CIVIC SERVICE, PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH,
CHELTENHAM? VICTORIA 4+ TH PRIL, 1965
Speech by the Prime Minister, the Rt. Hon. Sir Robert Menzies
Sir, Recently I was in London, I started off thinking I
was on holiday and I ended up by attending the funeral of the
greatest man of our time. I was very impressed by a number of
matters associated with it. For example, his body lay in state
itn Westminster Hall, Westminster Hall is the most famous building
: tn our history. It is very old. It was built by V. illiam Rufus.
Dark, sombre, full of history. And there, on a little dais, lay
the coffin with its custodians in uniform; and along two lines
through the Hall there came the citizens of London, young and old,
thousand after thousand, paying their homage.
I had wondered very much myself whether this great
man, who was at the peak of his greatness more than twenty years
ago, might be forgotten by younger people' I knew that grey-headed
people like myself' would never forget him;, particularly those who
like myself were fortunate enough to know him and to know him
well, For us, it would be impossible to forget him. But I thought
that those who were children in the greatest moments of his glory
might now regard him as a remote historic figure of no more
particular interest than other historic figures in the schoolbooks.
I was delightfully pleased to see that a good half
of all those who came through were young, exhibiting every possible
mixture from those who looked quite usual to boys with long hair
and girls with short hair, They all came through solemnly, with
respect. It was a most amazing tribute and it confirmed in my
mind the belief which I have always entertained that one of the
great things in our character is a sense of continuity, that we
are not here today and gone tomorrow that we have had people
before us and we will have people af~ er us; we being influenced
by those before us, and influencing those who come after us.. This
is the continuing city in reality that is referred to in tho Bible
and it is a great characteristic particularly of our own people, and
there it was that day just as iz was a few days later in St. Paul's
Cathedral where the view, the picture, was unforgettable the
Queen there attending the funeral of her great Prime Minister,
Now I said just now that I knew him well. I d~ d
indeed. I was greatly privileged, and many weekends I havevspent
in his house and had many great matters to discuss with him from
time to time. I always remember with a sort of sombre pride that
on two occasions I disagreed with him & id I assure you, my friends,
that took doing, because he was, of all men, the most formidable.
But one night he said to me at the dinner-table something that I
know he said elsewhere and which I know has now become familiar
in the books. We were talking about war because this was a time
of war. It was on every night, every day. And he gave me his
great slogan-In War, Fury
In Defeat, Defiance
In Victory Magnanimity
In Peace, 6oodwill. 9 / 2
2
It's easy enough to say those words but they really
stood for what he believed in. Time after time in my experience
of him, when we were discussing some problem or other I would say,
" Don't you feel that such-and-such might be done" ani his answer
would be, " No. That couldn't be done. It couldn~ t be done because
of the nature of man." 1 And it is about that great element, the
nature of man, that I just want to say a little to you this
morning because we must never become so pessimistic, we must never
become so sceptical of human virtue, as to become cynical about
it. We must remember that there is something immortal in the
nature of man. It is a continuing thing, It is indeed a
continuing city in the heart and mind of man. The nature of man.
Now, it has been proved if I may start with a
practical example or two that we are not, in our race, very
great haters, In War, Fury. Yes, but you remember, not in
Peace, Hatred. In Peace Goodwill. Yesterday's enemy becomes
tomorrow's friend time alter time in the course of our history.
After all, after the Napoleonic wars, as the boys and girls will
reriem be r, Ithe French and the British were not what you might
describe as great friends. There had been a generation of war
between them, bitter wounds and bitter defeats and the want of
friendship, no doubt endured a long time. AMA yet in this
century France has Uen our ally and remains our aily in the
North Atlantic Treaty. These things are forgotten, merciftQlly
forgotten, because if we lived on our enmities for the rest of
our lives, we would die the most miserable of people. It is in
the nature of man not to nurture hatreds and not to live on their
memory. You know, Sir, I don't want to invade the field of
theology of which you are a master but the old observation~ that
God made man in His own image has, f think been rather misunderstood
by some people, at least who appear to think of it in terms' of a
human image, a human body, a human appearance, and so we in the
old pictures that we used to look at when we were in Sunlay
School we rather saw imaginary pictures of God as a man. This
doesn' follow at all. When God made man in His own image, He
wasn't creating something necessarily that had a physical
resemblance to Him. He was creating something that had the
God-like elements in the spirit and in the character. This is
it, If we are in His image, it is because we have within
us a capacity for rising to great heights of pure virtue, side by
side with a capacity for sinking to the lowest level of selfishness
and bitterness; but these God-like elements in the human
character, sometimes twisted sometimes ignored, I believe
survive and blossom and deveiop as life goes on. One has only
to consider at a time like this the immense sacrifices that
people have made, the highest sacrifices. This capacity for
sacrifice, this capacity for preferring other people to oneself,
this capacity for sayn, " 1I will contribute all if it is for
the good of the country, exhibited so frequently in war is a
God-like quality. The capacity for sacrifice. the whole idea
of sacrifice is at the very root of the Christian faith.
Man's incapacity for enduring hatred, I've said
something about. I believe that it is one of the great elements
in the nature of man, I think indeed, that all the time we
are with checks sometimes wi~ h what appear to be a full stop
that we are proceeding along the path of civilisation so that
one day we will be able to say I won't perhaps, you won't
perhaps, somebody will that we are a fully civilised nation. a / 3
73
Now that brings me to the next little thing I wanted
to mention to you, We talk rather glibly, don't we, about Wiestern
civilisation or ancient civilisation or Oriental civilisation.
We take great pride in the fact that in this century, the most
' tremendous scientific marvels have occurred, not only in pure
science but in appl~ ied science in the technological field,
marvels have been brought aboui. Some of the young boys here
this morning might'be fascinated to know that I saw the first
motor car ever to come into our part of the State, and it wasn't
a motor car as we now understand it, It was a monstrosity called
a motor buggy. It looked like a buggy, and it was driven very
precariously with a sort of one-lung engine. That was among the
early motor vehicles in Australia, This is in my owm time, and
today there are so many motor vehicles on the roads that all those
who rule over us are tearing their hair~ almost literally to know
how they can cope with them, This is one of the marvels of
technical civilisation, I remember seeing for the first time in my life a
moving picture, a movie, It was out of doors, Nobody would have
thought of building a picture theatre in those days, and I remember
the picture vividly, it jerked like that all the time and it was
called " The Great American Train Robbery", ( Laughter3 Well, that
is only fifty-eight years ago and today we have talking pictures,
we have the marvels of radio, we have the marvels of television,
we fly through the air, I can be in four States in four days,
unhappily to make four speeches ( Laughter) because of the miracles
of flight. And all this has made us rather pleased with oiirselves,
hasntt it this half-century of enormous progress in the scientific
and technical fields,
Yet in this same century we have had two great warswe
have had some of the geatest outpouring of brutality and haired
in the history of man. Any body who wanted to sit in judgment on
this century in respect of non-technical matters might well say
that this was one of the most uncivilised centuries in modern
ftistory, Well, I don't want to go so far as to say that. That
would be extravagant because these wars have had their compensating
elements because of the nature of man, but I do want to remind you
And to remind myself' that civilisation has very little to do with
aircraft or radios or transistors or television sets, Civilisation
is in the heart and in the mind and those two elements will make
us civilised and the century a civilised one.
Sir, one other thing I would like to say to you is
this. We are a little inclined, aren't we, to make rather quick
moral judgments about the conduct of other people. One sees this
constantly in politics. In fact I don't mind admitting on my
behalf if not on behalf of Mr. Chipp that it is a constant
temptaiion and one that has to be resisted these quick moral
judgments on what other people are doing and are doing in good
faith. I had occasion to think about this recently, because I
have been talking to you about the nature of man and my poon
belief that as time goes on, with all its checks, the nature of
man grows stronger and better. This is the path of civilisation,
But recently, for example, I have been hearing
criticisms of the United States for intervening in a countr'y
called Vietnam. Very easy to be critical about what a great
country like the United States does. I venture to say that what
the United States is doing and the responsibility it is accepting
for the good of all of us is one of the greatest manifestations
of the nature of man, a very great piece of moral responsibility,
And you have only to ask yourselves the simplest of questions:
Why do you suppose that the United States, living in its own 00 0//
,4 oontinent, the richest country in the world, the strongest
country in the world, why do you suppose it is engaging itsofinalittLe
piece of land in the South E~ ast of Asia and sending its men into it
and losing men there and spending vast sums and producing vast stores
of equipment? Why do you suppose they are doing it?
I hope I won't have anybody suppose that they are doing
it because they want to make South Vietnam an American colony&
That would be too silly for words. That would be, in the homely
phr~ ase, buying trouble. I don't think any of us would want to,
have one of these countries as a colony. Of course not. Is it
because the Americans have enormous financial interests in that
colony? I venture to think they have practically none, Then why
are they doing it? Why are they, with all the temptations in the
world to be isolationists to say, " Well, we will protect our own
interest. We have the wide seas on each side of us" l; why do they
send their men and their equipment thousands of miles away across
the sea? The answer to me is perfectly irresistible, They are
doing it because they believe that what is at issue is human
freedom and they believe that human freedom ought to be defended
wherever it is challenged and that they, as the greatest power in
the world, should accept the greatest responsibility for it.
This is in reality, a tremendous piece of altruism on their part.
It involves a recognition that world power must be met by world
responsibility and that what they believe in and what we believe
in should be defended against attack. This is the greatest
exhibition of this kind that we have seen since Great Britain
stood alone in the last war.
It couldn't have happened, I think, fifty years ago,
sixty years ago when Americans were a bit inclined to say " We're
here, We will look after ourselves. Wde are not concerned about
the world." They are concerned about the world today. A very
good thing for us that they are and a very good thing for the
world that there should be a great power which makes it quite
clear that it is not moved by individual selfishness or a narrow
cultivation of its own national position but is moved by a feeling
that it is its brother's keeper. This is the last, and I think,
magnificent example of the nature of man.
And so, Sir, I end as I began. I can't think of
Winston Churchill without thinking of what he has said to me about
the nature of man. There are certain things that can't be done
or that certainly can't be done in the long run because in this
fashion, in this pervasive fashion, God has created us in his
own image,