“The Good Earth”

Northern Advocate, 18 November 1941, Page 4

“The Good Earth ”

THE Governor-General, Sir Cyril Newall, in a recent speech, stressed the value to any country of a strong rural community, and expressed the hope that there would be a movement back to the land both in New Zealand and in Britain. “The farming community in any land,” he said, “always had a stabilising influence, perhaps because their closeness to Nature saved their sense of ultimate values from many of the prevalent distortions.”

Commenting upon Sir Cyril’s words, the “Evening Post” gave them hearty support. It says that though New Zealand has done violence to the land in the past, we yet retain something of an inherited affection for a life lived on the land, and can even understand the Chinese veneration for “the good earth.” Farming, says the “Post,” now may be organised and mechanised, but it can never be divorced from Nature, and it must constantly foster those qualities of sturdy independence and self-reliance that make a nation. Sometimes we may fear if these qualities are maintained, when farmers call for State intervention to pull them out of the morass of mortgages in which their folly has plunged them. But that is when farmers forget farming and turn to speculation. Their innate sense is proved when, no matter how mortgaged, they yet cling to “the good earth,” their constant livelihood.