NOTES OF THE DAY

Dominion, Volume 15, Issue 160, 1 April 1922, Page 6

NOTES OF THE DAY

The City Council’s alarm on Thursday at the proposed Wainui deviation of the Wairarapa railway was somewhat premature. Whatever may be said of the various routes proposed it is up-to-date information with regard to ’ them that is required. On the old surveys of 1899 it is shown that while the present line climbs to a height of 1144 feet above sea level, a route can be provided via Tauherinikau with a summit level of 897 feet, or another via Wainui with a climb of only 560 feet, but with one tunnel a mile in length and a second three and a half miles long. ■ The first route still takes the traffic tortuously over the mountain ranges; the second involves gigantic tunnelling. The question. arises whether there is no other way, and it would be as well to hear definitely while the routes are being gone over that a' coast route would be wholly impracticable. Mr. Rochfort, in the seventies, when the present line was laid down, dismissed the coast route in four lines because of the shingle and slips, but his view was challenged by at least one speaker in Parliament, and it does not appear that any, survey was made then or afterwards. A few years back , there was talk of a coast road to the Wairarapa, via the Wainui Valley, and if a combined road and railway route by the coast could be .laid down at even equivalent cost to the Wainui tunnel scheme, it might be possible to kill two birds with one stone. There is certainly no other route for a reasonably level road to the Wairarapa'- . <■

A new use for music lias been found in America. Experiment has shown that it not only has pow'er to “soothe the savage breast,” but also to cause the ordinary mail sorter to forget his worries to such an extent that he will do more worn and make fewer errors than usual. The music which provided the stimulus in the test? in question was provided per medium of the phonograph, 'it is at night that music gets in its best effects in the mail-sorting department —particularly late at' night, or in the early hours of the morning. Mqn on all-night work grow weary at mail-sorting from the monotony of the occupation, and it i« said, in the eases under review, would usually go home tired. After the introduction of the phonograph, "however, they not only brisked up in their sorting; work, ind made fewer errors —about 10 per cent, less—but they knocked off duty bright and fresh. When questioned-'after some days of trial, the men said the time seemed shorter, the work easier and more enjoyable, and, that the music kept them alert. Now, if our own Postal authorities want to speed up and brighten up the mail-room work here is a chance for them.

An interesting item in the policy of the party which has now won a majority in New South Wales is decentralisation. This means a modification of the conditions in which nearly all the road and railway communications of the State converge on Sydney, and the development and use of alternative ports (for inward and outward trade is correspondingly discouraged. This state of affairs, highly detrimental to producing and other interests in some outlying areas of the State, has long been a subject of complaint. It is largely responsible for the agitation which has gathered head in recent years in favour of the division of New. South Wales by the creation of new States. Sir George Fuller proposes to meet tho position by giving settlers in the northern districts of New South Wales through railway communication with Brisbane. lie proposes a similar scheme of railway communication to give settlers in the southern districts a chance of marketing their products in Melbourne. Settlers over a wide area in northern New South Wales are half or less than half as far away from Brisbane as they are from Sydney, and many settlers in the southern part of the State would derive corresponding advantages from being in touch with Melbourne instead of Sydney. Tho existing problem is accentuated, and a solution is made more difficult by the gauge-variation of the Australian railways. The gauge in Queensland is 3 feet 6. inches; in New. South Wales, 4 feet 8} inches; . and in Victoria 6 feet 3 inches. In regard to this matter, Sir George

Fuller stated recently that he was perfectly prepared to see railways of the Victorian gauge carried to certain terminal points in New South Wales and to invite the Victorian Government to run trains over these lines. This proposal offers some immediate advantages, but its adoption in the end would complicate the problems arising out of the break of railway gauge in- Australia. The only real remedy, though it entails a huge outlay, is to make the gauge uniform throughout the Commonwealth.

A chilling reception awaited Australia’s invitation to Britain’s business men to come and sink their money in industries in the Commonwealth. The response to his call must have been disillusioning to the new Australian High Commissioner in the plain home truths handed out by one large concern which has tried the experiment' of establishing a factory in the Commonwealth. Impossible wages have to be i paid to unskilled labour, we are told, and needlessly hampering restrictions are imposed. There can be no doubt at all that if. the enemies of the Empire had desired to devise a weapon to strangle industrial enterprise in Australasia, they could have designed nothing more effective for this purpose than the doctrines of the Australian Labour organisations. The One Big Union idea is backed by an autocratic and ambitious clique, whose one idea is to kick the capitalist harder and harder until he is smashed, What follows then they know no more than Lenin and Trotsky knew when they dragged civilisation down in Russia to the ground in ruin and bloodshed. In New Zealand the same forces are at work in close alliance with the Australian clique. Australasia’s main hope lies in the fact—to paraphrase some well-known words—that while the local. Bolshevists can fool some of the workers all the time, and all of the workers some of the time, they cannot fool all the workers all the time.