IN TIME OF PERIL.

Waikato Times, Volume 96, Issue 15359, 6 October 1923, Page 11 (Supplement)

IN TIME OF PERIL.

"INASMUCH AS YE DID IT NOT.’’

(By ‘Darius.”)

Distance has two distinguishing finalities, the power i of lending enchantment to far remembered or imagined scenes, and also the power to dull tlie edges of calamity. The terrible fate of the buried cities, Herculaneum, Pompeii, and Statii, is never absent' from some memory. We have, too, concerning those cities, a sort of self satisfaction in the thought that they were exceedingly sinful and that therefore God’s judgment fell upon them; that it was, in fact, their own follies and moral iniquities that found them out. Not once, but twice or thrice before, the over-head mountain had erupted with awful consequences to man and the earth’s physical features, yet ever nearer and nearer the streets of the cities with their villas and surrounding villages, approached the sinister base. Man wagered his life against volcanic action, and Nature won. Human Invitation to Disaster.

* The curse that' lies heaviest upon mankind is not the Eden curse of having to earn his living by the sweat of his brow, but the endeavour to avoid the consequences of°thc old curse that made man a herd and tiller of the soil; a fatal gregariousness, a senseless and unnatural crowding into the cities, where alike the extremes of poverty and of wealth meet. Imagine in Tokio city 80,000 dead and 120,000 missing. Imagine a city that docs not provide for safe standing room for its inhabitants in parks and in open places, and then imagine the vast empty places of the earth, and ask what is wrong with mankind that it should so invite calamity in the earthquake zones These ruined cities are being hurriedly rebuilt much upon the old plan, so that, presently, the earthquake crop will again be whitening into harvest, for the oarthquake lands are but mountain tops towering over profound and hollow abysses.

To-morrow Like To-day. Earth makes no false pretences; the' doom that has fallen once will fall again. Science need not forcast this. History has done so. The Phoenix cities are rising from their ashes to fall in flame and ruin upon a latter generation. Even our own blind mountains arc an eyeless everlasting menace. Our volcanic areas have passed through a period of ’quakes and trernours caused by subsidence. The next period will be one of startling volcanic eruption, for these periods alternate unerringly as night and day. Fortunate it is that in Japan there was no dreadful volcanic eruption to iccentuate the awful welter of torment and blood, of suffocation and death. Fortunate it may be that, although devouring lire swept the ruins incinerating the trapped and maimed bodies, the heavens did not rain fire and brimstone and the earth spew up lava in slow torrents of molten lire; fortunate a loaded and ashen darkness did not descend upon the miltiplied horrors thronging the tottering earth, with the very sea itself aflame, and the crowded wharves and bridges collapsing beneath the wild stampede Into the liquid inferno. Surely hell itself could crave no finer sight for fiendish entertainment. Those Days also Have Passed.

Wc return without any very keen emotion of sorrow to our papers and read that the Hawk defeated Beauford and Dempsey knocked out Firpo in the second round of primordial encounter. It would not be true to say that the world has been staggered by the catastrophe, or thai wc felt a single convulsive shudder at the sudden avalanche of horror that descended upon the fair Land of the Cherry Blossom, with its seething millions of gentle, refined people crowding its cities to earn their frugal fare. We have been immunised against horrors by the recent war and much that was kindly in our natures has become calloused In the mad industry of living. Remote from the tragedy, in an easeful and plethoric existence, we failed to arouse in ourselves the dormant emotions of sorrow due to such an occasion. We kept on saying “God’s In His heaven, all’s right with the world” in a semi-somnolent refrain, while almost all is damnably wrong with that great and wanton hypocrite, or rather we would be so convinced but for the sailing of such good ships as the Australmount from a neighbouring port with God’s own pennon floating over the foretop. Ye Did it Not Unto Me.

Though we have not given sorrow her due, there are few of us free from an oppressive sense of shame at the inaction of our Government that lias so miserably failed to respond to Calamity’s call upon humanity. New Zealand is to pay a proportion of the cost of relief contributed by Britain. Pity Japan should not scorn our cold aid as she scorned the counterfeit charity of the Russian Bolshevik. In contrast of our gift of a stone for bread, Australia stands out in magnificent, opulence of generosity, keeping well in step with Japan’s protagonist, America. Our mercenary and soulless Cabinet, in a land glutted by Nature's bounty, proffers a cheque on the Bank of England, but the great neighbouring Commonwealth, God ho thanked, jias despatched the Australmount with a .cargo of relief supplies valued at £140,000. Our contribution to the Singapore base to threaten Japan, our late ally and faithful friend, whose battleships we hailed here as convoys and protectors in the dread days of German raiders and squadrons haunting southern hemisphere waters, is one hundred thousand pounds, and our bill from the League of Nations, £60,000. How much for Japan to help clear the putrifying tens of thousands from the streets to the funeral pyres, to house the homeless, to heal the broken bodies, to mend the mangled and house tlie homeless. Leave Him Alone.

Near about the time the good ship Australmount was headed for the open sea, Mr Massey, in San Francisco, at the Chamber of Commerce luncheon tendered him there, devoted an hour’s address to New Zealand's progress and development, and its place in the producing world. He had a good deal to say about the world’s peace, but said nothing of a peace-offering from New Zealand to Japan, or of the world's calamities. The verbal loyalist had nothing In say of heart, loyally' to stricken man of whatever race, nr colour, but lie did advocate unity of English speaking powers • almost v ilhin hearing of devastated Japan. Leave him alone; he is wedded to his idols,