SEEING IT THROUGH.

Auckland Star, Volume LXII, Issue 306, 28 December 1931, Page 6

SEEING IT THROUGH.

In a week that is largely devoted to the memory of certain men and women who "saw it through" on a great scale ifi may be amiss to spare a glance to their spiritual kinsfolk, who, year in and year out, arc found—or more often are not found—seeing it through with the same courage and to the same> end (said the "Times" in November). In this vtery week two such examples have been set. On Armistice Day in Hamilton (Ontario), as .we reported yesterday, Dr. Frederick Mowbray had a hearb seizure while performing an operation, and, althcnigh in agony, went on with his task, to die whan it was fill; ished. And in London a very popular theatrical artist, Miss Wish Wynne, left her sick bed and in spite of great pain kept her promise to broadcast a fairy story; a long illness and much suffering, kept secret from the public, made the strain too great, and she died on the night of November 11. Neither of those benefactors of their kind —neither he that brought health nor she that brought happy laughter to jnen, women and children —would have claimed to be heroic, any more than the men and women of 1914-1918; they had their job, and they saw it through. When Robert Louis Stevenson died there was an outburst of admiration for his courage and gaiety in the endurance of his all but lifelong ill-health; and that outburst set up* a reaction, in which the object was not to diminish the praise of the high-spirited writer, but to mike him one of an innumerable company, who, nameless for the most part and unremcmbercd, sefr'it through. And so with the surgeon and the ;ictrcss who have given the latest known examples of tenacity and pluck to the end. Their worth is n»ot lessened, it is enhanced, when they are seen ssn members of a countless host of people who have? done, and who will yet do,' as they did. To say nothing of the sea, of mountaineering, of exploration, in the unwritten annals of the mine, tliip railway, the factory, there must be hundreds 'of stories of heroic action and endurance called out by the sudden demands of danger and of erjisis. Not only that;. in every walk of life, bafch among men and among women, there are innumerable sufferers who conceal their pain and g«> on with their job when they would have every right to give up and ask for.succour from others- A cynic might say that at the root of this endurance lie a good deal of pride and a dislike of beiuig fussed over. It may be so. Neither the spirJj': nor its effect would be any the worse for tliati and the most gloomy pessimist who claims to be a realist must feel a little more hopeful"about human nature when he reflects that for every case of such heroism which is recorded there niust be thousands which pass unknown. i