The Road

New Zealand Listener, Volume 13, Issue 319, 3 August 1945, Page 5

The Road

T is not the fault of the Prime Minister if the San Francisco decisions are not yet fully understood by the public. It is not easy to grasp all that is involved when delegates from 50 nations talk almost without ceasing for 62 days. Apart from anything else there is the physical difficulty of reading such a mass of material as the reports now make; and if the Prime Minister himself and his colleagues overcame the vastly bigger difficulty of participating in every important discussion and sitting on every relevant committee, they were not confused as the New Zealand public have been by condensed, distorted, and sometimes deliberately coloured reports of the discussions as they progressed. It is not cynicism to say that the only New Zealanders who understand as well as know what the Conference did are those who took part in it, and that the effort of getting the rest of us to understand is comparable with the task historians have always had in explaining the Great Charter itself. But the Prime Minister has told us very clearly, and with moving eloquence, what they ‘set out to do. It was not to give the world security, but to open a way to security; not even to remove international friction, but to devise ways of dealing with friction before it leads to war. But this meant, to begin with, trusting one another, and it was soon made clear that complete trust was not yet a possibility. Therefore compromises had to be accepted, and concessions made,. that the New Zealand delegation found depressing, and the Prime -Minister has not tried to rub those failures out. They are in all his speeches, and they are incorporated frankly in the Report presented to Parliament; but the ‘solid body of achievement remains. The road has been surveyed and laid down -a very imperfect road, Mr. Fraser admits, a road that no nation should take blindly, but a road that 50 nations have now pledged themselves to use.