RANDOM NOTES

Dominion, Volume 29, Issue 151, 21 March 1936, Page 10

RANDOM NOTES

Sidelights on Current Events (By Kickshaws.) Anyway, Roosevelt's latest programme is a great relief. ♦ * • We note with interest that 12 flying fleas are being built in New Zealand, and hope that when completed their first job will be to hunt down those hordes of mosquitoes. Three phases, it is declared, are envisaged regarding the Rhine problem. The first phrase, we understand, was the “fait accompli.” The second phase was just talk and the third phase will be just the “fait accompli.” * * * The contention that people in England and New Zealand drink the lowest per capita amount of milk is perhaps true, but there are other people who eat the world out of house and home. For example, it may come as a surprise that by far the most popular food in the world at present is rice. Far more rice is consumed throughout the world than any other food not excepting bread. The West is, of course, the great bread eating area. Nevertheless, despite the fact that the average Westerner eats 14 tons of bread before he dies, ho never succeeds in catching up with the East and its rice diet. As regards New Zealanders and milk, it is perhaps only fair to point out that what they miss in milk they make up in ice creams. Each one of us, it seems, tucks away in the year four gallons of ice cream. Possibly if this unexpected quota of milk and cream be taken into consideration, New Zealanders will be able to look milk statistics in the face without a blink. It is, of course, nothing compared with the tea we drink, but then tea is New Zealand’s national beverage.

The two most popular foodstuffs among white people to-day are white bread and potatoes. lhe allowance of bread works out at just under lib. a bead, and we eat just over lib. of potatoes. There has, however, been a gradual change in the menu of most of us during the last decade or two. We eat far less meat than did our ancestors and we eat far more fruit. The reason for the last is possibly because, despite high prices, there is more fruit available. In contrast to this most white communities only eat an egg every three days For some strange reason the commodity that has become increasingly popular is sugar. We eat nearly six ounces of sugar a day. The greater bulk of this is not taken at meals, but-in lollies and the like between meals. The least popular commodity it would appear is pepper. The whole world contrives to get along with a modest 40.000 tons of pepper every year. What the world does with all this pepper is a mystery. Like mustard, perhaps it gets left on the plates to make fortunes for the purveyors.

One hears a great deal concerning the toll taken by motor-cars, wars, disease and the like. The recent storm and floods in the United States of America in its own way, suggests that storms are just as deadly. In fact, storms are actually worse than war. A quite normal West Indian hurricane is capable of wiping out 40,000 homes in a. day and taking toll to the tune of £30,000.000. Visitations on this scale are by no means uncommon in the Miami area iu America. A loss of life of 1000 people is the normal accompaniment of the other damage. It will be seen, therefore, that if mankind spent money to protect himself from storms he would be spending money in a way calculated to save millions of lives. Fire, landslides, tidal waves and earthquakes have killed more people since the world began than anything else except disease and time. Perhaps one day there will be an outcry against loss of life in storms, as there is about the roads.

It is a strange fact that despite the deadliness of storms, historians delight to tell us how many people were killed in various battles. Nature’s battles are not worth recording. In tbe_battle of Blenheim for example some 17,000 men were killed. In the Blackergunge cyclone. which visited the Ganges delta iu 1876, 100,000 human beings were killed in a night. A further 100,000 died subsequently of the pestilences that swept across the area involved. The famine that followed probably brought the totals to well over one quarter of a million. Can it be that just because one nation did not vanquish another the toll taken by Nature is forgotten? Vanity keeps past wars alive, and the luck of it kills storm statistics. Indeed how many people had ever heard of the Backergungc cyclone. Almost everybody on the other hand has heard of the Battle of Blenheim, a puny affair, admittedly, in comparison. It is a strange world. We magnify minor events and forget major ones, unless we are personally involved in them.

Amid a recent welter of egg-aml-half jubilation there came this one solitary letter from “W.A.T.”; "Your remarks recently regarding action in the Rhineland contained the statement: ‘France is largely to blame for lack of i-tern treatment of the Mussolini complex. France is the country who will suffer most for her errors iu this connection.’ May I supplement this statement somewhat? To me the problem of Abvssiuia and the problem of the Rhineland are the same problem—viz., Are the nations which have entered into covenants to maintain peace, prepared to abide by those covenants? Recently Italy was judged—almost unanimously—guilty of a flagrant breach of her pligWted word to all the other nations of the League in her invasion of the territory of Abyssinia, another League member. On that occasion France’s attitude was shifty and equivocal, and calculated to encourage Mussolini. It was not the attitude of an honest League member. Now Germany has invaded the Rhineland in complete violation of her freely-given obligations, and France cannot understand why every other League member is not stirred to the depths by this infamy. The truth is that tlie Rhineland invasion has metaphorically stepped on France's pet corn and it hurts, but the real lesson for France is that the sins of omission are punished just as surely ar are the sins of commission. Her dilatory and unsatisfactory attitude on lhe Italo-Abyssiuiau issue gave comfort aud encouragement to covenantbreakers everywhere, with the inevitable result that the next move has landed with poetic justice right on trances own doorstep. Iu fact, the reaction has proved to De a wallop on her solar-plexus! Truly the "ay of transgressors is hard! To use an Asquithian phrase, ‘Wait and see’ ”