Words Without Caution

New Zealand Listener, Volume 16, Issue 394, 10 January 1947, Page 5

Words Without Caution

T was a little depressing to find statesmen all over the world talking about the new year as if they ha@learnt nothing and forgotten nothing. Unless the cables seriously misled us, as abridged messages so often do, the world’s spokesmen are still ready (with some notable exceptions) to commit themselves to promises and pious hopes that have less than one chance in ten of realisation in our time. We seem to have lost our fear of words and to have forgotten that the leader who holds moons in front of us when the facts would justify a limited amount of very green cheese delays recovery with every extravagant phrase. It is permissible to offer miracles in the pulpit; but to offer them in the market place and on the public platform, in chancelleries and parliamentary assemblies, is to discourage the growth of the few small plants whose cultivation is really worth while. Nor is it the answer to say that no one is unduly elated by words these days or unduly depressed. That may be true but it is not an encouraging truth. Before words lose their value men and women have lost their character. It is not the words that then mean nothing but the things of which they are the labels, beginning with the biggest. We have only to say truth, or liberty, or kindness, or charity, or courage to realise how rare those qualities now are; and we don’t bring them back by talking about them. It is equally true that we shall not bring them back merely by being silent about them, but we give ourselves a chance to respect them again if we keep them out of the mud in the meantime. Let us face the fact that all the virtues but two or three have been found too difficult for the modern world; that it is not the moral Everests on which we are now standing but foothills and mud flats; and that the most pitiable of all adventurers is the man who goes a mile into the wilderness and comes back claiming a hundred miles. There are times when it is most encouraging to raise no hopes at all.