POST-WAR PROBLEMS.

Kaikoura Star, Volume LXIV, Issue 61, 7 August 1944, Page 4

POST-WAR PROBLEMS.

THREE GREAT TASKS. General .Tan Smuts, in a speech delivered in Birmingham- England, is reported by Renter’s, as follows: I put the problem of Europe, of her salvanging and rehabilitation, first in our programme of world reconstrucstruetion after this war. She must not be carved up, atomised and reduced to a helpless chaos of fragments. Rather should she receive a new stable structure as a United States or Commonwealth of Europe. And in the making of this new structure, this island with its unique position should play its proper leading part. Second on our postwar peace pro-

grannie I would place the question of establishing a world organisation for security against war. It will almost inevitably be an improved and reformed version of the old League of Nations. That brave and l brilliant improvisation failed in part, largely because it was not clothed with sufficient authority and coercive power to maintain peace. Next time the responsibility should be placed on those who have power, and the Great Powers who won the war should l»e made responsible in the first instance for keeping peace—at least for the transition period until a more permanent scheme for effective supervision could be worked out. But even iiiove may be needed for a peaceful worlcl order of the future. A new world organisation for peace should also be supported and buttress-

ed by appropriate regional groupings, or by other friendly associations among nations, whose traditions or comradeships in the world war would qualify them as supporters of world security.

Such, for instance, would be the fruitful association which has grown up between the United States and the British Commonwealth of Nations during this war—in many ways the most valuable by-product of the war. Understandings and co-operation which have grown up between these two groups form perhaps the most promising and lasting development of this war.

It may yet prove the turning point in history and become the most valuable force behind a new world organisation and world progress generally. But let there be nothing exclusive about it and let it not exclude close

collaboration with Russia. Thus would arise a triple bulwark of Great Powers against aggression. The phenomenal rise of Russia need not frighten the world. She has her part to play in a new comity of nations. She has arisen from vast purifying upheaval and sufferings and has still her great contribution to make to human history. But there is a third and no less important task before us. We must prepare for the new era—for the age of mp.n, the common man, the man whom in Lincoln’s homely humorous phrase God loves because he has so many of them. From the beginning of this century, oar generation has been scourged one war after the other. Our conscje is becoming seared. Our sense of p and sympathy is deadened.

Whole populations are decimated and one reads every morning, without pausing to think, of the number shot overnight in occupied countries. After the last war we erected monuments to the Unknown Soldier as representative of nameless heroes sacrificed in bloody slaughters of that war. And shall we not after this war

erect a monument to the common man, as representative of the men, women, and children of the civilian populations who paid the penalty and bore the sufferings for the sins and shortcomings of our western civilisation!

And should that iijeinorial not take the form of a better social order of society, with higher standards of living, with more social justice and security and of better opportunities for life! Throughout all the civilised world it is felt to-day that much of the unrest which culminates in modern war originates in wrong social and economic conditions, and that to yombat wai and aggression effectively these conditions will have to be dealt with in fundamental reforms.

Where we failed 25 years ago we may now hope to succeed after bitter experience, not only of this war but of Ihe postwar social and economic troubles which overtook us in the years between the two wars. And so from the ruins of this war will arise a new monument to man, the common man, which will record the passing of an era—the era of social indifference and the coming of the new age with its higher standard of social responsibility of every citizen born into our society. War will thus become but a stage, a passing stage, for man in his long nprch to better society and a richer life. So may it be. And so the greatest world war may perhaps further the greatest peace.