THE CRUEL EARTH.

Waikato Times, Volume 109, Issue 18257, 19 February 1931, Page 6

THE CRUEL EARTH.

The Sydney Sun. referring edilorially to the New Zealand earthquake, says:— Man builds a city. “A wrinkle in the worn old face of Earth deepens, and it is gone." Our sister Dominion of New Zealand reels, aghast and dazed, from I lie sudden blow of a tragedy without parallel in her history, and all Australian hearts throb

with pain and pity for the grief and ] disaster which have overtaken their friends and kin across the Tasman Sea. The physical history of our , neighbour island nation cannot have j left its people without foreboding of 1 some such dire calamity, whenever their minds 'turned to events of the | past, with Iheir inevitable reflection in the glass of the future. Yet they continued to 1 make their homes in perilous places, to busy themselves with their human affairs, to meet their daily sorrows, and to pursue the passing happinesses that are given to humanity, dismissing such foreboding from their minds, nor allowing it to assume the proportion which would make it prescience of the grand calamity. For that is the way of mankind, which dwells ever in the shadow of fear—in the shadow, but perceiving it not, because the vision is fixed constantly towards the sunlight of hope for happiness. The evacuation of Napier Is a story, that fascinates while it harrows the mind, and excites the imagination to vain, retrospective hopes that it might have been made when scientists actually voiced the terrible possibility that has become the ghastiv fact. We know, while we shudder at all tHiat lias happened, that Napier will he rebuilt and refilled with ils people, as the slopes of Vesuvius have been tilled again by the children of those who Perl from its red ruin, or perished in the smoking flood, and as a proud city has been reared again on the shores of the Golden Gate. We humans are at heart a fatalistic crew, bound as we are to the only mother we know—the cruel, kindly earth, who mixes so much pain with the pleasure she gives us. We shout to see the sunlight in the valleys, forgetting the clouds that gather on the hills behind