CONDENSED CORRESPONDENCE.

Auckland Star, Volume XLIX, Issue 149, 24 June 1918, Page 7

CONDENSED CORRESPONDENCE.

"A Worn-out Mother" say 3 that the regulation not allowing folding perambulators on tramcare presses hardly on ■weary mothers with crippled children. Infantile paralysis is responsible for a number of these cases. "I know of a mother living out at the terminus of one of our suburbs who haa to trudge wearily along day after day with a poor little paralysed child over four years of age to the hospital for treatment. Then think of the domestic duties and other little ones at home to be cared for when the mother worn out and weary after her long walk, through wheeling her crippled child backwards and forwards from the terminus." In Australia, says our correspondent, perambulators are allowed on cars. Perhaps our correspondent's letter may catch the eye of some kind-hearted motorist who would be willing to help in the case mentioned ü ßritisher" criticises tlie exemption of bootmakers on the ground that their work i= essential. He thinks boots ought to be standardised. "We were told the other day by an employer who was giving evidence before the Board that the public *lid not want a plain boot. They wanted a high-grade boot and they had to cater for the public's want. That seems absurd, as a working man with a young family finds it almost beyond his reach to pay for even a plain boot. It is time boots were standardised. We will soon be into the fifth year of the war, and we should sink a little pride and be thankful to wear even standardised boots. The same applies to the clothing trade. Fashions are as much in view now as before the war." '"One of the Victims" writes:—"ln the Press recently has reappeared paragraphs appealing to employers to give returned men a chance. I travel daily toy a workman's train, and in this train are and other aliens going out to work at a suburban job. There's some-

thing rotten in the state of Denmark when our tioys have fought, return, and cannot get -work, whilst men of alien birth stop at homo, arc coddled by the Government, and have the time of "their lives." Mr. H. J. Gentles -makes the following suggestion for the route of the proposed new railway line to link the city with the north line:—"The line would go up a level gully f rom Patteeon Street, Freeman's Hay. to the Western Park, then by tunnel under Ponsonby and Great North Road, coming out into the Arch Hill Gully, somewhere opposite Dominion Koad, then by the gully to Morningside Station. There is plenty of room for a station on Freeman's Bay reclamation, and ac for compensation, there is a great difference between ths two routes, -which is very much in favour of the Western Park line."