The Dominion FRIDAY, APRIL 24, 1942. ANZAC—AND THE UNFINISHED TASK

Dominion, Volume 35, Issue 178, 24 April 1942, Page 6

The Dominion FRIDAY, APRIL 24, 1942. ANZAC—AND THE UNFINISHED TASK

The Anzac Commemoration tomorrow brings with it the annual reminder of a great task bequeathed to civilization by those who made the supreme sacrifice in the War of 1914-18. This unfinished task, which was to lay the foundations of a freer and more generous democratic existence for mankind throughout the world, was a noble conception. It was fraught with great complexity and difficulty. It required above all things an ample space of time, in conditions of assured and lasting peace, for the vast underlying problems to be. worked out, and in the interim process of regeneration, the supreme virtues of patience and tolerance. The whole concept has been challenged by a combination of evil forces which now threatens to destroy utterly the hopes raised by the vision of a better world in which life would be secure, and liberty enthroned. At all costs the task must be finished. It is a debt we owe to those who died for the cause in the last war, and have given their lives foi- it in this one. But in this war there is a still graver issuelife or death for democracy. President Roosevelt’s tentative choice of a name for it is peculiarly apt, for the conflict is nothing less than a “war of survival.” In no other of the wars of history have the lives and future of the great mass of the world’s people been so dependent on the final outcome. The fate of all sections of humanity from the highest placed to the most lowly is at stake. In the present struggle the broad issue is whether all nations are to be free to work out their own domestic destinies in their own way, or become units of a gigantic world system tyrannically controlled and ruthlessly disciplined by a German super-state. If the Allies lose this war humanity at large will be compelled to change completely its present ways of life. We have only to consider the liberties we possess, the privileges we enjoy, the freedom in which in normal times we can go about our affairs, to realize that with all these things in the balance this, indeed, is a war of survival in the grimmest and most tragic sense. None would willingly tolerate the perpetuation after the war of the many and irksome restrictions necessarily accepted by the community in these days as wartime precautions. But imagine such restrictions magnified a hundredfold and perpetuated for all time under a systematized tyranny. Let wageearners picture to themselves what their lives would be like without organized unions, without an Arbitration Court, without free access to Courts of Justice, without, in fact, any recourse whatever for the ventilation of grievances, and the maintenance of rights and privileges they now enjoy. Let every household throughout the country try to conceive what kind of existence it would have to endure.in an. atmosphere of State espionage that would make domestic privacy impossible, that would make every citizen suspicious of his neighboureven of his own kin—and every scrap of conversation or expression of opinion a menace to his personal safety. . And that is only a fragment of the picture. Who would be likely to be our masters in this new dispensation of tyranny? The Japanese? Imagine what this country would be like under a Japanese dictatorship. Let these and other possibilities contingent on an Allied defeat in this war sink into the mind, and the true and full significance of President Roosevelt’s designation for the present war should strike home. Which of these conditions, freedom or tyranny, is to survive? The answer to that depends upon the response made by every citizen throughout the United Nations. For ourselves, as with others we have to rid our community of those political and industrial futilities which, as the United States Minister, Brigadier-General Hurley, so frankly emphasized at the State luncheon in his honour on Wednesday, are simply playing into the hands of the enemy. We have to reckon on what we stand to lose in this war. . Summed up in his own words, these are “the rights of mankind to life, libeity, justice, and the pursuit of happiness.” If we win—and nothing but the utmost we can do will enable us to win—we shall be able to go forward to a new era of progress, culture, and the amelioration of the lives and conditions of the human race the woild over.