TRACTS FOR THE TIMES.

Auckland Star, Volume LXIII, Issue 198, 22 August 1932, Page 6

TRACTS FOR THE TIMES.

GETTING OUT OF THE MUD. (By PRO BONO PUBLICO.) I am too old and have taken too many hard knocks in life to be easily annoyed, but there is one class of writer and talker that irritates me unfailingly. It is the class that sees nothing good in. the world. Perhaps you don't come across it often, but if you are trying to keep abreast of current ideas you iind it cropping up persistently. What progress the world makes comes gradually, and the really practical and useful man is he who takes hold, of a detail, studies it thoroughly, suggests an improvement, and then persuades the world to adopt his idea. This type of reformer is never a demagogue. He gets few headlines or none in the papers, and mostly he does his work, takes a little profit, or none at all, and then drops quietly out. Looking.back over history you are apt to get the impression that progress has been achieved by sweeping reforms. It is not so. The big idea starts in a small way and grows by additions and acoretions; and reforms that we think to have been won by short, irresistible campaigns have generally taken a century or more to reach completion. The reformer who wants to shatter the world to bits and then remould it is invariably no more than a shatterer. The men who pull down old houses are not the men who build new ones. You employ a different contractor for the second job. The world is admittedly very evil, at any rate the economic world is, but it might be worse. It wasn't such a bad place until the war came, and even after the war we managed to get along pretty well until a couple of years ago. When I am told, therefore, that "capitalism has proved an utter failure." that "interna.tional trade is doomed," that "three-quarters of the world's people are destitute and will have to go into slavery," and that "nothing will save the world economically but a complete social revolution" — all sentences taken from recent books or articles —when I read these things I feel like telling the writers to find a better hole and go to it. All that is wrong with the world, really, is that man got a little ahead of his world. He went too fast and he spent too fast, and he has now to wait for the world to catch up. There may be ways of helping it along, and that is really what sensible people are discussing. I think of the problem as something like hauling a car through the mud —"-etting ropes on to it, and then getting everyone to give a pull simultaneously. We want sacks and brush under the wheels, too. In the meantime a lot of people are standing off and giving advice, some of them telling us that the old bus is for ever stuck and we shall have to get a new car from somewhere. And some people' want to sit still and be hauled along by others. It is a big job, no doubt, but if everyone will quit grumbling and give a hand with the ropes well get the bus through all right.