THE H.B. TRIBUNE WEDNESDAY. NOVEMBER 13, 1929 THE REBUILDERS

Hawke's Bay Tribune, Volume XIX, Issue 282, 13 November 1929, Page 6

THE H.B. TRIBUNE WEDNESDAY. NOVEMBER 13, 1929 THE REBUILDERS

It is, of course, entirely natural and proper that on Armistice Day the minds of the Allied Nations involved in the Great War should be turned almost exclusively to thoughts of gratitude to those who fought the great fight for them and brought it to a successful conclusion. Theirs was the great risk and the great sacrifice, and to them are our chief thanks due for leaving us with our freedom to set about the work of reconstruction in our own way. But, as a recent English review writer suggests, the survivors of the War who have been doing and are still doing that work should not be altogether overlooked. He claims that the credit is not to be given to any Government that civilisation did not disappear from Europe during the years immediately succeeding the Armistice. Rather was its salvation due to “the individual man and woman, creatures of habit and convention, who carried on after the guns had ceased firing, who with a. dtuqd imud went the,

daily round as before the cataclysm.” It was this great mass movement, almost unconscious in its impulse, which held the peoples of Europe more or less steady until those in authority could collect their forces and lay the foundations of a new structure. It was on the basis of old fundamental traditions, now apt to be derided by a young and inexperienced cult without background, that the rebuilding of the social edifice was undertaken and has been well started. No doubt many grievous errors were made m the task of adapting them to the new circumstances and demands of the day. But, on the whole, it may be said that greater progress has been made during the past ten years than seemed possible to those who fully realised the effects of the tremendous shake civilisation had sustained. It is doubtful, indeed, whether many of us here fully grasp the significance of the physical and ethical changes that the War has brought about. But it is at least a partial realisation by those on the other side of the world which is now impelling humanity to safeguard itself against a recurrence of the grosser mistakes of the pre-war past.

“The nations,” says the English writer quoted, “build monuments to great soldiers who have been skilled in handling great armies and awful instruments of war. It is possible that in the future the nations will build monuments to the men who have tried to make the instruments of war superfluous and have shown skill in the handling of the instruments of peace for the good of all mankind.” Many, indeed most, of these men are still alive. Some there are whose names are household words both nationally and internationally, but there arc numberless others that have been at work, foreseeing the need for years of patient and persistent labour against tremendous odds. Politicians have come and gone, but these men, in the comparative obscurity of private or business life, have worked on towards the ends which the nations are only now beginning to understand were the ultimate goals of all the conferences, discussions and agreements of the past decade. It is specially well for us that we should realise all that has been so slowly achieved in the past, now that, under happier and easier conditions. things seem to be moving so much more rapidly in the right direction. Even the earlier mistakes that were made have not been without their use, for they serve now for' beacons warning us away from ascertained dangers. What may be hoped is that those who now find themselves in charge may not, from over-confidence in their own wisdom, run into others in the different courses they are adopting.