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The New Zealand Railways Magazine, Volume 13, Issue 1 (April 1, 1938.)

Values

Values.

All the while in this changing world the values of most things vary in relation to each other as well as in an absolute sense. The relative values of space and time as they affect life are instances of the rapidity of change in elemental matters. From London to New Zealand, a trip that took half a year a century ago, six weeks fifty years ago and to-day, for the average individual, is not done in less than a month, has been reduced by Clouston to a 4-day journey— this daring, born and bred New Zealander, thus circling half the world in half a week.

The increase in the value of time in relation to space is seen also in land transport. The trip from Auckland to Wellington which was a matter of weeks in the early days of settlement is now only a matter of hours.

Factory production, methods and means of distribution, education generally, and most of the exact sciences have made progress in some ways equally impressive. Each step of progress changes the value of each unit in the matter affected. For this reason it is the essence of good living to keep in step with the times by recognising the changing values as they occur and getting rid of dead stock, either in ideas or commodities, to make room for the new.

The clogging effect of superstitions and outmoded traditions holds back some individuals and some nations from their full share in the benefits of progress. They have not got their values right.

All people place a higher value on peace at the end of a war than at its beginning. This is just as natural as that a pork pie should mean more to a hungry man than to one who has just finished a full-course dinner.

One of our philosophers has said that there are three wants which can never be satisfied: “that of the rich, who want something more; that of the sick, who want something different; and that of the traveller, who says, ‘Anywhere but here.'” The Railway Department, however, would go a long way to satisfy a traveller of this kind and, in the course of its efforts, send him a long way too.

So we must also be prepared to re-value our philosophers who, good in their day, would doubtless, if they lived in ours, revise their own philosophy.

Even health varies in value according to time and country. But just as nothing will supply the want of sunshine to peaches, so nothing can replace health for full and free living.

Luckily the most valuable things cost the least and their real value does not vary greatly.

A swim in the sea, a bask in the sun, the smell of new-mown hay, plain living and fair thinking, a bright idea, cheerful conversation—these are among the things of value that most may share and that do not usually lead either to economic stress or social disappointment. But it often requires an earthquake, a war, or a pestilence to make most of us realise the full value of the comparatively costless blessings which are normally available to the bulk of mankind.