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Timaru Herald, Volume CLI, Issue 22203, 21 February 1942, Page 4

Peace and happiness are not dependent on materials other than those to sustain life and promote health, writes Mr Frank S. Smythe, the great Alpine and Himalayan climber, in his new book “The Mountain Vision,” This great fact has yet to be realised in the West. Yet it is beginning to be realised. Man is becoming more and more conscious of his environment. He sees himself not as some slave to material circumstance, but as a free entity capable of living and enjoying life in the sun and air amid the beauties of nature. Time to think and time to contemplate are as necessary to a man as time to work and time to be amused. A greater beauty and a greater peace are to be perceived through an hour spent seated on a hillside than in a hundred hours spent moving rapidly across the face of the earth in a motor-car or aeroplane. To live beautifully it is necessary to parcel out life into the correct proportions of action and inaction. Always to be doing something, or being amused by something, is soul-destroying in its ultimate effects. The clinics for nervous diseases are full of such cases. Nature teaches man the virtues of calm, of acting deliberately and thoughtfully. Nature cannot be rushed or bludgeoned without dire effects. Fertilise her with artificial stimulants and she becomes sterile; accelerate her processes and she becomes weak and impoverished. Mankind reacts in precisely the same manner. Let us adapt ourselves to Nature, not continually strive to force her to adapt herself to us. • • • *

“I think that the man in the street generally has an Impression that weapons alone will win the war —perhaps that is going too far; but that weapons are the crucial factor,” said Captain C. M. Patrick, M.P., speaking in the House of Commons. “But I think everybody who has fought in a substantial part of any campaign knows that victory comes in the last resort only from the age-old process of a soldier on his feet walking into and holding the enemy's position. That was true at the time of Hastings; it was true at the time of Waterloo, and t is equally true to-day. The only new factor is that in order to make it possible for a soldier on his feet to advance into the enemy’s land, actions by great fleets, powerful air forces and, nowadays, masses of tanks, are a necessary preliminary condition. It is the man and not the weapon that counts most.”

“There are still persons in America, and some in Britain perhaps, who would have us sign a compromise peace with Hitler,” said the Dean of St. Paul’s, Dr Matthews, in a recent sermon. “They would leave him some of the conquered territories. No doubt such a peace could be easily arranged, much to our present comfort. To such persons we might put the questions: Which nations would you have us betray? Who are to be the unwilling victims of your dastard peace? Our answer is different. For their sakes we dedicate ourselves to the bitter straggle for freedom for all."