Mr. Attlee's Visit

New Zealand Listener, Volume 14, Issue 359, 10 May 1946, Page 5

Mr. Attlee's Visit

R. ATTLEE’S decision to visit New Zealand is in itself very good news. It would be good news in any Dominion, but nowhere quite so good as in the remotest from London and the most isolated. We need these contacts. Although we can now talk to London, at a price, listen to London, at almost no price at all, and travel to London in about the same time as we used to spend on a journey to Sydney or Melbourne, there is no effective substitute for face-to-face conversation. It is permissible to say, also, that the benefit of such a visit will not be on our side only. As long as there is a commonwealth of British nations it will be important that each unit should understand every other unit, big or small. When world brotherhood comes, mrisunderstandings will be merely political dyspepsias or colds in the head; unpleasant still but no longer serious. To-day all misunderstandings are serious, and the most serious are the domestic ones. For internationalism is of course not in sight. The human family is divided into three or four powerful groups, not warring groups certainly, or even hostile, but suspicious, jealous, confused, and capable of almost any plunge into sudden anger and folly. So far as our own group is concerned, we are fortunately very near to complete confidence and co-opera- | tion. World brotherhood is still a dream, but British brotherhood is a reality, and to keep it real we must be careful not to drift apart. Mr. Attlee is coming to help in keeping us close; not just to look at us or let us look at him, but to greet the people of New Zealand as well as their Government and carry home the news that the cables can’t convey.