TRACTS FOR THE TIMES.

Auckland Star, Volume LXIII, Issue 135, 9 June 1932, Page 6

TRACTS FOR THE TIMES.

OUR GREAT MARKET. (By PRO BONO PUBLICO.) Some people have a curious idea of the extent of the British market for our products. There was a bit of an argument at a stock sale I was at lately on this subject. A man who regards himself'as a politician was discrediting the "more production" method of countering the depression, arguing that we had only one market abroad and that if we put more produce into it the only eiTeet would be to send prices down further. Evidently lie thought that our market was already saturated. I couldn't stand by and listen to talk of that sort, of course, and I put the facts as strongly as I could. He came back at me by demanding the figures, and I had to make a guess at them on the spur of the moment. Since then I have made a point of getting the actual facts, and they are both interesting and instructive. The particular subject of the argument was meat. Eor iive years before the slump the Mother Country imported an average of about £i 10,000,000 worth of meat a year. Of that quantity less than a. quarter came from British countries —£8.>,000.000 from foreign countries, and £25,000,000 from within the Empire. It doesn't look as if the market in this instance was saturated with the British-grown product.

The sole classes of foodstuff's in which the Empire provides the bulk of the Mother Country's supplies seem to be sugar and tea. Its bread and butter conn; more from foreign countries than from the Empire. In grain and flour the importations are £+.">,000,000 British and £03,000,000 foreign; and in dairy produce £37,000,000 British and £48,000,000 foreign.

Only a tenth of the importations of timber and timber products are, British grown. In wool we make a better showing, but cotton brings the total of textile raw materials imported from foreign countries above the quantity imported from within the Empire. These figures make it clear that there is plenty of room for "Empire-grown produce in the markets of the United Kingdom, just as there is room in the Dominions for more of the manufactures of the Old Country. New Zealand, for instance, could take a few million pounds' worth of Empire products instead of foreign products, and do it without interfering with local industries.

" THE LIGHT OF ASIA."

EDWIN ARNOLD'S CENTENARY. (By ROBERT H. NEIL.) Among eminent men of letters at the end of the Victorian era was Sir Edwin Arnold. He enjoyed the distinction of having been a great journalist of an unfailing vivacity and wide equipment, a professed scholar in many directions and a poet who made a secure reputation with "The Light of Asia." When Edwin Arnold died in 1904, those who knew him confessed to losing "one of the most kindly, most industrious, am, most accomplished friends" they had. The son of a Sussex magistrate he was born on June 10, 1832, and was educated at the King's School, Rochester; King's College, London; and University College, Oxford, where in 1852 he gained the Newdigate prize. In 1850 he was nominated principal of the Sanskrit College, at Poona, and on. settling there soon studied several Eastern languages, and mastered not only those of India, but also Turkish and Persian. A successful translation of "The Book of Good Counsels" from the Sanskrit of the Hitopadesa indicates _ his rapid attraction to Oriental study. In addition to writing this translation, epoch-making in as much as it prepared the way to greater works, ho wrote a pamphlet on education in India, pleading for a more scientific grafting of Western knowledge upon the lore of the East. There can be little doubt that Arnold's subsequent life and almost the whole of his subsequent work bore the impress of his Eastern experience, for all his finest achievements in verse were dated after his departure from India.

During a visit to England in 1801 Arnold obtained the post of loader writer on the "Daily Telegraph." This appointment finally determined his career, for lie continued his work in journalism for forty years, with a vigour and readiness that never degenerated into the faults which are briefly stigmatised as "journalese." His colleague, George Augustus Sala, describes in his "Reminiscences" how in the early days of 1802 the Eastern aroma first began to make itself felt in the leading articles of the "Daily Telegraph." Arnold and Sala were responsible, perhaps, in about equal measure, for the roaring tones in which the "Telegraph" began about this time to answer back the thunder of "The Times." In 1873 Arnold became a chief editor of the "Daily Telegraph," and with the proprietors was responsible for the dispatch of some enterprising and important journalistic missions, that of George Smith to make archaeological exploration on the site of Nineveh in 1574, that of H. M. Stanley (jointly with, the "New York Herald") to complete the discoveries of> Livingstone in the same year, and that of Sir Harry H. Johnston to Kilima-Njaro in 1884. The loyalty and affection shared by Arnold and the entire staff of the "Daily Telegraph" played a great part in making the paper so successful that before the advent of the halfpenny newspapers it was able to boast that it possessed "the largest circulation in the world." After twenty-eight years in the editorial room, where his staff included many brilliant journalists, lie became a travelling commissioner of the paper, and in 1889 lie started upon a tour of the Pacific Coast and Japan. As a picturesque tourist, in books like "India 'Revisited" (18SG), "Seas and Lands" (1891), "Wandering Words" (1894) and "East and West" (1896), he lias few rivals. His first visit to Japan was often repeated and lie was fascinated by the artistic and social side of Japanese life. His writings on Japan helped to spread in England optimistic views of Japanese progress and culture.

Philosophers and men of science stand upon the outskirts of literature; the poets occupy its very citadel, and among the popular poets of the Victorian era Sir Edwin Arnold took a high rank with his great Indian epic, "The Light of Asia, or the Great Renunciation," first published in 1879. The epic introduced, and still introduces, Buddha to many a Western mind to-day which would otherwise remain in ignorance or intolerance of the mysticism of the East. The style in which it blended music and colour was palpably Tennysonian, but its immediate and continuous success was well deserved. If the technical student coukl not entirely applaud its methods of expression, it was for. the many a work of supreme merit and importance, for it spoke of a new thing with dignity and knowledge. "The Light of the World," which followed, dealt with a subject familiar to all of us —the life and teachings of Christ —but it did not repeat the earlier success. Sir Edwin was endowed with great natural gifts, but he was over-sensuous as a poet, and defective as a .metrist; his glowing imagination led him too far, and occasionally vitiated his taste. The exercise of translation, which hampers many, exercised the right kind of restraint on him, and ho has left several excellent versions from various foreign languages, especially in the Oriental field.

During the last nine or ten years of his life his sight gradually failed, but in spite of infirmities he maintained a keen interest in contemporary affairs. He d;•*. not fear death, and his eager spirit, unquenehe# by the labour of so many years and the terror of blindness, has left us a legacy of steadfastness and cheerfulness which is more valuable than many books, more pervading than the work of the scholar, more useful than the brilliance of the satirist. At t lie end he may have had in mind the picture of the smoke slowly rising from the burning ghats at Benares, on the banks of the Ganges, for he left instructions that he should be cremated and his ashes bestowed in the chapel of his Alma Mater at Oxford,