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Press, Volume LVII, Issue 17292, 2 November 1921, Page 6

The Churches and the Totalisator. In a long letter which we print, on another page;:, of. to-day's paper, tho Ven. Arohdaacbii Haggitt and the Revs. Napier Milne, J. J. North, and John PaterßODj ireiply to the article in Monday's "Press"., in which we discussed the anti-totalisator pamphlet which they prepared as a committee of the Council of Christian Congregations. The most striking 'weaknesses in the pamphlet—which we set out clearly, making quotations and supplying the refutations, point by point—our correspondents have been unwilling to defend. They practically confine themselves to our complaint concerning prestidigitation, and our observations upon "unearned money." Let us repeat the matter of our complaint. The committee—Archdeacon Haggitt and hifl colleagues—found themselves confronted with the difficulty (which they

made for them selves) that gambling risks in business are not, as they maintain gambling risks at Riccarton are, , " a barefaced defiance of a central law "of life." They sought to get over ! this difficulty by saying "business men I "do not create risks'' where, as we clearly showed, the argument, if it were to hare any relation to the sub- ! ject, required the word "takes" and not "creates." So far as we can understand the involved gloss our cor- | respondents supply in their letter, they i maintain that racecourse risks are arti- ■ ficially "created," while business risks ! are not, but are natural, normal risks. ' They seek to illustrate the extinction by giving an example—the case of the men who drove for oil at Chertsey. " They took risks. But they only took " them when they had reduced them " to the utmost by all the resources of "science and of experience. They be- " lieved that the risks so reduced were "low enough for them to launch out "on the enterprise." Surely it ought to have occurred to the Committee to reflect that as much could be said by anyone who backs a horse in the Cup. He. knows the risks as well as the Chertsey oil seekers. He stakes his pound because he has reduced the risk by studying form and so on. As a matter of fact there will be many hundreds of whom it will be possible to say next week <hat they knew and measured their risks far better than the Chertsey experimenters, for they will have picked a winner, while the Chertsey people did not. No; the fact is that business ia as full of risks as betting is, and of risks known to be risks, and deliberately taken in the hope of dividends of. some sort. To seek to found a case against the totalisator on the ground that the bettor is taking created risks is hopeleßS unless one is prepared to condemn as immoral a great volume of legitimate business. Nor is tho Committee more happy in its treatment of the problem of "unearned money." Our correspondents say: "We contended that money outside "gift ought to bear a relation to ser- " vice rendered to the community. Dis- " pleased with this contention you at- " tempt to include all invested money in " the category of the-unearned"; and they go on to defend interest on investments. Now, we expressed no displeasure at the committee's contention regarding service, and we did not mention invested money at air, nor can we imagine why the committee could not see what we meant. "We shall put it plainly. The pamphlet argued that it is "a barefaced defiance of a central "law of life" to seek and enjoy "un- " earned money," and we naturally pointed out that this was a condemnation of millions of respectable and useful people. Consider the case of a man who bought a house in March of last year, with the object pi selling it at a profit. If he sold it at the right time he made a good deal of money. This profit was assuredly "unearned." Was the. transaction "a 'barefaced. defiance ■""of .a,central law of life." In conclusion, perhaps, we should say that our correspondents ought to know better than to call an "unmeasured attack" what the readers of "The PreSe" have their own senses to tell them was a carefully measured and moderately phrased' criticism, and a criticism which our correspondents have failed to meet.

The anxiety with which Mr Parr, Minister of Health said the other night in the House he was watching the plague situation in Queensland is thoroughly warranted. So far there have been 37 or 38 caws of plague reported in Queensland, of which 20 have proved fatal. It is pointed ont that this rate of mortality is much higher than in previous visitations, when it was about one in every three cases. In the past, the death-rate from plague has been fairly low at firsthand has increased, as the epidemic grew in virulence. In the present instance, in the first few weeks of the outbreak, it shows a mortality of rather more than 50 per cent., and the Director-General of Health in the Commonwealth has stated that, judging by the experience of the past, the main epidemic is not to be expected until about next March or April. The spread of rat infection, he anticipates; will continue, "until well on into next year and probatly longer," and the danger of human cases occurring "will be just as great mx months hence as.it is now." ' —* It is, of course, of no avail to discuss at this stage of the outbreak the extent to which the policy of sedrecy regarding the occurrence of the first plague case in Queensland, which was pursued by teh State Health Authorities, is responsible lor the spread of the disease in that State, and for the menace that its existence there holds for the rest of Australia and for New Zealand. So far the close quarantine supervision that has been instituted has kept Melbourne and Sydney free from human cases, but infected rats have been discovered in Sydney, and where they are found there is danger of human beings becoming infected. The near approach of summer, coupled with the threatening state of affairs in Queensland, give great force to Dr. Cumpston's warning, and makes it more imperative than ever that the campaign against the rat shall be waged with unrelenting vigilance. The rat, by the way, is not the only animal to be guarded against; a plague-infected oat was discovered in Brisbane last week. The continuance of the immunity from plague which New Zealand has so far enjoyed depends largely upon the rigorous enforcement of the quarantine regulations and the employment of every possible means by port and municipal authorities and by private householders to exterminate the rat.

In the letter from Archdeaoom Haggitt and ike Revs. Napier Milne, JJ. North, find John Paterson, which we deal with in one of our leading articles, there is a strange reference to the "Autobiojjraphy of Mark Rutherford," the first of that famous series of books, written fcy William Hale White. In, our first article on uhe pamphlet on gambling prepared by our correspondents, we made some quotations from, the "Autobiography," which we introduced with the remark that it was aj book with which "the members of the Council [of Christian Congregations}

are all, or ought to be, familiar." Our correspondents refer to this at the end of their letter, saying:— "You conclude by challenging our knowledge of Mark Rutherford, but von quote words of his editor, Reuben "Shapeott, as though they were Rutherford's." We did not "challenge" our correspondents' knowledge of Mark Rutherford; on the contrary, in our foolish simplicity, we assumed that they all knew tho book. And now we find that our assumption was wrong: they know nothing, or knew nothing, of the book. For Mark Rutherford is a purely fictional character, and so is Reuben Shapeott. Hale White merely invented Rutherford for the hero of his book — which is a dramatic presentation of his own spiritual development—and invented Shapeott as his friend and editor. But our correspondents imagine that RutJherford was a real person, and Shapeott another, and tha,t we wickedly ascribed to Rutherford what Shapeott said! We think we can predict that our correspondents' solemn rebuke to us will obtain the fame that so exquisite a "howler" deserves. ♦

It does not mudh surprise us that the Rev. J. J. North, whose style, in the pamphlet and in our correspondents' letter (the mere word "challenge" is a sign-manual), should know nothing of Mark Rutherford, for, to be quite frank, no earnest man could ponder White's books without losing that hard arrogance or uncha.ritableness which spoils Mr North's handling of social problems. But that a selected committee of the Council of Christian Congregations should all'Sbe ignorant of tho facts concerning Mark. Rutherford is both astounding and sad. In their haste—having read as far as the Water Lane chapter, tho third—they quote a sentence from Rutherford's admirable account of his renunciation of wine as if it were an advocacy of Prohibition. Even here, on a point which is beside the issue, they err seriously. White's fliero, very unlhappy, has begun to find wine a consoler, and he realises tho perils of continued reliance upon wine as «■ preventive of hypochondria. Very wisely he decides that he must overcome this perilous habit, and he gives some excellent advice concerning the way to doi it. But there is not a word concerning wine as an evil tlhing, not a word to suggest anything except that wine persistently taken as a cure for acute misery is an evil thing. That is all. The best thing our correspondents can do is to read the Mark Rutherford books, of which, it almost appears, they are more likely to be able to borrow copies from abandoned racegoers than from moro precise people.