Balder Ex-Libris

Author : Joad Cyril Edwin Mitchinson
Title : The case for New Party New party broadcasts No. 1
Year : 1931

Link download : Joad_Cyril_Edwin_Mitchinson_-_The_case_for_New_Party.zip

A land fit for hereos to live in. You remember the phrase? It was coined in the war by politicians wishing to assure the mcn in the trenches that they were fighting at least for something. They fought accordingly, and in duc course they won. That was thirteen years ago, and the land seems much as usual; so much 50, that one cannot help wondering whether this was merely a cant phrase, devoid alike of meaning and purpose . In the mouths of the politicians who coined it, it may have been; I cannot say. Yet in the minds of those who fought to make it true, it was at once an inspiration in the present and an ideal for the future. Those young Englishmen who volunteered in 1914 and 19I5 were inspired by an idealism which was one of the few fine things the war produced; they really wanted to build a new world, and they really believed that by beating the Germans they would lay its foundations. Had they not believed these things, they would have gone mad. They did their part, but somehow the new world failed to materialise: it seems, indeed, as far off as ever; at times it has seemed even further. And reflecting on this failure, one is tempted to ask whether the agony and heroism of those terrible years were completely wasted, and whether, if they were, the waste was inevitable. Was it inevitable that the country should slip back so quickly into its old ways, cvcn when its old ways suited it so badly, and, as the years go by, suit it worse, or was it after all possible that the bells of victory might have rung out the old world and rung in a new ? ...