MODERN WORLD’S TRAGEDY.

Ashburton Guardian, Volume 59, Issue 39, 25 November 1938, Page 4

MODERN WORLD’S TRAGEDY.

If there is to be found in most public comment on human affairs an undertone of sadness and disillusionment, it is not because we are afraid, as at an earlier date our fathers were, that the world is not going to be able to support and satisfy our appetites, writes Mr Million Paton in his book “World Community.” It is not because the inexorable hardness of things rises up and gives denial to oui generous passion for brotherhood. It is for the opposite reason. We are aware that the command of nature already attained by man is enough to enable him to abolish most of the woes that have afflicted humanity since history began to be written. Me know these things, and we also know that somehow or other we cannot rise to the occasion. Our defect is not primarily intellectual. True, the stud;* of economics is difficult and high finance is ay mystery, but we do not really in our secret hearts believe that all the mournful business of quotas and trade restrictions, burning food to keep the price up, the existence of at least a quarter of a million of “long-unem-ploved'’ in England and AVales, and the rest of it, is due to ail inability on the part of good men to devise any better wav. M e know that tliei e is something more deeply wrong with us than that. “The world has become a unity, and for this high destiny mankind is not yet fit.” On the technical side we are ready for world community and the work of our best brains has brought it nearer to us. But it is the tragedy of our modern world that we are forming ourselves into mutually exclusive and hostile groups.