NOT A CRISIS.

Auckland Star, Volume LXV, Issue 46, 23 February 1934, Page 3

NOT A CRISIS.

BUT A REVOLUTION. WORLD AFFAIRS TO-DAY. ADDRESS BIT Kffl, VAN LOON. "I hope that my audience will forgive me if I speak for a moment of more serious matters than the vague compliments which arc part of the ordinary lecture," said Mr. Hendrik Willem van Loon, the celebrated Dutch author and philosopher, who is travelling on the Franconia as official lecturer, in the course of an address to the Auckland Travel Club this afternoon. "I feel convinced that the world is not merely passing through a crisis, but is passing through the greatest revolution that has taken place since the days when Roman civilisation slowly crashed down and was succeeded by an entirely new and different form of civilisation. Even the Reformation, though it shook the world from one end to the other, was insignificant in comparison to the upheaval that is going on at the present moment. And the French revolution was mere child's play, for it only transferred the economic and political power from one class of society to another. ' Unavoidable Incident.' "The present revolution goes much deeper and further than that. It threatens or promises (that depends upon your point of view) to change the entire order of tilings and leave us in a world which we would hardly recognise if we were allowed to conic back a hundred years hence for a glimpse of the things that are about to come. No, it is not the fault of the Great War. The Great War was merely an unavoidable incident. Nor is it the fault of the Russian Revolution, which also was merely an unavoidable incident: Nor of the depression, which is a phenomenon of the complaint from which the world is suffering but not the cause." The "Villain." Mr. van Loon said that the mechanical development of the civilisation of the last lot) years was bound in the end to destroy the old agricultural culture of the past 50,000 years. The villain in the drama, if one could speak of villains in a drama that was merely the result of inevitable historical developments, was James Watt and not Nicolai Lenin. It was the machine that had destroyed the old culture in which man had been the beast of burden.

The machine was now being described by many people as a villainous invention that should be drowned in the deepest hole of the Kermadec Islands. But that would not do the slightest good. The machine in and by itself waj not wicked, but only the use man made of that machine. When old Alfred Nobel invented dynamite lie merely wished to give the Swedish farmers a handy instrument with which to take stumps out of their unwilling soil, and lie did not have war in mind nor did he intend his invention to be used to blow up his fellow men. It was the same with almost everything else we had invented during the last century and a half. We invented tilings to set men free from the burdens of existence, and then in the hands of clever manipulators those same engines of progress were debased into instruments of destruction. This had gone on so far one nowadays was almost afraid to invent something for fear that . tomorrow it might be used to kill one's neighbours. All attempts to let civilisation go on without machines were doomed to failure. The problem before the human race was the problem of how to use these greatly multiplied arms and hands and legs and eyes (for what else were machines V) for the benefit of

all mankind and not for the profit of a small number and the detriment of the vast majority. Europe and America. Mr. van Loon said that the whole of Europe seemed to have become a smouldering field of hatreds and resentments. If Europe were exposed for another fifty years to the sort of things that were occurring now, civilisation might have to. seek another refugee It had seemed for a time that America was going the same way, but the revolution engineered with magnificent skill by President Roosevelt—for what he had brought about was a deliberate revolution—was going to pull America through, at a comparatively small cost, compared with the cost of what would have happened if Roosevelt had not had the strength and the will to interfere.