NEWS AND OPINIONS

Evening Star, Issue 21636, 3 February 1934, Page 2

NEWS AND OPINIONS

LONDON’S RIVER BUSES. There seems little doubt now that London is going to have its river buses (writes the correspondent of the Melbourne ‘ Age ’). The first of them—to be followed, according to present plans, by twenty-nine others—is just being finished at Walton-on-Thames; and the service will start early in 1934. The river route fo town is to be an all-the-year-round alternative to bus, tram, and tube, and there will be'a flat fare of 6d from Hammersmith to the Tower or the Tower of Greenwich. It is hoped that eventually a three to five minute service will be in operation. The craft are to be fast and commodious—twenty minutes from Hammersmith to Blackfriars, for instance, will save a lot of time compared with the land route; and there will be accommodation for 100 passengers. The saloons are so decorative that, out of the rush hours, they will provide suitable accommodation for dances, and the boats will be hired out for such social purposes. One fact likely to give the boats a measure of popularity is that drinks will be available at any hour on board from the well-equipped bars there, for “ Dora is a landlubber, and she and her licensing restrictions do not even embark on even river craft. A CENTENARIAN. A personality among centenarians was Mrs Mary Cruttenden, who has just died at Southend. “ I became a teetotaller when I was 97,” she had said, 11 but I changed my mind again afterwards.” To change one s mind at four-score-and-seventeen must be a tremendous adventure. — 1 Observer. STERILISATION. A hunchback won a. throne by his wit Another was called a wizard because he played with lightning in his laboratory. The maimed, the halt, and the blind have scaled the heights of fame in spite of their handicap.' But, if the mass sterilisation contemplated in Germany had been in force generations ago, “the world might have been deprived of some of her greatest. Some such reflections come to those who ponder this scheme to purify the Nordic strain. Nothing so extreme has been attempted before, no plan has opened so wide an avenue down which tho outcast and despised could be driven; none has gone so far in discriminating among scientific theories and in assuming that human judgment can not err.— ‘ Literary Digest.’