"BACKBONE OF THE COUNTRY."

Auckland Star, Volume LVII, Issue 144, 19 June 1926, Page 11

"BACKBONE OF THE COUNTRY."

SOME IMPORTANT VERTEBRAE.

PRIMARY AND OTHER PRODUCERS.

(By "SCRUTATOR".)

"The primary producers are the backbone of the country" is a very well-worn platitude, if for no other reason than to avoid an unprofitable argument, let us concede whatever degree of truth there is in this glibly-made assertion. A little analysis, however, shows that this Atlasian backbone is composed of, and supported by. a large number of important vertebrae, without which the osseous column that supports the manifold anl diversified burden s ? of our civilisation would lie prostrate and powerless. Assuming that Sir Backbone lives in "the House that Jack built," the timber thereof will have been cut by axes and saws from Sheffield. The mattress ho rises from was fashioned in Mosgiel, and likewise the blankets. Tf, perchance, lie is hard up, as his professional croakers would have us believe, then he will have slept on sacks, which had their origin in the jute mills of Calcutta. And. presuming that he has time in his world of work and woe to wash, he draws waiter from a tap made in Birmingham. and he uses soap from Auckland, maybe, and a towel from Manchester. Out he goes to the dairy shed, for we will assume that he is getting his living from the materially most important and soul-destroying industry in this Dominion. (I bad nearly fallen a victim to "this fair land - — that is what comes of reading the correspondence columns in the newspapers.) There his understandings tread on concrete, the cement for which also came from Auckland w-orks. Backbone likes this hard and clean floor, but its use was forced upon him by sundry vertebrae that he now affects to despise as parasites, instead of recognising them for what they are—his indispensable supporters. in these days of grace he turns a switch down and an electric motor hums around sweetly, actuating a milking machine, both of which are also products of the brain of the engineer, who, with the scientist, constitute the most vital and valuable of all the vertebrae of Sir Backbone, but whose existence he quietly ignores, while availing himself of their inestimaDie services to the greatest extent that his brain and bank account will permit. And so with every movement he makes he is dependent upon producers, who are not primary. Plod and plan as he may, there soon comes a time when he is helpless without the veterinarian, the agricultural scientist, and the dairy factory inventive genius. Without the refrigerator his butter and cheese would become rank and rot on his hands, to say nothing of the steamship that carries his surplus produce to the four corners of the earth. Lacking the telegraph and the printed page, or the modern development of wireless, he would now know what the markets were requiring, nor could the essential knowledge for continued progress be stored in text-books, and handed on from one generation to another. One might go on ad infinitum, but sufficient lias been stated to show conclusively that the primary producer is merely a producer like the rest of us,:, allowing that the industry he is engaged upon is a vital one. yet without the aid of the scientist, the engineer, and the teacher and disseminator of news and knowledge of all forms, the farmer would be reduced to the necessity of folowing a nomadic life as a herdsman, for the only implement he would be able to make would be a contraption formed by lashing, by means of a, piece of raw hide or fibre, a piece of rock to the end of a pole. It is the progress of science and the mechanics of industry that have made farming, and the general accuMulation of wealth, possible. Left to himself, the farmer would have to •work, ns would everyone else, from dawn till dark in order to eke out an existence that would be "sordid, mean. brutish." He would" not, at the end of a long life, have the proverbial Highlander's "ta pounds to bury himself with." And Sir Backbone may as well be reminded that the producers other than primary are his best and most numerous customers, and it ill becomes him to belittle them. Likewise, the non-primary producers are indebted to the farmers for the production of the raw- materials necessary to life, and upon which the former may exercise their industry and inventive skill, the two branches of neorde bein<r. like the upper and lower blades of the scissors, complementary. Having endeavoured to put things in their true perspective. T am n-epared.----to admit that, for the sake of thp commonweal, much more encouragement should bn «riven to the primary producers of this country, for tb" wo-ld wants all our primary produce, b" 1 F"w of the products that are not vet" pl"»°lrillied to the farmine ir-dust,™*. *"* we may all pet along bet+»r ; f — "' + "reason together." instead of cnnt'U"allv shouting that we are such important jolly sood fellows. Let us got on with the mb of building up a balanced nation nnd "in the nroepss of the Hl""'' each will fiud his rightful place and his due reward.