THE H.B. TRIBUNE. SATURDAY, JULY 5, 1919. THANKS GIVING.

Hawke's Bay Tribune, Volume IX, Issue 171, 5 July 1919, Page 4

THE H.B. TRIBUNE. SATURDAY, JULY 5, 1919. THANKS GIVING.

At somewhat short notice to-morrow has been officially proclaimed as a dav of thanksgiving for the conclusion of peace with the country which all civilization, excepting itself —and possiblv, in the lurid light cast upon it by the war, it should not be included in the category —recognises as the prime instigator of the greatest military calamity that has ever fallen on the peoples of the earth. It will not, however, take any length of time to summon a sincere and heartfealt gratitude to the Power which controls our small mundane affairs for the endin'- vouchsafed to a long-drawn struggle that has tested to the utmost all the best qualities of our race, revealing their persistence in spite of much which cannot but have tended towards deterioration during a long spell of exemption from any really severe national trialWe have to be thankful, in the first place, for the victory that has attended the tremendous military effort in which we have been engaged alongside Allies whose rights and claims to the maintenance of their national life it has vindicated. while also reviving the national life of others who, as subject races, had in the beginning to enter the field against us. The war has proved itself not only, as we began it, a war of self-preservation for the champions of freedom who first entered the lists against those of domination by a great military Power, but also, in very truth, a war of liberation for many millions of down-trodden and oppressed peoples in every continent of the Old World. We have to be thankful, again, though in a way that seems a little selfisn. that our own small country and the Great Empire of which it forms a part have been spared from the horrors of invasion by a foe bereft, of all regard for the dictates of humanity and possessed of a lust of animal appetite and wanton destruction that from the outset to the end has piled revolting horror upon horror. We have to be thankful that our women have been spared the fate worse than death to which so many have been victims in the countries polluted by t.he foot of modern barbarians, and that neither they not our old men nor our children have been subjected to starvation and to a virtual slavery under the lash of cruel conquerors. We have to be thankful that, though the crisis found us all unused and unreadv, the old blood coursing in the veins of our voung men tingled and thrilletl at the first call to arms in defence of our liberties, and le i them to dare, and, in sadly many cases, to lose all for our protection Our causes of thankfulness as part of the Empire are not capable of any listing, but we may be finally and supremelv thankful that, now the great task is ended, we may without any self-delusion say that it was undertaken and carried through in supnort of the right, that our soldiers have fomrht for us a clean fight, and have on every field kept i our honour bright. But there can be no depth or reality in our gratitude were it not profoundly touched with sorrow first for those among our own people who have had taken from them the lives of those they held most dear. For them the compensations of victory for the moment seem but as Deaa Sea fruit. For them only the healing hand of Time can be hoped t>. bring pride in their lost ones to’ the conquest of grief. Nor can our sentiment of gratitude reach its pro per pitch unless it is accentuated by a mental contrast of our own happy conditions with th<; misery to which so many millions, both of the countries who fought with us and of the countries for whom we fought, have been and are still subjected. Belgium. France, Italy, Serbia, Rumania. all have fougKt staunchly and stubbornly beside us, and are now finally relieved from the terrors and inflictions of invasion and enemy occupation only to find themselves with millions of their populations whose domestic and industrial life has nearly been crushed out of them by cruelties, oppressions, and robberies untold. Before them lie still years of tribulation and trial, assuaged only by the consciousness that they are at least free to set about the tremendous task of restoration, and by the hope, which must not In’ disappointed, of substantial heirfrom, friends less pitifully placed.

Of all our old Allies, towards none need more acute sympathy be felt than towards the now helpless millions who at the outbreak of the war were subjects of the Tsar of Russia. For them peace is not yet. nor is it in definite sight. Freeing themselves from a tyranny* that had lasted many centuries, they have but fallen into another whose career, brief and all as in the nature of things it must be, has been already marked by a rapid sucession of hor-ror-inspiring tragedies, played in the name of Liberty, such as could only have been possible among ;• people so long accustomed to subservience to autocratic rule. But no. such mad And malignant fever as now* possesses the body politic of Russia can last for very long, and it may be hoped that it is already working itself out, and that sane political consciousness will, ere many months pass, follow on an emergence from the insane delirium now posses sing a section of the people. Such ghastly ebullitions of apparently insensate human rage have, more than once before now, been the strang - precursors of sound liberty based q>i trulv democratic government. We may thus hope that history will her., again repeat itself, and leave the regime of Lenin and Trotsky but the evil dream which the early stages o) the French Revolution would i.uw seem to have been but that the pages of history tell us of its blood-stained reality. Tn no way can we deem sincere our gratitude for the peace which now follows on victory did we for a moment forget that the people still in tlie throes of revolution eon tributed. and at what cost no ere? can yet say, -very largely, though it seems so lone ago, to the factors of ultimate success. Remembering this, it must seem to most of us. though evidently not to all, that the deliberate abandonment- of the great mass of the Russian people to any fate that may await them is not merely base ingratitude, amid all our pro--fessions of thankfulness, but an act of downright treachery to an Ally ‘who helped us so much to the winning of the war.