A LOST OPPORTUNITY.

Te Aroha News, Volume XLI, Issue 6599, 14 May 1925, Page 8

A LOST OPPORTUNITY.

When the summing up of historical facts of our. troubled times takes place in the centuries to come posterity may learn where the nations lost themselves after the Great War. Today we are too near the event to get perspective. Only this is patent: Somewhere and somehow a great opportunity has been lost, and opportunity knocks but once. Time was when conquering kings summed up their tale of armed forces and x manhood, and the power to control governed the chances of successful defence or aggression. The chivalry of battle has gone; the day of the strong arm and the high heart has passed. The call to arms, which a few centuries ago was a matter of months, now comes in the twinkling of an eye. The bow and the spear have given place to the machine gun and the red artillery, which shakes the heavens. Now the day of the great gun passes and the chemist, to whom the shades of all the Borgias should bow before, surpasses all dreams of slaughter. If judgment follows cats, the great nations stand to-day condemned as the greatest felons of all recorded time. We hold up our hands in pious horror when we read of persons done to death by poison or by the knife, and yet the nations delight to honour the man who invents the indiscriminate poison as which kills, irrespective of age, sex, or condition, the innocent and guilty alike. What sublimated hypocrisy is this Not a day passes but some open or veiled threat of discoveries of science for the extermination of all living beings is flashed over the cables or pollutes the free air of heaven. What farce is this disarmament which theorists preach? To-day we prohibit dum-dum bullets and countenance poison gas; to-morrow we condemn battleships and embark on submarine and aerial enterprises of destruction that beggar description. A peaceful agrarian nation (if such a thing as a peaceful'nation exists) can be wiped out by the scientifically equipped industrial nation in almost a day with not a hope of retaliation. What a situation for the gods to look upon! What a monstrous reflection on Christians who profess to take faith, hope- and charity as their motto! The whole political world is focussed upon a state of war. It is compelling it. What international folly is driving the people of the world to destruction when there is no cause individually Our talk of peace is as the chattering of sparrows on the housetop, an empty formula. Much tends to promote the opposite condition. The martial policies of the world expressed in the assassin’s form of poison gas would have been condemned in the worst period of the worst regime known in historical records. The nations prate of national honour, of an enlightened civilisation, and degrade the name of humanity to the level that only a Theristes could describe, or for which a Dante could find a "*>