PLIGHT OF N.Z.

Star (Christchurch), Volume LXVI, Issue 20447, 27 October 1934, Page 21 (Supplement)

PLIGHT OF N.Z.

Lost in Maze and Praying For a Moses. A MAN-MADE SYSTEM. (By E. J. HOWARD, M.P.) THERE is a key to the riddle! Although the good citizen wrapped up in bowls, tennis, football and other sports thinks it just happens, there is a key to the riddle, and that key will tsome day open the door to prosperity and happiness. One cannot ignore, and should not ignore, sport. The mind, the body, and the very soul of man demands activity in some form or other. If we put our blood under the micrQscope we see the little fighting, shoving, active red corpuscles of the blood. If we introduce the slightest poison to these corpuscles, we see them slow up, cease their fight, and become sluggish. Fear is a poison. Anger is a poison. An angry man is not a happy man. He is not normal. His mind is manufacturing and sending forth millions of poison thoughts. He is incapable of viewing things sanely. An angry man is to all intents and purposes insane. He is full of delusions, and mostly delusions of persecution. And a hungry man is a savage man. Mistakes of Leader. When I was a boy I attended a lecture in St James's Hall, Plymouth, when a man whose name became almost a household name for years lectured on the mistakes of Moses. Moses was a man who saw that his own folks, the Jews, were being turned from landowners into common labourers, and so he said there was only one way out of the tangle, and that was to make for a new land and start afresh. But he died just before they reached the promised land. All Moseses die just before they reach the promised land. But the “ herd ” is left something most helpful, and what we term mankind is better off because of the trier Moses. The mistake of Moses was to take the Jews into the wilderness. And yet it was a natural mistake. Pie was not a good psychologist. He did not know all the time the older people would, be looking back hungering for the city lights and the picture shows and the rocking-chairs, such as they were in those days. He did not know that the young would chafe at the restrictions of discipline. When the Boers of South Africa decided to up-stakes and make for no man’s land they were under the influence of that great trek of Moses. They were great Bible students, and they had even worked themselves into believing they were the lost ten tribes. But they were wrong. They were no more the lost ten tribes than we are in New Zealand. And sometimes we wonder if we are not the lost tribes—lost in an economic labyrinth. Economics is roughly the science—although one jibs at the word science in relation to economics—is the science, then, of sharing up the food. It is not the science of flying in the air, and yet if we go up in the air this bogey man follows us. Petrol running low—all right, we must go to earth for petrol. At the dinner table, tea table and to the job, this Old Man of the Sea follows on our shoulders.

And yet men can recite the names of the horses who won the Melbourne Cup each year for the past forty years, but shudder at the word economics. And so like the people Moses tried to lead into a better land we chafe and fret because we do not believe there is any promised land. The Main Trouble.

What is the trouble with New Zealand ? The main trouble is how to get three meals a day and a bed to sleep in at nights. Simple proposition. If we were all Robinson Crusoes we would have to work out the problem for ourselves. But we are not Robinson Crusoes. We are the lost ten tribes. We are lost in an economic labyrinth. We are in a maze. We walk round and round and find ourselves in the same passage we were in last year. We have improved our hogs and culled our cows. We have studied our soils and investigated animal diseases. Our herds are sending out a stream of milk that threatens to drown our dairy farmers in bankruptcy. And we are praying for a Moses to come and tell us how to get out.

The economist, that is, the professional economist, comes along and says: Easy; produce less. What is termed the “ crank ” comes along and says, “ Eat more!” And he points out that if every New Zealander had consumed one more egg each last year, there would have been no eggs for export. And then, says the professor, “We live on what we export”; and every lover of economics murmurs,

“ We live on what we export.” So this fight goes on between the two schools of thought. The scientific schools say: “Produce less and the price will go up and you will have enough money to buy more, and there you are.’ The second school says: Produce for use. If you produce for use and not simply as shopkeepers to sell, then everyone will be happy, or at least fed.”-

The second school starts from the point of goods. Produce the goods and get them consumed. But the scientist builds up a case on a blackboard and can convince. Whoever saw an atom? And yet the scientists say: Yes, of course, we start from the atom, or at least we will split the atom and start somewhere. Whoever saw the ether? And yet every radio man knows it’s there! Does he? Scared of Good Harvest.

What we do know is also based on science. That is that there are hungrypeople in the midst of plenty. VYc know, too, that the harnessing of the Waitaki River will throw more of our men out of work. That it will give hght and power to more farmers in the backblocks, but throw hundreds of miners out of work. What a fool system! And yet the system is manmade.

We ask God to give us a good harvest and yet are scared when it comes Two years ago we got so much wheat that we didn t know what to do with pocket,^ 1 brothel

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