KIPLING AND THE NEW WAR

Waipa Post, Volume XXIV, Issue 1638, 7 May 1925, Page 8

KIPLING AND THE NEW WAR

Speaking at the annual banquet of the Chamber of Shipping in London last month, Mr Rudyard Kipling,-who said that among his many weaknesses had been “an early, acute, and abiding influence in the mercantile marine,’’ declared that the recovery of British trade had been retarded by propaganda of ill-will.

“When a nation is lost,” said Mr Kipling, “the underlying canse of. the collapse is always that she cannot handle her transport. Everything in life, from marriage to manslaughter, turns on the speed and cost at which men, things, and thoughts can be shifted from one place to another. If you can tie up a nation’s transport you can take her off your books. .We have suffered from one scientific attempt to prove this, which very nearly succeeded. For the moment, however; there is a lull in the wars fought with visible weapons. We are deep now in the world war that aims to destroy the spirit and will of man in his home and at his work. A sound man whose moral can be gassed and gangrened in time of peace till he condones and helps to create every • form of confusion that will ruin himself and his neighbour is doing his country infinitely more harm than a thousand casualties in the battlefield. It is. cheaper to induce your enemy to cut his own throat for what you have persuaded him are lofty motives than to do it for him against his will. And this is the essence of the new model war—to create^ill—will, which is the mother of despair, and through that ill—will to exploit the damnable streak in each of us which leads us to stop our own work and talk about the duties of others. The rest follows by itself. Our sane attitude toward each other must be that goodwill—a goodwill just a little more persistent, just a little more indefatigable than the ill-will which is being fabricated elsewhere. For if goodwill can once more be made normal, with it must return that will to do work which is the trade mark of established health in a people. If the will to work be too long delayed, then all that our race stands for must pass into the hand of whatever nation first recovers that will.