BUILDING ON THE PAST

Press, Volume LXXXI, Issue 24568, 17 May 1945, Page 6

BUILDING ON THE PAST

DEVELOPMENT OF NEW ERA IN HISTORY

PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT’S “ FOUR FREEDOMS”

"However revolutionary be the new age that lies before us, it must grow out of the past; the experience of Russia in the last 2a years has shown clearly that there are no ‘clean cuts’ in human social affairs, and if our future is to be soundly based it must retain the fundamental principles of Christian democracy which have always formed the background of our political and economic thinking, and given them their characteristic tone,” said Mr J. Snell, Dominion organiser lor the Church of England Men’s Society, in an address delivered at the annual conference of the society in Christchurch yesterday. “In the age of experimentation and testing that lies ahead.” he continued, “we may hope that the British race, with its instinctive distrust of logic, its innate sense of fairness and hatred of oppression, and its genius for compromise and. improvisation will somehow evolve a working scheme under which we may obtain the benefits which intelligent planning can bring without placing all humanity in a strait-jacket, or stifling all individuality and initiative. “The keynote of the new order, in its internal working, must be co-operation as contrasted with competitive individualism. Capital, management, and labour must find a way of Working together on a basis of mutual trust and confidence, of which the ‘Peace Charter’ for labour and management announced jointly by Mr Eric Johnston, the president of the United States Chamber of Commerce, Mr Philip Murray, the president of the Congress of Industrial Organisations, and Mr William Green, the president of the American Federation of Labour, is a most hopeful beginning. “Such a programme will call imperatively for that moral and spiritual revival which President Roosevelt so ardently desired, and which so many other of our great leaders see to be the essential pre-requisite to any worthy form of individual or social life.”

The reconciliation- of freedom with authority was one of the outstanding problems of social life. said. Mr Snell. He detailed the "Four Freedoms" which President Roosevelt had declared to be essential to the building of a satisfactory post-war order of society. and gave a resume of the Beveridge plan for ensuring freedom from want. Freedom of speech and the allied freedoms of writing, study, teaching, and assembly were necessary. he said, for three main reasons: (1) because the Renaissance and other liberal eras had revealed that freedom was essential for progress: (2) because conformity, inevitable under a dictatorship, limited variety; and (3> because denial of responsibility and opportunity thwarted the creative impulses of aU save a few enthusiasts.