MANY LOYALTIES

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXII, Issue 22193, 21 August 1935, Page 14

MANY LOYALTIES

CONFLICT UNNECESSARY OVERSEAS LEAGUE ADDRESS That the ever-widening circle of loyalties to which everyone is committed in modern life need not necessarily conflict was claimed by Mr. J. W. Shaw in a luncheon address to the Overseas League yesterday. Judgments were greatly influenced by these loyalties, and often life was a compromise between opposing ones. There was no reason why they should not be made to co-operate. Ihe more fully one developed the highest ideals within oneself, the more one contributed in loyalty to the family. The two ideals need not conflict. It was similar with the family and the community, the city and the Dominion. On a wider view again, the best contribution New Zealanders could make to the British Commonwealth of Nations was to do everything possible to increase the Dominion's prosperity. A further loyalty was that owed to the whole world to advance the brotherhood of man and cut down the vertical divisions of nationalism and the equally watertight horizontal divisions of class. Here again loyalties need not conflict. This object "could best be achieved by supporting the Empire and consolidating the things for which it stood, and not by seeing good in every other country but one's own.

Mr. Shaw claimed that it was impossible to deny Imperial citizenship and yet remain a citizen of some part of the Empire. Inevitably the one privilege involved the acceptance of full Imperial citizenship, with all its obligations, including that of supporting Britain in war, as the Rt. Hon. G. W. Forbes had stated recently.