The Old Year and the New

Manawatu Times, Volume LV, Issue 7044, 31 December 1932, Page 8

The Old Year and the New

(Mr. H. E. Holland, Loader of the Opposition, lias released to the press the following New Year's message.) A Happy New Year to every man, woman, and child in the Dominion and beyond it.

J..„only wish that tho goodwill of every-.. New Year greeting could be translated into practical effect. There is none among us who will not devoutly hopo that the year about to be born will bring to every homo a fuller measure of prosperity and happiness than that experienced during tho year siowly dying . It is for the people in the mass to decide whether or not this shall be.

in the middle of last century, more than eighty years ago, Lord Tennyson published the greatest of all his poems —“ln Memoriam. ” This immortal contribution to the literary splendour of the Nineteenth Century was without any doubt whatever mado under the influence of the prevailing economic and political conditions, and its message still rings for the perplexed and threatened nations of the Twentieth Century, l-’amine —in part due to tho failure of the potato crop in parts of Central Europe and Ireland but also prevalent where available food supplies were withheld—ravaged thickly populated areas, cutting wide swathes of death in the ranks of the people. Unrest, bringing national explosions, was inevitable. The revolutionary wave that rose in Erance in the spring of ISIS, lifted Louis Philippe off the throne, set up the second Republic, and swept across the Rhine provinces. The barricades were reared in the streets of Berlin, and the guns thundered there on March IS, when the Prussian monarch found himself compelled to yield, for the time being at any rate, to the demands of the people. In Ireland the people were dying faster than coffins could be found for their burial. In England want and misery, with no hope of Parliamentary redress, invaded almost every home of the common people; and the revolutionary spirit engendered by these conditions was finding a more or less menacing expression in the historic Chartist movement. Is it then, to be wondered at that Britain’s greatest poet of that day should have envisioned “wild hours that fly with hope and fear,” or that he should have beheld “Time, a maniac scattering dust, And Life a Fury slinging flame.” The stanzas, “Bing out, wild bells, to the wild sky!” embodied, as I read them, the great poet’s earnest protest against the wide-spread grief that was sapping the mind of tho nation! tho feud of rich and poor ,thc false pride in place and blood, the class antagonisms that grew out of and rested on economic foundations; the want, the care, the sin, the old shapes of foul disease, that were likewise economically foundationed; the narrowing lust of gold, the wickedness of war, the darkness of the land! It was, moreover,- a call -for a higher state of society—a loftier social consciousness: “Bing out the old, ring in the new, Ring'out the false, ring in the true! ” Bing in the love of truth and right — the common love of good, the thousand years of peace, the Christ that is to be! As I have said, that message still rings for the Twentieth Century. The conditions that called it forth in 1850 are intensified a thousand-fold in the hours of daylight and dark that hover between the- passing of 1932 and the advent of 1933. The danger of national explosion was never greater than now; for it is foreign to both human nature and the British character quietly to allow women and children to starve while plenty abounds.' Lord Melchett is right when he declares that, in a world laden with wealth, great masses of the population are living in the worst degree of poverty' and in the most pitiable circumstances; he is right when he asserts that the world’s stocks of all the principal necessities of life are greater than they have ever been before, and

Mr. H. E. Holland’s Message

that the command which man has over the forces and resources of Nature is greater than during any previous period in history; he • is. abundantly right when he insists that there is not tho slightest need for the appalling poverty that is now prevalent. What Lord Melchett says of world conditions is equally true of Now Zealand conditions.

Never in this country’s history have the Christmas bells pealed and the Christmas carols been sung to an accompaniment of such uupareileled want and misery as in this year of 1932.

Likewise, never has any country presented a more amazing paradox. Poverty and hunger of women and children in a land in which the necessaries of life are produced in greater abundanco than ever before. Primary producers, manufacturers, wholesalers, and retailers unablo to sell their goods, and faced with bankruptcy and ruin in consequence. Families starving because they cannot purchase- the goods which these others have to sell. Starvation in the midst of teeming plenty because willing men are denied the right to work and earn the purchasing power that would enable them to provido for tho needs of themselves and their dependents.

This has been the bitter experience of tens of thousands of our people in 1932. Will the experience be repeated in 1933? That is for the people to say. What is happening to-day is wholly unnecessary.. It constitutes the elimination of all the elements of common sense from our acts of national administration; it abrogates all that is best in our common humanity; it involves the negation of every side of Christianity-

The apologies for the existing conditions rest their case on a perpetuation ;>f the age-long perversion that fate has ordained that poverty, hunger, and misery must be endured in the midst of plenty —that economic laws are beyond the collective control of the community. In some- cases they rely on the monstrous falsehood that want and hunger, with no shortage of life’s necessities, is the will of the Most High God. It is nowhere denied that production is greater now than ever before. The orly problem is that of distribution; and that is no insurmountable problem unless we insist that the nation must continue to place the profit-making interests of the Financial Institutions and Money Barons as a class before the interests of the people as a whole. On the day that we are prepared to enter upon a comprehensive scheme of industrial reconstruction, with the machinery of credit and currency .systematically operated in line with the goods produced and services rendered, we shall take the road that leads to the solution of our distributive problems arising out of inadequate purchasing power. In this connection, Sir Basil Blacket is correct wnert, in his Halley Stewart lecture, he says: “In view of what we have done with currency, and what currency has done with us in the past twenty years, we arc all of us fit for the lunatic asylum.”

The Hon. Mr. Downie Stewart see 3 in the present situation the possibility cf the collapse of the whole capitalist system. In my opinion, we are now experiencing a complete breakdown of capitalism, and there is no way out except by the road of social endeavour. Let the anti-social elements protest as they will, the choice is between methodical and orderly social processes undertaken by the collectivity of the people and the earthquake and thunder of physical force upheavals. The deepest thinkers will stand for the social and consequently orderly methods. Tennyson sings:. “Well roars the storm to those that hear A deeper voice across the storm.” —a deeper voice proclaiming that social truth and justice shall prevail. It 'will be well if that deeper voice is heard by the nation as a whole.