“WHAT'S THAT TO US?”

New Zealand Times, Volume XLII, Issue 9619, 27 March 1917, Page 2

“WHAT'S THAT TO US?”

ARE THERE ANY PEOPLE LIKE THIS IN NEW ZEALAND? They stood arm-in-arm, a man and a "irl, and watched the latest developments of the international situation as related in the lines flashed on a newspaper bulletin board. Both were very smart, in the ultra-smart, too-highly manicured way. Her body was tip-tilt-ed on patent leather heels; lus face was pink with a pink that didn't come from the biting wind. After a few minutes said he: "Shucks! What's the war to As? Let’s go in where it’s warm and have a drink.” “What’s that to us? : It s the attitude, spoken or implied, of many toward most of the facts and, problems of life. Just yesterday there was a story in the “Globe” which told of a girl' who tried to take a starving old woman, trembling iu her insufficient rags, into a Broadway restaurant to buy her food. The proprietor denied them admission. He allowed only “respectable” people in his place, he said. The old woman was starving, but what was that to him? The men and women of the warring countries had that attitude, too, and then war, which had been but the shadow of a shadow of a cloud, was upon them, and those who had said “What’s that to us?” found that it was to them what it was to every one e ] se _ a calamity and a horror and a nightmare. It brought them, it seems, to themselves. It developed their latent heroism, and capacity for accomplishment. and sacrifice, and devotion. War may come to this country, and it may not. No one knows to-day, but to-morrow we may know. Whether or not it comes, the situation has within itself at the present time potentialities of the gravest moment. Who are we that dare to say in complacence, "What’s that to us?”—New York “Globe.”