POSITIVE CAUSE

Timaru Herald, Volume CXLVIII, Issue 21805, 7 November 1940, Page 7

POSITIVE CAUSE

Empire’s Part In Victory British Official Wireless RUGBY, November 4 Discussing war aims in an Empire broadcast, the Under-Secretary of State for Air (Captain H. H. Balfour) said he believed that one aim was clear and universal to all—the defeat of Nazi Germany, but the British ought not to confine themselves to saying that Nazism and all it stands for must be destroyed. “The young men of the Royal Air Force—the youth of the British Commonwealth of Nations—are fighting to win the war, which must secure the shape of the world to come,” he declared. “We are fighting for a positive cause with a future, and not merely a negative cause with a past. We must never talk or think as if we were trying to save some dusty old code of living which is on its last legs. I would like our young airmen to feel that the glorious achievement in which they are taking part is not merely a struggle to keep what we have. It is a struggle to keep the future safe. Let the past take care of itself. “Even though every material memorial of our past were effaced we know that we are fighting for a just and mighty order which will still be possible in Britain and the Empire. Our cause does not depend upon the ghosts of lovely old London which bombs may batter, but upon the living vitality which we will build anew. It is not over the wicked vandalism of damaged St. Paul’s that we must weep, but rather over the death of even one young man who might have ouilt a new St. Paul’s. “When we used the word democracy it is not with thoughts of the mellow evening of days gone by, but of the dawn of something so tremendous in opportunities that its glare can dazzle our eyes. The young men of our Empire who are defending freedom for the world to-day are the ones to whom we must look in shaping the world to come. We shall have as great a need in peace as in war of their services.”