I WHAT THE PAPERS SAY

Auckland Star, Volume LXV, Issue 308, 29 December 1934, Page 8

I WHAT THE PAPERS SAY

POINTS FROM THE PRESS.

PRIZE-DAY SPEECHES. No doubt prospects of a long vacation and freedom from the authority of teachers and the grind of lessons enable the pupils of the schools, at this season of tno year, to endure with appropriate attention and well-concealed resignation many of the speeches at prizegiving- ceremonies. On these occasion* the older generation is as prone to take advantage of the opportunity to give advice as the young people are to ignore it. for not everyone possesses the gift of being able to speak to children in a way that holds their attention and captures their interest. Isut every now and a-ain, with the publication of those prizoday speeches, there are found odd onee with a 'well-balanced combination of humour and wisdom that must have delighted the audiences of parents and pupils to which tliey were delivered One by Miss Margaret Hardy, the lady Mayor of Brighton, England, was of tins character and was so audaciously unorthodox that it attracted widespread notice. She advised the pupils to cultivate a good, healthy inferiority complex, that before the great and beautiful would encourage feelings of awe, reverence ami respect. It was a ruinous thing in life, she said, to go through it thinking lone whs a~ good as anyone else and a great Ideal better. "Miss Hardy continued her mischievous reflections by advising her audience to have a thoroughly pessimistic outlook towards life, for when they wont into tlio world they were bound, she eaid, to have very many painful experience**, and the optimism that" believed in prospectuses promising a fortune brought only disappointment. Her last injunction was to be thoroughly dissatisfied with everything in life, on the ground that dissatisfaction 5s the spur and impetus to all progress. After all, Miss Hardy's three ideas were not so revolutionary, being only old truths in a different and arresting- garb. The art of talking to children, and not at them, is one that could bo cultivated with advantage by those who deliver the addressee at prizegiving functions.—"Christcliurch Times." * » ♦ • SUMMER TIME AND LOSSES. One of tlio finest summers in Wellington's history—finest in popular weather classification —has seen the' deaths of a number of notable people, elderly down to middle-aged. The latest to go ie Mr. John Strauchon, who was Under-Secretary for Lands just before the war. and whose career as a surveyor had brought him very actively in touch with the breaking-in period of New Zealand's history J — with clearing, settlement, road-making, and \ all those other operations that alter Nature to make room for man. Settlement is necessarily a despoiler of the native growth—no bad 'thing, provided that the substitute ie something better—and the breaking-in generation contained many men who were neglectful on the subject of forest preservation and natural beauty. Not so. however, with Mr. Strauchon. for in his later years he was one of the few (at that time) actively interested I in beatitification of Wellington, and he had a just sense of the balance that should be held between useful clearing for settlement and the clearing , that is useless and which leads only to an unchecked water/low or to noxious i weeds. Unfortunately, the power of officials (tlin.;e who liad a forest sense) to check despoliation was small in the old days; probably it i< not very great oven now. Alertness of Water Hoard and City Council officers n few days ago saved Hie council's reserve near Ray wards, but elsewhere fires are rampant in the upper valley of the Hiitt. while on the divide between the Mungaroa and the Wairarapa the smoke clouds are reaching up towards the sky line. Burning of forest on land useless for settlement will continue in j every dry summer, because when Nature's i insurance (dampness) fails, human preventive ! measures are unequal to filling the gap. — | Wellington "Evening Post."