The Show.

Press, Volume LVIII, Issue 17607, 9 November 1922, Page 8

The Show.

In an ago whicli is exceptionally restless, full of new ideaa good and badj and very different indeed from the lota Victorian ago and that more active decade during which Edward VII. was King, the aontinued vitality of the A. and P. Association's Show is most interesting and significant. One needs not to be in the sere and yellow to remember when the city dwellers thronged on foot or in horse-drawn vehicles to the Show Ground. To-day we all go by tram or motor-car, and we find amongst the exhibits machines which are commonplace to the children of to-day,'but which were simply not dreamed of by the people of twenty years ago. But we find horses and. sheep and cattle just as in the old days, and implements of tillage, not fundamentally different from the implements of tho pre-petrol age. It is not difficult to imagine thai a great many of the city dwellers who will go to Addiugton to-day and to-morrow will find the display of stock and implements curious and amusing, so little do they realise, that the city and its activities are no more than by-products of the laboratory which is represented by the.livestock and "dead stock" at the Show. The city folk will do.well to reflect upon the meaning of this vigorously persisting display of what is going on in the territory outside the tramway zone, and to teach themselves that the pastoral and agricultural in-dustries-are of vital importance to the province, and that there is more virtue, more national usefulness, in the horse

or cow or sheep which is decorated with the red card than in any of those anti-agrarian propagandists who decorate themselves with red ties. Yet, whether or not the Show revitalises the intelligent' citizen's understanding of his dependence upon thd man on the land, the man on the luijd will continue to keep the country going. The locomotive has driven out the bullock-dray and the stage-coach; the electric telegraph, having abridged time and space, is making way for radio; the motor-car has replaced the horse as a means of transport; lakes and waterfalls are doing the work once done by coal—but the horse, the cow, and the sheep, the plough and the drill, remain unsupersedcd and, irreplaceable. And so the old familiar features of the Show remain as up-to-date and as important as they were in the day when the Show was founded. Nor can anyone set any limit to the time within which this will remain true.