NOTES OF THE DAY

Dominion, Volume 18, Issue 55, 29 November 1923, Page 6

NOTES OF THE DAY

It is quite time that the City Council gave its attention to • the question of publishing its by-laws in a form which the public can understand and follow. Our contributor, ‘ ’Spotlight, this mowing deals with the matter of the Motor Traffic By-laws, and shows how hopelessly confused these have become in the form in which they am now issued. Motor traffic regulation has now become a question *»f very widespread interest and concern, and it is obviously absurd for the City Council to make by-laws and publish them in a form from which it is well-nigh impossible for motorists and the public generally to disentangle a meaning. A new batch of these by-laws is to come up for consideration at this evening’s meeting of the Council, and *t may be hoped that the opportunity will not bo missed to ensure that steps be taken to put the matter right.

Now that Dr. Albert has failed to form a non-political Cabinet, the German political problem appears to be as far as ever from solution. The latest combination, suggested—that of the reactionary parties of the Right and Centre Party—appears to be quite impracticable. These parties have neither the aggregate numerical strength nor the identity of aim that would enable them to form a stable governing Coalition. The Centre Party stands for constitutional government and for the recognition of treaty obligations. It has been able in the past to co-operate to some extent with the Socialists, and would certainly find itself in uncongenial company if it were grouped with the parties of the agrarian and industrial magnates who wish to defy the Allies and to pursue in domestic affairs a policy of reaction which would be almost certain to lead to civil war. It casts impressive light on the extraordinary disorder of German national politics that such a combination has even been suggested. *

No complete explanation has yet been given of the unsatisfactory deadlock that exists in connection with the development of an Imperial wireless chain. When the last mail left England, however, the British Government was being freely criticised for allowing the deadlock to continue. At a meeting of the Empire Press Union Lord Burnham declared that Britain was falling below the rest of the world in what was already one of the most effective and powerful means of communication. On the same occasion it was proposed by Lord Burnham that the Government should allow the whole British wireless service to be undertaken by private enterprise, preserving the right to purchase after a limited number of years. This proposal apparently was neither approved by the British Government nor taken up by the Economic Conference. The one satisfactory feature of the situation is that very strong pressure is evidently being brought to bear on the British Government to induce it to end the wireless deadlock—a deadlock which arises, according to the British Postmaster-General (Sir L. Worthington Evans), out of the fact that “we (the British Post Office) have not yet arrived at a satisfactory division of the services with the Marconi Company.”