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Hokitika Guardian, 23 September 1937, Page 4

Tmk present will by future historians l>v called ‘‘The Ago of Fear, ’ writes Mr Philip Guedalla in the Listener. Ho imagines a historian writing 100 years lienee as follows:—There could be no doubt about it. The world of 19117 was badly soared—and showed it. Fear was the leading motive of its actions and the chief propelling power of its public. Other ages have been aeturrted by faith, like the highest, moments of the Middle Ages, or by hope, like the glorious expansion of the Renaissance when the world broke hounds toward the West and > he Elizabethans sailed in the wake of 'he great Spanish navigators into the New World. Hope was still burning bright before them as the men of the Eighteenth Century stumbled toward freedom in the great revolutions which set up the United States and brought down the Bastille. There was something there for men to hope for - and 1 hey were lioping still through the imxt hundred years, as nation after nation and cl after class struggled to he free. Tint in 19:17 faith burned low in spite of desperiate attempts by few sectaries to fan the flame. Vast ingenuity was displayed in organising immense public demonstrations in which huge masses of people testified to their belief in something which was imperfectly explained to them by simple movements of the arm or fingers

But government by gesticulation was a poor substitute for faith. And as for hope, by which the world had been brought slowly forward into the sunlight of a freer life and gradually mounting standards of human comfort --hope in 1937 had contracted lo a narrow aspiration to he let alone. Compared with the brisk ages that had gone before; it almost seemed as though something in the mind ol man was numbed: and the leading figures of the time, measured by any standard, were completely unheroic. Some of them were frightened and said so frankly; while others, who .vert' just as frightened, shouted very loudly indeed in a vague hope that if they made sufficient noise somebody else might he more frightened still. But all of them were uniformly seared.