Courage to endure life’s lesser ills
Guardian’s 1921 New Year's editorial reflects on past year of war, disease and unemployment
On this, the passing of another milestone on life’s road, we wish all our readers a Happy New Year, happy in being good and doing good.
Today we lay aside the old volume, 1920, with its diversified record of joys and sorrows, of pleasure and pain, of success and failure. What it contains cannot be blotted out; the year with the few or many that preceded it stands irrevocably as a testimony for and against us. God grant that when all the records of the years are summed up there may be at least a small balance of credit of each of us.
We enter the new year with gratitude and hope. We know not what it holds for us; we “only know we cannot drift beyond His love and care.” Let us go forward “with courage to endure life’s lesser ills unshaken and to accept death, loss or disappointment as it were straws upon the tide of life.”
The year that is gone has, in this province, been a normally eventful and uneventful one. To many it has brought joy and happiness and a measure of success; to some it has brought bereavement and sorrow, experiences sadly common through all the years.
That loss is common would not make
Our own less bitter, rather more;
Too common! Never morning wore
To evening but some heart did break.
To those in our midst by whom the year just closed will be remembered with sadness, we extend sincere sympathy and the earnest hop that in the new-born year and the years to come the sorrow may more and more merge into a hallowed remembrance. Throughout the world there has been unrest; the embers of the great war have flamed afresh in some of the European countries and want and disease have taken their toll even in the path devastated by war. While there has been untold misery in those countries it has been relieved somewhat by the charity and sympathy of the civilized world. Vast sums of money have been raised both in Europe and America for the relief of those destitute ones and our own little province made creditable contributions to those funds.
Labour unrest, a not uncommon sequence to war, has made itself felt both sides of the Atlantic; unemployment there has been and is, but notwithstanding the dislocation of industry consequent upon the war and the absorption into civil live of thousands of returned soldiers, statistics show that, up to the present, the number of unemployed in Canada is but little greater than that of normal years. In the United States conditions are not so favourable; the large industrial centres are feeling very keenly the slowing down of manufacturing operations necessitated by the over-production of the two previous years.
In Canada although there is some reaction following the flush and perhaps extravagant years of industrial activity during the war, agriculture, commerce and industry are in a normally prosperous condition. True, there are adjustments and re-adjustments which occasion uncertainty and anxiety but the prosperity of the past few years has been such as to safely tide over the present period of comparative slackness.
In our own province there is less of unrest and uncertainty probably than in any other province in Canada. We have no large industries to become disorganized by over production or otherwise and, because of this, there is comparatively little unemployment. Our farmers are prosperous and their prosperity ensures that of all other callings.