THE AFTERMATH

Ellesmere Guardian, Volume LXII, Issue 19, 11 March 1941, Page 3

THE AFTERMATH

We shall have no doubt to create a New Order, but we did not go to war for any such purpose. We British went to war to save ourselves and the rest of the civilised world from the triumph of organ-1 ised crime, and we are fighting now for everything that man holds sacred, writes Professor Gilbert Murray in the Contemporary Review. But can we in any case save it? "One more war in the west," said a recent Prime Minister, "and the civilisation of ages will fall with as great a crash as that of Rome." Is that proving true? The loss of life, as far as numbers go, is easily repaired. Within quite a few years after the last war, which was fol-. lowed by a still more destructive pestilence, the population of the world was higher than in 1914. In quality the case is not so plain; to some extent war picks out in each country the brave and the strong. This war is picking out the most civilised races. The economic and financial losses will be gigantic, but, again, can be easily repaired. A war after all can only destroy the harvest of one year. Flocks and herds replenish themselves. As for capital goods, the manufacturing power of the world has long been greater than it can use; if we could1 imagine it used according to some! reasonably public-spirited plan, without nationalistic mal-adjust-ments, it could in a very few years make the wealth of the human race far greater than it has ever been. Nevertheless, the period of disorder and impoverishment which is sUre to intervene will bring great dangers. It may lead to ruinous revolutions. It may, even without that, produce an equally deadly result, the destruction of the cultured Middle Class, on whom so much of the moral and intellectual guidance of a nation depends. It is the ruin of that class in Germany which made the brutalities of the Nazis possible. Again, the prospect of economic recovery depends absolute-

ly on the wisdom of economic policy in nations which have not been remarkable for it of late, especially Great Britain, the Dominions, and the United States.