The Manawatu Daily Times The Past Teaches Us

Manawatu Times, Volume LIV, Issue 7191, 24 June 1933, Page 6

The Manawatu Daily Times The Past Teaches Us

It is well that we should be reminded occasionally that there is nothing new under the sun—even in slumps and depressions. And Professor Elder has been doing valuable service in this matter in Dunedin by pointing out in a. lecture, “The Aftermath of Waterloo,” that the troubles we have been passing through have happened many times before.

We cannot do more than quote a few sentences from Professor Elder’s address to show liow the thing that is, which has most power to dismay us when it seems unprecedented, is the thing that has been. In the twenty-two years’ war with Napoleon the national debt of Great Britain was nearly quadrupled. The post-war situation was profoundly affected by the economic revolution produced by changes in the methods of agriculture and manufacture. Even the machine is so far from being a peculiar product of our own times that in 1816 it was stated that the cotton mills of Great Britain were then producing as much as could be made by eighty millions of operatives working by hand. The war was a time of: wealth, and its aftermath years of poverty, financial crises, and unemployment. Then, as now, while times were good, farmers acted as if high prices would be a permanent feature of their lives, and adopted a style of living modelled on that of the squires. The dole, in its worst shape, made a chief incentive to irresponsibility and idleness on the part of thousands, though the dole, in an older form, has been praised by Trevelyan as saving England from a revolution like the French.

“The world situation was full of promise for Britain. . . ■. The situation at Home in 1815, however (and for long years afterwards) left the statesmen with scarcely a thought to spare for Imperial concerns.” The masses of those days thought that all would be well when they had their due place in Parliament. They control it now, but salvation has not. been found. In 1840 —nearly 100 years ago—Louis Blanc, in France, was preaching Mr. Neilson’s engaging maxim: “To each according to his needs and from each according to his capacity.” It was not a new maxim then. A pretence was made of trying it, by means of national workshops, which were a ghastly failure.

The world is very old. It is a fashion to think and talk as if it had had no crises and no depressions until this generation began. Sensationalism is the vogue. Cataclysmic beliefs seem to be almost as popular in politics as they were formerly in theology. We can distrust statesments about the “greatest crisis that the world has ever known”; civilisation, or even the capitalist system, being on its last legs; the “most vital conference Avhich has ever been held.” There were pretty bad crises, presumably, when the Vandals and the Goths swept over Europe; when the Black Death ravaged it, destroying more than half the population of England; when the Turks reached Vienna; when the Thirty Years’ War, which was not limited to one country, wiped out more than half the population of Germany by famine, pestilence, or the sword. Civilisation could survive those dangers, and the prospect is that it will survive again

Swift endings by catastrophe seldom happen. The history of man from his beginning has been one of adjustment to new conditions. On the face of it, that is what is happening now. The world has shrunk in size. Nations must live together. Older nationalism has to reconcile itself to a new internationalism. But if cataclysm is a danger it is still avertible. The world has had wrong ideals. “What we must do now,” says a Russian writer, “is to save the freedom of the human spirit. Christendom is again face to face with the question of whether it takes Christianity seriously, and really intends to strain its will towards the actual practice of Christianity. . . . Christianity is returning to the situation it 'was in before Constantine; it must again set out to conquer the world.” That is precisely the moral which Dr. Elder has drawn from his study of the past.