eternal pessimist who will always cry, ‘It can’t be done’-let me say here and now-it must be done."