The Tale of A Thousand Weeks

Dominion, Volume 27, Issue 252, 21 July 1934, Page 20

The Tale of A Thousand Weeks

THOUSAND weeks! It is a pecular division of time. It is /% • ,a long stretch, almost a generation in our brief lives. And / % what weeks they have been!” (says Mr. Winston Churchill in the “Sunday Pictorial”). “The world has moved more since 1015 than in the whole of the nineteenth century. It has moved more than it moved in a thousand years before the nineteenth century. Everything has changed. Tfle whole structure of Europe is altered The empires of Germany, Austria,' Russia, Turkey and China have disappeared. Most of the Parliaments so eagerly erected in the nineteenth century are gone. “The movement toward democracy and liberty has been arrested and " dictatorships have overspread the world. Great peoples have readily cast away their slowly gained civic rights and freedom for which, largely through English example, they had struggled so vehemently. “The subjugation of women, about which Mr. John Stuart Mill wrote so stalking an essay, is at an end. The race of women has asserted its place in the world. ' “In the factory, in the counting house, in the great professions, and, above all. in politics, they have begun to function. They have become bread-winners and consumers qn a great scale. Vast new industries have come into being to eater for their, wishes and adorn their persons. “The gift of flying has been won by human science and daring from

the mysterious vault of heaven in which it had so long been safely concealed Motbrs throng the roads in ever-increasing numbers. The horse, so long the ennobling companion and helpmate of mankind, Is almost extinct, except for sport and pleasure. ‘ ■ /• . “The marvellous inventions of the broadcast and gramophone have opened to scores of millions in every country the cruder forms of culture and afforded them an opportunity for participating, if only they desire it, in the life of the State. In spite of all its follies the world,has become much richer. There is a great abundance. Indeed the machinery and organisation we have set up, largely under the harrowing impulses of the Great War, are capable of producing a glut of all the commodities which our present economic arrangements enable mankind to consume. “In this process at least one-tenth of the leading industrial populations find themselves an idle, unusued surplus in the work-scheme of mankind—an enormous moss—so far found easier to maintain in corroding leisure than to employ. All the old principles of finance and economics, which the nineteenth century developed and fondly believed were establisded for ever, have been discarded, and no new coherent system has been erected in their place. "Profound reactions in the faith and morals of many peoples have followed these great world changes. What a scene of stupendous and magical transformation!” / -v.,'. 1 '■ /