The Dominion THURSDAY, JANUARY 2, 1930. RETROSPECT AND PROSPECT

Dominion, Volume 23, Issue 83, 2 January 1930, Page 10

The Dominion THURSDAY, JANUARY 2, 1930. RETROSPECT AND PROSPECT

■ When, a hundred years hence, the New Zealand historian comes to survey 1929, what events, if any, will he think worthy of special note? ‘He will have this advantage over all of us that he will see men and things in their true perspective. Looked at in this way, with the eye of the future historian, a review of 1929 in New Zealand seems rather futile. Taking the long view, what have we achieved that is worth while? It is rather a hopeless question. We may have achieved very little or have acquitted ourselves better than we know. Even if, in large events, a particular calendar year makes a brave showing,'the individual may have had no part m them. Yet the lesser years that precede or succeed those that-are writ large “st as »>ueh a part of toman life and history. ActuaUy although less marked, they may be more important in the march ° f P Srly we individuals of the rank ,nd He may smugness) take comfort to ourselves. To quote R. L. btevenson, “to have lived at all is doubtless (in the soldierly c^P res ®^2 aee have.served And when a man has lived to a fair ag Etarfhis marks of service. He may’have never been remarked upon the breach at the head of the army; Ut least he shall have lost his teeth on the camp bread.” „ _ T c There is much more of this “Christmas Sermon by R.L.S.that seems more appropriate to a New Year stock-taking tha t Christmas. In spite of the fortitude it supplied to Mr. Snowden Rudyard Kipling’s If flies a little high for the work-a-day world of most of us. But listen to this: ,

To be honest, to be kind—to earn a little and to spendl a little less, to inake upon the whole a family happier for presence, to renounce when that shall be necessary and be embittered, to keep a few friends but these without capitulatio above all, on the same grim condition, to keep friends himself—here is a task for all that a man has of fortitude and delicacy. He has an ambitious soul who would ask more. . . • But are these few and simple ideals enough for this first week of a new year? Not everyone will agree that they are but, Stevenson answers, “life is not designed to minister to a mans vanity. Nor does Stevenson set the goal sb low. that there is nothing to aspire to. Those who do, not more but better, will do very well indeed. Some talk of “divine discontent” as the mainspring of human progress. Yet there is nothing, divine about discontent. Serenity is nearer divinity. Nor will discontent of itself achieve anything. It is the striving that matters. To have tried, and tried hard, is everything—success is a mere incidental, and a dangerous one, if esteemed too much. The goal-posts are there but the game is the thing. ~ ' , , No doubt every one of us, in the odd moments we have tor thought, have been ruminating along these or, perhaps/' more aggressive lines. It has not been so much a careful enumeration of events as a moral soliloquy, warmed and softened by a little humour. May the conclusion be that, for 1929, nothing is here to weep”; and for 1930, that here is another hopeful occasion to which we may all address ourselves with honesty and effort, to make of it the best that may be and, at the least, to serve.