Timely Topics

Northern Advocate, 25 January 1940, Page 4

Timely Topics

“Busy though they are in so many other directions,” asserts the "Sunday Times” (.London), “Ministers can

Bureaucrat's in WARTIME.

hardly afford to delay longer a critical over-

haul of the mistakes which during the past two months the bureaucracy has committed in their name.

“In the early days of the war orders and more or less inevitably, were poured cut in a flood, of which it was impossible that full account should be taken even by the Minister responsible in each case, let lalone by the Cabinet or the House of ■ Commons.

! ,“The resulting mischiefs are. in no* ia few instances, enormous, and in fmany others serious and indefensible |The case for stopping them is urgent, rßut the difficulty is, that in setting tup controllers, and the bureaucratic iinterests now rooted in thousands of 4 new posts will need to be uprooted. I “Civil servants have the defects of | their qualities; good administrators fare apt to be ambitious, and their de|sire to expend their jurisdiction is | too seldom tempered by any familifarity with the methods and main- | springs of non-governmental business, |or with the delicate interdependence !of its workings.” ? Sf Si v *

| “We all long for peace, but are wo i prepared to pay the price of peace? 1 “ It will be a costly business. It may mean the surrender

THE PEACE QUEST.

of part of their national sovereignty oy all nations. It will

mean faking the profits out of .war. It will also mean moral and spiritual rearmament in our own lives. “We have not felt the need for peace deeply enough. The*great vision has never impassioned our hearts or burned like a fire in our bones. We have not felt keenly enough the pain and anguish and vast burdens of the world’s woe. “We have not realised deeply enough the blackness of the shadow that lies’over the. homes of humanity and across the faces of our children. If the populations of so-called Christian countries are shrinking, perhaps one reason is that parents refuse to nurture their sons for the shambles.

“Until we realise the desperate need for peace it will continue to elude us. ft is not enough to sign pacts and agreements, though these have a certain value. It is not enough to deal with emergencies as and when they arrive, though men are thankful for the respite that is often gained. Something far more indeed is required. Nothing less than, a thoroughgoing transformation of the human spirit will suffice.”—From “All Things Are Yours,” a book of sermons by the Rev. Dr. John Short, of Bournemouth.