NOTES AND COMMENTS

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXVIII, Issue 23880, 3 February 1941, Page 4

NOTES AND COMMENTS

UNDOING CIVILISATION In the course of a very short despatch from Athens, says the Times' Literary Supplement, the following places were named as possible objectives of the new drive to undo the arts of civilisation: Athens, Ophakmia, Samothrace, Lemnos, Mitylene. Chois, Crete, the Cyclades. ami some others almost as evocative. ICach, it would be thought, is a name with power enough in itself to exorcise the forces of barbarism. And it may prove to be so. There can he no country on earth without citizens who, knowing how profoundly the thought and behaviour of mankind have been affected by the unique services of Greece to the. world, are not shocked by this fresh eruption of the evil spirit that has betrayed Europe and corrupted Rome into a capital of treachery. Hitler and Mussolini are prolific in these symbolic acts to make clear the kind of New Order they seek to impose.

BOMBING REPRISALS All the evidence that exists appears to indicate that indiscriminate bombing of civilians only intensifies whatever determination to endure they may already possess, savs the Church Times. The bombing of defenceless people in Spain and of still more defenceless people in China raised rather than diminished their lighting spirit. Since the days of Queen Elizabeth British morale has never stood higher than it stands to-day. It is a colossal assumption that the long-suffering German helot could be intimidated to forswear his idols by the bursting of a bomb. Civilians are in fact being killed and wounded every night in Germany. This is the result of attacks directed against targets commonly recognised as of military importance. The civilian is in the front, line in Germany no less than in England. If the suffering which he is now undergoing has not broken his lighting spirit and efficiency we gravely doubt whether his collapse would be brought about by arbitrary extension of his pain and loss. Moreover, there is real substance in the argument that, whatever measure of reprisal may be taken, the Nazi barbarism will always go one worse, and that for Britain to embark on the attempt to out-Herod Herod can only lead to the most vicious spiral of brutality without gaining any relative advantage.

THE LOVE OF FREEDOM When a citizen once has known freedom. tasted of its self-respecting blessings. lie can never again be entirely craven. Never can he be regimented in mind and enslaved in body, writes Mr. William Allen White in the New York I'imes, There is .something biological in the thing called ''human nature." some dynamic force inherent in a society of free men which resists retrogressive change, socially, politically and in economic areas —a lowered living standard, for example. A nation or a race that has once known liberty is in continual rebellion when liberty is denied to it. There is the final guar-

nntee against a totalitarian world. The final defence of democracy as a -world order must be this: Democracy may tail in battle, but it will triumph in peace. Human nature cannot be chained. The evolutionary processes ol democracy cannot be thrown into reverse for long. Tyrants always have fallen. The lands they have ruled always have revolted. Patience will leaven the lump of any dictator's victory with a love of justice. The gun, the tank, the bombing aeroplane mav mow down men by the hundred thousand, but all the implements of wrath have never conquered a human spirit They never have finally overthrown any democratic people. PROGRESS EVEN IN WARTIME "The need is not for any premature reordering of the structure of Europe, but for a deliberate attempt to ensure that the weaknesses which the war lias uncovered in our own strcture shall be permanently repaired," said Mr. J. B. Priestley, the novelist, in a recent, interview. "We cannot prove that democracy is the key to progress by standing still. The English people has not often been in as ready a mood as it is to-day. We are presented with a matchless opportunity to get things done that would otherwise be wrangled over for a generation —to get them done, what is more, by the general consent of all the people. Reforms as large as woman suffrage and as small as daylight saving arose naturally out of the exigencies of the. last war; there are many others of the kind to be garnered today. Nor will they wait until after we have won. Disillusion always comes with peace; there was many times as much social progress registered in 1917 and 1918 as in a whole post-war decade. We must not be content with defending a Maginot Line of freedom; we must, sound the advance in every field at once. It will be hard at times, this year, to remember that we are helping to make a better world: but we can at least take steps to be sure that we are assisting at the planning of a better Britain. The call for action 011 the reform front is a verv real one, and it will grow more and more insistent as time goes on."