PROTESTS.

Evening Star, Issue 19765, 16 January 1928, Page 6

PROTESTS.

Du Hill, the Empire’s ambassador from Kew Gardens, after all is coming to Dunedin. The programme, arranged in the north, lias been so revised that this city will not bo omitted from his lour. He will spend hero one and a-half days. Something may be achieved, therefore, by a protest against injustice when it is sufficiently prompt, vigorous, and united. It is not often that, by agitation, a threatened injury is averted so completely. The protests made by the South Island against the itinerary first announced for the Samoan fruit boat have been only partially satisfied. Demands that the proceeds of the new petrol tax for the maintenance and construction of highways should be allocated in a manner that will ensure justice to the South Island have met with less satisfacthni still. There are other protests which the community, or part of it, makes continually which produce no effect at all—protests, as‘old as wo can remember, against the propensity of Governments for doing as much instead of as little business as possible by Order in Council; protests against the methods of Parliament; against the gradually dwindling political representation of this island; against the unnecessary noises made by motor cyclists; the bad writing and general ignorance of our school children (which tends to be an annual grievance of some employers at tbo time when, in most numbers, they seek employment); against the high-handed ways of hawkers; against the rates. It would he sad if, when the department which administers our compulsory, free, but still most expensive, system of State education is making unwonted e(forts to guide its products into vocations most suited to them, its work of training should bo so deficient that it must be begun again in whatever profession they enter, but the complaint is yearly made.,

Apparently we are not alone in tills multiplicity of things producing dissatisfaction. Air Robert Lynd has been considering the phenomenon, in an article in a leading weekly, as it affects Great Britain. From a survey of newspapers, chiefly, he concludes that we live in a babel of protests. British experience has shown, during recent years, one or two examples of popular protests which have been successful, but he is convinced that they are ineffective, for the most part, largely on account of their number. “They are like seed sown so thickly that few of them ever come up. They choke the life out of each other. As a result, we who have the natural Jove of protesting against things no longer protest with the same confidence. How, indeed, is it possible to have much confidence when we see all the things we have protested against for years [like the notorious D.0.R.A., Defence of tho Realm Act, which, born of war necessities, still tells Englishmen when they may buy chocolates, for example, and when they may not] flourishing as splendidly as though the sun of universal approbation had shone on them.” Air Lynd suggests that, to prevent tho force of particular protests being lost in a general maze, all persons who have complaints to urge should join a great Society of Protesters, which would take as its motto “ One at a time,” and submit their protests to a central committee, which should decide which protest should for the moment be given precedence. No Government or other authorities would be able to ignore them, when they were thus urged to the exclusion of all rival' murmurings, and with a unanimous voice. That counsel lias its limitation for grievances, like some of our South Island ones, in which one part of a community, forming a majority, has its interest in conserving advantages from the rest. But it is something to know that tho protest which was raised against the omission of Otago from Dr Hill’s tour has been successful. In the special circumstances of his mission it would have been less an outrage, apparently, if his visit had been confined to Otago and the rest of New Zealand ignored. He can learn in Dunedin as much about the economic botany of the dominion as he could learn in the most exhaustive tour of tho two islands, and moie than he could do in any other city.