COST, OF LIVING.

Evening Post, Volume LXXXIII, Issue 26, 31 January 1912, Page 3

COST, OF LIVING.

WHEN WELLINGTON WAS YOUNG i A PEEP AT THB PIONEERS. (By Eareye.) . ' Wh«tt Sir John Findlay first took the field in Parnell against ex-Captain * Knyvett's chief champion, Mr. Dickson, the ex-Minister briefly discussed one plo- *! blem of the hour — the cost of living. *- "Is it," he asked, "the higher coat of ' Jiving or the cost of higher living?" He "1 did not then essay a definite answer. '. { Many centuries ago philosophers asked similar questions, and they blamed the " ■"higher living" for many of the troubles which fell upon communities. One old Roman said ; "What you do not need is dear at a braea farthing." But modern man or modern woman can easily persuade himself or herself that he or she needs a thing because it is cheap. That hum;m trait was to be noted in the mat- ■ ket places of ancient Greece and Rome, and it will never be blotted out. It will always exist to add to the cost of living. Is is a truism, little heeded ■ bow, that reduction of needs cute down . the hours of toil, and thins' out the worries of housekeeping. The "week-ender 1 * • of the seaside whare who turns the , plates, and uses the underside when the • top-surface is greasy or jammy, knows , that truth. The bushman who uses a , bottle as & candlestick and a soap-Box . as » chair also knows it. - Such, a man is not worried much by the cares of property. He does not fear that a burgjar many steal his chair or his candlestick. Electric lights of liners make a shaft of flame in the still sea silvered by the moon of summer, and the belated rattle of a winch troubles the soft night air. It is the insistent voice of Trade from •which no time nor place is sacred. The distant cars are murmuring in undertones somewhere below a great cross of electric lights spanning the slopes above Thorndon. A little reverie, a little unrolling of the scroll, and all the hill by Thorndon is dark except for the light of that same moon and a few dots of brightness by the shore. An old wooden hooker has just crept in ; from the coast, and her anchor is going down to the merry lilt' of a chanty.^ She has mails and goods eagerly awaited. Her name will be guessed by small boys soon after sunrise, and her sailors • will come ashore with much gossip about movements in the north. It is the big event of the week. • C f) t » Mr. Elsdon Best cannot remember a Wellington quite so simple, but he can turn his mind back to days when life here was not very complicated. The community's "top hamper" was very light indeed— no great public buildings, no tramways, no telegraphs, built with borrowed money. A strike of carters, of builders, or of waterside wdrkers would not have worried anybody very / much except the «ti'iker«. Each family was compelled to be self-reliant. There was no heavy ground rent, and the cottage wa_ so simply built that the weekly charge was slight. Land enough lay about the cosy little building for the raising of vegetables and wheat for bread. The house was not stuffed with needless furniture, and the walls and shelves were not hideous with countless knick-knacks. > The pioneer did not ioad himself with such lumber; did not work for it; did not have hia cost of living complicated by it. Mi. Pioneer and Mrs. Pioneer did not spend any extraordinary sum? on suits and dresses and hats. On week days Mr. Pioneer liked to do his toil m white moleskins and a blue shirt, and on Sundays ihe liked " to be in clean white moleskins and clean j blue shirt. Sometimes this was acconv ] plished by having a, sparo shift of this j raiment, and sometimes by having the , -work clothes washed for Sunday. Mr. ' Pioneer did not work for elaborate j tweed to be moulded to his figure by specially trained hands. After all a man looks more pleasing to any healthy eye in a clean blue shirt and clean white moleskins than in a cub of cloth which makes him resemble an impressionist picture of a weird bird, with folded wings. It is conventional n»w to think and act otherwise, and one pays for the convention. Many conventions figure in the latter day cost of living. Some married couples, not affluent, start conjugal life with a burden as the cost of conventions which give nobody, except the caterers, the photographers, and a few others, any enduring joy. " Wages were poor in those times," , says^ MA Best. He mentioned that men - received only 3s j>er hundred feet for j pit-sawing timber. The late Mr. Thomas M'Kenzie remarked to the writer that a- man named Mitchell, ("Jimmy " Mitchell] used to carry a' sack of flour on his back from Wellington to Plimmer■fon (or further) for 10s. But, of course, silver and gold • had a much greater buying power in Wellington in those days than now. There was the patch of ground to help, 'and the bush and the _ea could yield some food. Bartering ■was a, popular practice^ as it is in all comparatively primitive communities. Barter still has some. vogue in remote rural parts of New Zealand. v Amusements of small boys were not much of a, load on the parents. The, circus, the moving picture^ and vaudeville were yet to come. Mr. Best remembers the days when the boys had "stony" marbles baked for nothing at the kiln near Clay Point (the Bank of New Zealand corner.) He remembers, too, when the "shanghai" (always termed a catapult during his boyhood) first delighted the juvenile element of Wellington. This pastime was turned to profit for the whole family. . The boys roamed the bush, which then had plenty of parrakeete, pigeons, and other toothsome inhabitants big enough to be baked in a pie or roasted. Sometimes the boys worked through as far as the Ngahauranga stream, where wild ducks thought they were safe, and bagged a few of them with the humble catapult's aid. The boys were also valuable providers of fish and firewood. They earned their board very soon after they were breeched. The girls also had to justify thenexistence very early in life. They had no doll-like time of it. . Their clothing made no big gap in Mr. Pioneer's weekly earnings (if he happened to be under a "boss.") When the girls were 4 able to add two and two they rather simplified than compounded the cost of living. They were of the class now termed the " useful people." Home-made sweets preceded the modern chocolate and caramel. Walt Whitman, rather a Socialistic writer, once exclaimed: — "I could turn and live with animate. They are bo placid and self-contained." Therefore, he would have been happy if he had been among the " simple-lifers " of early Wellington, though they were not "animals." Th«y were sturdy and brave men and women, whose simple dean living gave a legacy of health to their descendants. They did not fret and fume for unnecessary things, j They heartily did the Work which lay to their willing hands, and ,to that old-time vigour modern Wellington ©wes much of ite present comfort.