This column first appeared in the Victoria Daily Times on March 22, 1941.
A namesake of mine wrote me a letter that has just come, and I am going to quote one paragraph from it. He is a farmer in Saskatchewan, and I gather from his letter that the going has been heavy. But he has a pattern in his mind of what the world should be, and so I quote this:
“We may be able to stop Hitler, and still not win the war, for this war is really a war for a better world, and unless we can cast out selfishness and indifference and self-seeking in our own lives, we cannot hope for a permanent victory. We must have a world free from fear and suspicion; a world where people can live blithely; and all this depends on what we put into our own lives after the war is over.”
The last phrase has a bite in it. That nails us to the wall. What are we going to put into our lives after the war? We will not be new creatures when the war is over. I am thinking of the last war and what followed.
I remember Alfred Noyes’ Victory Ball, written in 1918, where he pictures the dead men standing along the wall, wondering how the dancers can be so light-hearted and carefree after all that had happened. The dead men, who had given their young lives for an ideal, and thought the survivors would have been “looking for worlds to mend.”
Now that should be our ambition, our passion; we who are not fighting. We should be welded together now in a great fellowship of world-menders, ready to sacrifice everything we have to give the world a better pattern of life. A pattern of life such as David Livingstone had for the people of Africa, and, to take a modern example, Rawl Ally, the New Zealander friend of China.
Alley works in China to teach these brave people how to organize in remote places little factories, so small and insignificant that their enemies do not see them; and yet in these co-operative factories the Chinese make many of the goods they need. He teaches the Chinese not the arts of war, as Lawrence taught the Arabs, but the arts of living; and he does it because he is a lover of humanity.
He has adopted two Chinese boys and says you can pick up any Chinese boy any place you find him, give him a chance to live, and you will have a good man. Rawl Alley has no office, no staff, no salary, but is accomplishing miracles because he has a passion in his heart. He is a world-mender.
So are the missionaries, teachers, and all men and women of goodwill who give their lives in human service. But there are not enough of them. They have always been a remnant!
I am writing this in a hospital room — a lovely room, plain as an ironstone china plate, but airy and comfortable, with a great high window from which I look out at a street and smoke rising through the misty air.
At the end of the street on the boulevard there are two small weeping birches just coming into green, as delicate and light as two fairy umbrellas; and a new house is being built on the corner, too, with a happy man lathing the wall on this side.
He ought to be happy on this lovely spring morning and I think he is by the way he is pounding in the nails. I hope it is his own house, and that he won’t have to put a mortgage on it, ever.
I am thinking of what the author of How Green Was My Valley said about this being a war of the Little Houses. And I hope he is right, for the people who live in the Little Houses in all countries are not the people who want to make war. So if this is our war, we must make sure this time that we do not sow the seeds of a 1965 war when we come to make peace.
There is no use talking about what Britain should have done. Let us be done with this vicarious bluff of blaming our present distress on the English Tories who thought more of the financial holdings than they did of the peace of Europe. It has all been written and spoken. Let us begin from here, remembering the famous lines about the Moving Finger that writes, and passes on.
We, the common people, can make a new world, but we have to work at it as the people of Britain are working on their own defence. Life is a pure gift, given to us without strings or qualifying clauses. We can either cherish it or throw it away.
Life in Canada is a gift of supreme beauty, wrapped in the cellophane of our sunshine, tied with the golden streamers of our great distances — a gift of many colours, as varied as the strands in our national tapestry.
We have great choices in Canada — great freedoms, and destiny has put a heavy responsibility on us in that we are part of the British Commonwealth of Nations and that we are also citizens of the American continent. We cannot be niggardly, small-minded people. The plains, forests, rivers, the wheat fields and mines, with their prodigality of wealth should shame us out of our little mean ways. It takes eternal vigilance to keep the right pattern in our minds.
Freshly printed in a Canadian edition comes a little book by Daphne du Maurier called Come Wind, Come Weather, which contains stories of Britain’s defenders — the people in the Little Houses who are holding the fort for freedom and a new world.
They have in them a new quality, another dimension. They show us how the lives of ill-natured people have been sweetened, homes united and new sources of strength tapped.
There is no use in telling people what they ought to do unless you give them some inkling of how they can begin. Too much of our religious teaching has been “Be good — or you will be sorry. Be good and you’ll go to heaven.”
This little book has a clear, unmistakable message. It is so simple that some will miss it — the people who like ponderous words and hidden meanings. Her people are not perfect. They may make mistakes again, but they have a way of getting back into service, calm and unafraid. I quote from du Maurier’s foreword, in which she speaks to the people who live in the Little Houses.
“Ours are the little problems. Worry, anxiety, petty household cares. It seems at times easier to face 100 bombers than one irritable relative. Yet in our sphere there are deeds of gallantry to be done. There will be no bugle call, no beating of drums, no banner to unfurl. The fight is not spectacular. It is a silent struggle between self and spirit, and the voice of the spirit is the voice of God.”
This little book in its red and white cover will come into many a home this Easter like the breath of spring, like the first notes of the meadowlark.
Some of McClung’s columns from the 1930s and 1940s have been collected in a book, The Valiant Nellie McClung: Selected Writings by Canada’s Most Famous Suffragist, by Barbara Smith.
