A SHAKING WORLD

Hawke's Bay Tribune, Volume XXIV, Issue 80, 16 March 1934, Page 5

A SHAKING WORLD

MAN MUST BUILD ANEW “The Old Things Are Dead” A CALL UPON GOODWILL There are so many factors contained in the problems facing the world to-day, said Archdeacon K. E. Maclean, of Havelock North, in an address to the Hastings Rotary Club to-day, that it is difficult to appraise them properly, and the position is so intricate that nobody speaking of it could be dogmatic. It seemed to be necessary to realise that mankind were like fishes swimming in a sea of the thought of today. Perhaps the presence of that sea was not realised. Furthermore, there was a refraction of light in that sea, ■and perhaps we did not realise that that angle of refraction affected our vision. There was a time when men thought it right to own slaves, or to torture or hang men for petty crimes. Those men were no les worthy and no less wise and upright than ourselves. We convicted them of wrong-thinking, but what would the future say of us? We were inclined to think that today we were living in a world of enlightenment and humaneness, but our conceit received a nasty blow when the World War broke out. But we got round that by “putting it on to Germany.” Suppose that the facts force us to the conclusion that no trade revival will be of use unless it is a world-wide revival—and the League of Nations returns showed that there had been no improvement. It had been shown that the world's work, efficiently organised, could be done in five hours a day so far as production was concerned, and soon that period would shrink to four hours, and then to three. Under our present system, prosperity depended upon a scarcity of something somewhere. There was at one time a great field of trade to be exploited, and trade and population went on expanding, with ever-improving methods of production, until the point of saturation was reached; and then Asia found it own Manchester and its own Birmingham. After the war, spending-power decreased, and as spending-power decreased unemployment increased. Today there were probably 100,000,000 people segregated into a life m which they were made to feel that the world had no use for them. If those things were true—if the old world were gone—it was time to stop tinkering, and to plan the world anew. It was not the part of intelligent men to try to make an unworkable machine go. There was going to be a tremendous call on goodwill, on boundless courage, and on infinite patience. Without religion, those things would fail. “It does seem of first-rate importance,” said the Archdeacon, “to realise that tho old world is dead, and that a new world must be built.” The three-hour working-day would come eventually, and there would not be so great a need to educate people to earn a living. Mankind would then, more than ever before, have to find a reason for living. Most men earned money by drudgery, and man had to tnake enough money by drudgery to make his leisure a time of pleasantness. Education in the future would have to be designed to teach people how to use their leisure, and that would mean a great revolution in social thought and habit. “I do not put these things before you to make you feel gloomy,” the Archdeacon added, “but to make you think of them. Do not forget that although the sun is shining here, there are in England 200,000 youths between the ages of 18 and 20 who have never done a day’s work in their lives, and countless more older men who never will do another day’s work. “The world is shaking under our feet, and we must set about building it anew. It depends upon ourselves whether we start out for a new heaven, or whether we start out for a new hell.’'