Racing and the Public.

Press, Volume LVII, Issue 17207, 26 July 1921, Page 6

Racing and the Public.

One of the earliest of the attacks upon the Racing Commission's report—that made by a Dunedin paper* —illustrates very well the insincerity and. confused thinking which inspires most of ' the opposition to racing. The Dunedin paper gives up a good deal of its apace to the cultivation of popular interest in; the iurf—apart from its clronioling of racing results; If it were sincere; and were not anxious, like some other journals of its class, to keep a foot in both camps, il would either ad;mit the reasonableness of the Commission's report or copy an -English ex* ample and give no kind of encouragement to racing at all. Most of the enemies of racing, it is incumbent upon us to admit/ are perfectly sincere, and that is so much, to their credit. "But although they are sincere, unlike some of the newspapers, such, as that to which we have referred, they ar© as little inclined as those newspapers' to enquire whether. their arguments are based on clear facts. They will probably think that the Dunedin paper has hit the nail on the head when it says that the Commission ought never to have been appointed, and that "it ■■'•' is not more racing days, but more .'* working days, that New Zealand "needs at. this juncture." The words quoted are a masterpiece of confused thinking. We shall examine only two of theiallacies involved in them. The first is that the addition of one to the number of racing-days in the Dominion iB equivalent to the deduction of one from., the working-days in the Dominion. This is quite ai widely-spread idea, although it has often enough been pointed out, in our own columns and elsewhere, that the effective work of the Dominion goes on undisturbed by any or all of the racing days. "When the Gore Trotting Club holds ita annual meeting, nobody stops work except the people about Gore, and we venture to say that Gore's contribution to the efficiency of the nation is not lessened as a consequence. Complaint is made sometimes that Carnival week in Christchurch results in a slackening of the tension in city offices and factories, and some of those urban reformers who are so very familiar with rural life are occasionally bold enough to say that the farming community sacrifices its interests to its annual desire to see the Cup. There is obviously nothing in these complaints. Real productiveness is nowhere sacrificed to any sport in the Dominion. On the contrary, we believe that even the admitted balance of loss involved in racing—that margin of labour and material for which no direct

material gain is more than counterbalanced by the effect of recreation upon productive efficiency. * A great deal of money and labour could be saved if the. community abolished football,, dancing, alcohol, the play, golf, ''non-utilitarian" boohs, pleasant foods, racing, and all the graces and pleasures of life. But it would quickly "become apparent that a serious loss of i efficiency must follow the loas of plea"sure and recreation. It is not necessarily "more working days" that the Dominion most needs "at this junc"ture," or at any other time, but more and better work; and one will

is not robbed of its recreations than from one which is. The enemies of racing need not seek to find any footing on the economic ground, and if they turn aside from it and base their appeal for support upon a plea that.the Commission's recommendations involve an increase of betting, they are met by the fact that the new permits will not add to the volume of betting so much as will bo token away by the extinction of the permits hitherto issued to the Avondale, Napier Park, and Canterbury Park Cluba.