SELF-SUFFICIENCY

Evening Post, Volume CXVII, Issue 127, 31 May 1934, Page 10

SELF-SUFFICIENCY

Auckland reports that home brewing is on the decline, because it requires a good deal of work (which ceases to be a pleasure when the novelty wears off), because the product is not always good, and because it leads to more drinking and less saving. The report is interesting because it bears on the question to what extent the individual may be self-sufficient. With the advent of new scientific short-cuts, self-suffi-ciency has become a world problem. There is a self-sufficiency of the nation, and a self-sufficiency of the individual. Mass manufacture by means of machinery has become so systematised that Mr, Owen Young thinks that each country will make its own necessary manufactures; and brewing technique has been so improved (?) that yesteryear niany citizens were sure they would in future make their own beer. If there is now,a hitch in the one, may not there be hereafter a hitch' in the other? It is hard to believe that any improvement, however scientific, will in a moment place home brewing on the same basis as home tea-making, or home bread-baking on the same basis as home cooking. It is also hard to believe that the last has been heard of the' international exchange .of manufactured goods.. Self-sufficiency may have virtues. It almost certainly has limits.