HISTORY’S WARNING

Taranaki Daily News, 11 May 1933, Page 15

HISTORY’S WARNING

NEW ZEALAND DID NOT HEED.

THE UNEMPLOYED PROBLEM. “Looking at our own country, I confess I do not see any clear sign of better days,” said the Rt. Rev. T. H. Sprott, Bishop of Wellington, in his presidential address at the opening of the annual Synod of the Wellington diocese of the Church of England on Tuesday. “Our greatest and most urgent problem, unemployment, seems to be as far from solution as ever,” said his Lordshin. “The legislation is now in force, and all people of good-will must earnestly hope that it will bring to the country the benefit it was designed to bring. No doubt it has brought, or will bring, relief to many; but I think that, looking at thp country as a whole, the relief given is in part delusive. I mean that in part it has meant little more than the transference of the burden from one set of shoulders to another set of shoulders, little, if at all. more able to bear it. The notion which is floating about that all the people who invest money are people of large means, who, after all curtailments and deductions, have still an,ample or at least a sufficient margin left, is, of course, ridiculous. The fact is that large numbers of investors are people of small means, who, through long years of work and careful living, have managed to save a few hundreds or have acquired a little house property as a provision for old age. In tire best of times these people have but a narrow margin; in such times as these it altogether disappears. I mention this because I think the special Hardship of such people has not been sufficiently recognised. They for the most part do not loudly complain, and so do not receive much sympathy. “Sometimes—l do not say always—this severe limitation of choice is due to some previous misdoing or folly. I believe it is so, at least to a considerable extent, in our present evil plight. I do not forget that we are involved in a world calamity which is beyond our control. Still I believe that, to a . greater degree than we like to admit, our plight is due to our own fault. Just think! Here we are, a community numbering 1,500,000 all told. We own a country won for us by the patient endurance of privations, the brave defiance of dangers, by the early pioneers, long since forgotten. It is a country of great natural resources capable . of maintaining a much larger population. It is also a country with a climate which, notwithstanding its vagaries, conduces to a somewhat pleasure-lov-ing life. We discovered that money could be borrowed in abundance. We borrowed freely. I do not say that this money, so easily acquired, was wholly misspent, but I believe much of it was. In all the luxuries and amenities of life we would' raise our sparsely populated and undeveloped country to a level which it took older countries centuries to reach.

“I believe not a little of the .borrowing wealth was utterly wasted. This might have been all very well if ■ national prosperity were a constant quantity, subject to no fluctuations. “We were,” concluded Bishop Sprott, “unheedful of ones of the most certain lessons of history—perhaps we imagined that the past had nothing to teach a young democracy in a new country —the lesson that, as the natural year has its seasonal changes, so likewise the greater year of national history; that sooner or later there come—there- must come—times when rains descend, and floods come, and winds blow and beat upon the house of a nation s life; and then, if that house be ill-founded or carelessly built, it must fall, and the crash is great. As yet that last stage of calamity has not ' befallen us; but I suspect that, if we knew all, we should discover that we had been nearer to it —perhaps are still nearer to it—than we thought or think. Well were it if we should lay to heart the lesson before it is too late. We need—imperatively need—to consider our ways.”