Peace Plus

New Zealand Listener, Volume 12, Issue 289, 5 January 1945, Page 5

Peace Plus

said, is not enough. Is peace enough? In the opinion of our readers it is not. Although 30 to 40 people are not even a handful of our reader group, not a big enough number in themselves to represent anything or anybody, they become representative when they all begin to say the same thing. The men and women we asked about 1945 were not chosen at random-there is some degree of selection in everything we do if we are awake and sober; but they were not chosen in the hope that they would say something that we thought we knew in advance. If we had been foolish enough to believe that we "understood" any of oug contributors their answers would have made nonsense of our thoughts; but that is not the kind of discrimination we allowed ourselves. Our desire was to get variety into our answers, and we therefore exercised choice to the extent of selecting addresses from which we thought we should receive different replies. We did receive different replies, but nearly every contributor said directly or indirectly that peace is not enough, and victory not enough. Some were less hopeful than others, but none as depressed as we expected they would be in the face of Runstedt’s offensive and the civil war in Greece, It was interesting also that not one was blindly and fanatically optimistic. But the more cautious they were the more important it began to seem that few were content with the defeat of Germany and Japan and the return of absent relatives and friends. It is a fine thing to convert the worn-out weapons of war into the ‘brandnew instruments of peace, but it has been done before, Our contributors said quite plainly that this will not satisfy them. Far less will it excite them. They are almost afraid of peace alone, and even when they do not know what they want in addition, they do know how insecure military victory alone will leave them. It is a profoundly encouraging sign. eee: Edith Cavell