THE PASSING SHOW.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVII, Issue 183, 4 August 1936, Page 6

THE PASSING SHOW.

(By THE MAN ABOUT TOWN.) Dear M.A.T., —Young Peter, rising six years says, "Daddy, when I am a man and I've been to the war antj it comes Ansae Day, I hope they sing", 'Onward, YOUNG RECRUIT. Christian Soldiers,' 'cos I know that one." Then as an afterthought he asks, "Daddy, what is the difference between a Christian soldier and the other kind of soldier?" Now, M.A.T., when Peter's daddy was aged «ix you used to answer all sorts of awkward questions for him. Can you still "do your stuff'? E.J.K. Jack Frost arranges exquisite effects, and you may see a quite ordinary citizen on a sunny, frosty morning moving in a nimbus, an aureole, a veritable MORNING PIPE, halo made by parties of his breath condensing in the frosty atmosphere. The little lad notec: this phenomenon 011 a recent frosty morning. He was looking out of a home window. Passing bv in the street was the horse-drawn vehicle of the rubbish collection service. The horse was carrying Tils halo. "Oh, dad! ' said the voung t'jnerver. "i'hat horse is having a smoke!" The wee boy is only three. He is learning his Catechism very well indeed, and is liable to repeat portions of the same at any time. Wee people with resilient THE CHILD MIND, minds hop from one subject to another, and so his parents heard him sing: Captain Cook, Captain Cook, I'll write a book Just like the travels Of Captain Cook. And mother, improving the occasion, asked, "Who was Captain Cook, William?" And the little chap, reverting to higher things, instantly replied, "A grave offence against the laws of God."

A contemporary columnist, mentioning that there is a collection of bookplates in the Victorian National Gallery, declares that a bookplate in a book will THE "B." BOOKS, probably prevent the most hardened borrower from pinching a book. He is wrong, of course. You may have a bookplate drawn by the most eminent of artists stuck in the inside of your most cherished books, and if you arc ass enough to let them depart on the assurance of the average liar, "Bring it back next Tuesday," you may usually say "Good-bye" for ever. The average bookish person, having read a book, simply sticks it with many others on a book shelf. He may not see or handle a book for years. He doesn't discriminate about them—they may be his; they may be Brown's or Jones'. Bookplates don't trouble him because he doesn't see them. What is wanted is a large "B." on t/.e back so that the roving eye of the dratted borrower can't miss it. Booksellers should sell big red "B.'s" for backs of books and every silly lender should stick one on every book. Tlie other day a fellow asked another fellow to look up a bit of ])oetrj'-, as another fellow kept lots of books of verse. When the searcher searched for his stock of verse books he hadn't any. Mother had lent the lot at one time and another. Not one will ever come back. No "B.'s" on any of them.

In the matter of wages, salaries, emolu- | ments and the other several forms of reward for work achieved, those who give wages and those who receive the PAY DAY. same, the arbitrary fixation of reward for toil (if any), and the universal growl world wide 011 this subject. Conceive the return to ancient days when there were 110 metal tokens denoting reward 011 Friday, 110 grubby promissory bank notes —110 banks unless you counted the gents with the aquiline countenances who used to be whipped off the steps of Temples and so forth. Pay day came then as now, but then the masters seem to have kept the wages in gunny-bags and in leather bottles—corn and oil. Did it ever occur to you that the Old World worker having toiled from frosty morn till dewy eve every day without intermission, queued up for his corn and oil—or any other wages in kind? Eastern bosses who insisted on the corn and oil wage, if they employed a large staff, would need large granaries and immense oil deposits. Probably they kept groves of olive trees to draw the oil wage from and bookkeepers, cashiers and accountants who could add up bushels, make entries with a chisel in the stone wages book, and tot up ephahs of wheat by mental arithmetic. \ou have rt»ad the Biblical stories of the ardent lads who worked for the boss for shelter and tucker for seven years—and the boss' daughter? Modern methods do not permit the payment of wages in kind. You can, of course, imagine working for a draper who paid you every Friday in socks and ties, or the ironmaster who awarded you a sewingmachine instead of bank notes" at the weekend. To bring it down to tin tacks—fancy present toilpr being awarded a couple of gross of newspapers—complete witli Magazine Section instead of the dear old paper tokens of modern life. Thanks—say it in gold!

Louis Bleriot is dead. He met his death without crashing to it—luckv! He was the first man to fly the English Channel.- For hundreds of years a subWOE TO THE marine tunnel between VANQUISHED! England and the Continent was proposed, but •danger of it as an aid to invasion apparently prevented it. No one put a large foot down on the much more sinister invention of the i aeroplane, not a soul imprisoned the early geniuses of the air, the incredible and heroic people who have changed the fortunes of humanity and who made a hideous diabolism available in the guise of knowledge, speed aiul utility to all people. A lyilitary lecturer at Oxford has pointed out that civil aviation is a faice nothing but a reserve for bombing purposes. In short, the heroic men and women we worship are all pioneers of intolerable anguish, unutterable destruction, agony piled on agony. In periods of world history durin" which the human brain has been as "good as at any other period there has often been utter cessation of epoch-making invention—nianki-iul turned the sod with a bent stick—and had enough to cat—mankind century after century did his after-dark work by light of grease candles—and saw, and so 'on, ad infinitum. Mankind passed through the reigns of uncounted lyings behind bullocks, horses or asses—and fit there—and mankind who got there fought the institution of power vehicles instinctively. No one lias fought the invention and perfection of air vehicles, of all wicked contrivances the most ghastly. The Old World sooner or later must have rest from satanic cleverness, from the apparently innocent innovation that spells woe to the vanquished. Not a soul who furnishes an interested world with a new gadget for the massacre of humanity ever does twenty-one years in gaol for his sin. The world wants a' rest from the instigators of wholesale Death, whom we all applaud. THOUGHTS FOR TO-DAY. Love cannot tie hid any more than light, and least of all when it shines forth in action. —John Wesle3 r . Life is a quarry, out or which we are to mould and chisel and complete a charafter.— Goethe.