By the Way

Evening Star, Issue 23349, 19 August 1939, Page 3

By the Way

(By X.Y.)

I—John Citizen —have lent Moneys to the Government At the rate of four per cent,

They receive some benefit. Or they wouldn’t ask for it— My one hundred pounds, to wit.

I. can not afford to splash This accumulated cash , On a gift to Mr Nash;

But I comfortably can (When ha meets me like a man, Paying four per cent, per an.)

Lend him what I have to lend, Knowing that I can depend On repayment in the end.

Lots of fellows thus invest Savings from the family chest For- a bit of interest.

Other folk, across the seas, Put their little all in these Government securities.

They have learned to trust the State; For its credit has been great— Up till now, at any rate.

Hitherto a man' could say: “ Trust the State, for,_ anyway, Where it borrows, it will pay.”

From beneath the marble clock From the teapot and the sock, Little people purchased Stock.

Dp 'then rises Mister 1 Lee, Shaking our security. Hurling names at you and me

We are Shylocks, it appears, Normans, gangsters, racketeers. Vampires (strident Left Wing cheers)

With voracious greediness We are seeking to oppress Cripples, widows, fatherless. Kindly, Mister Lee, explain. Shall I wait, and wait in vain, For my.hundred back again?

If, by any ebanbo, you get Walter’s seat in Cabinet — What’s your theory of Debt?

Tf you reach—as Savage did— Premiership (which Heaven forbid!) What about my hundred quid?.

In the meantime you excite Sentiments akin to fright. In your comrades on the Bight.

Oppositionists, with joy. Welcome chances to annoy Labour, through its Naughty Boy,

Fraser wears a worried frown. Vexed Advisers of the Crown Simply itch to choke you down

TJfaey would like.to see you win Ministerial honours in Regions warmer than Grey Lynn ! • • * *

Erosion is coming to be mentioned in current reading matter almost as frequently as war preparations. The two subjects have features in common, notably that of wastage due to man’s seizure of soientfio discoveries and feverish 1 application of them, heedless of possible reactions. An official of a New Zealand fertiliser company had a sensational tale to tell on his return concerning what is happening to wheat lands in parts of New South Wales and Victoria. Harvesting grain in Australia is a far simpler and speedier process than that followed in Otago—stripping, . instead of, cutting, stroking, stacking, and threshing, _ And in many parts there is no rotation of crops. Starved of humus the Australian soil is.an easy prey to wind and water. The farmer sees his paddock reft with ,ravines or its surface bodily blown away, sometimes both.

Unfortunately there 1 is ample corroboration of the havoc erosion is working in Australia. When painstaking research work evolved the drought-resist-ing wheats use was found for the mallee lands, in the Murray basin near where that river enters , South Australia, where the rainfall averages about nine ' inches a'year,' At'first the crops were 'surprisingly successful. But with the ’ fantastically gnarled malice roots no ■ longer there to bind .it the light soil ■ began to' blow with the first wind, and . it nas been blowing away ever since. The wheat growers are falling back be- ' fore an advancing Sahara,'and the dust itself is choking; watercourses which ' normally fed the Murray. The mallee country is now the desolate front of a 1 fteing campaign. In. ‘Australian Journey’ Paul McGuire laments the wasteful shortsightedness and fouhdationless optimism with which the w ay-back pastoral areas in Australia have been handled. The salt-bush and blue-bush, on which so much of Australia’s wool and mutton has grown, are two of the world’s toughest vegetables. They are steadily • disappearing. ■ What harm the rabbits •came, short of doing' was completed by overstocking after droughts in the lust for quick profits. Australia's recuperative power when the rains come after a drought is proverbial. -. But it is a diminishing power. Mr M'Guire says: “ Each drought ’should have been a warning, but people have glibly believed that when the drought broke everything would bo /'as it was before. But,* after each drought now, the recovery "becomes less and less pronounced. There is a general and progressive decline of the pastoral lands. . No recovery reaches the point of the • previous recovery, ft is only a matter of -time when the pasture's turn to and the deserts march to the sea ”' '.-is; * .■• *- • * ? The same author has a few words on the.indiscriminate use of the axe in the more'favoured coastal range section of Australia. Besides the destruction of ■ forests outright there was the ringharking of trees in the belief that the dead, skeletons would not “ rob the basture.’.’. It has proved to be mere sabotage.' and provided a heavy additional ‘‘risk in. a country plagued with hoaU fires, for the nng-barked trees fiame into terrible torches. There is no overstatement in sentences such, as these: “Every tree murdered in .Australia is a blow at Australia’s life.” “The slaughter of trees in Australia is an appalling business and equivalent - to? a slow process of national suicide.” With the removal of growth the exposed, rocks “flint” and scale under sun and frost and the mountains disin- ‘ testate. Comes a downpour of- rain, ana the Jssk Valley in Hawke’s Bay is an illustration of the result; a smiling countryside becomes a dust howl and a pleasant stream a perpetual flood menace because‘choked. The lessons of .experience have been .wasted on Australia and'Now Zealand. The ’atest of them was provided by the >■'UiS.-A. wheat belt in the long stretch from the Great Lakes to the Rocky 'Mountains/mow known as the “ dust-

“T he time has come,* r the Walrus said ; “To talk of many things

bowl.” The earliest is probably Mesopotamia, where popular legend places the Garden of Eden. Intermediate there are the eases of North Africa and China. Good authorities say that, beginning from a grain-growing area in North Africa (once the granary of the world}, the Sahara has steadily crept, and is still creeping, southward, turning savannas into sand dunes and mere aridness into desolation. The Lake Chad shoreline has receded in places over 20 miles in the last hundred years. The dry seasons are becoming increasingly frequent. The little villages are losing their fight. Many of the wells good a hundred years ago are dry holes in the rock to-day. The millet patches of yesterday will be windswept wastes to-morrow. In Asia the Chinese deserts grew because a desperate peasantry tried to use every cultivable acre for crop, cut down trees, and the soil washed down from the denuded hills, silted up the rivers until their beds gradually rose above the level of the surrounding country, so that periodically the flood waters surmount the man-made levees along the hanks and the widespread inundations which the Sino-Japanese war cables have lately mentioned incidentally can easily be imagined. Is it Nature’s retribution that graingrowers practically the world over complain of their uneconomic plight? And is it characteristic of the political mind that this is often the first industry singled out for subsidy? « ■» : * * After an interval of about a quarter of a century Mr Fred Doidge, M.P., has changed bis seat in Parliament buildings from the Press gallery to the floor of the House, for he was a pre-war parliamentary representative of the Auckland ‘ Star,’ and had among his proteges the recently-departed Mr Albert Edward Glover during session, and the once perpetual Mayor of Auckland, Mr Gunson, during recess. Both were prolific of live copy. During the long interval Mr Doidge was in Fleet Street, associated with the Beaverbrook organs, chiefly the ‘ Daily Express.’ This week he told the Wellington Rotary Club something of the inside of London’s present-day journalism and its papers for the masses, with their circulations running into millions. And very interesting it was. * * * But if any reader of this column is sufficiently interested in the matte/ he can suppl'emant Mr Doidge by reading Sisley Huddleston’s new book, ‘ In My Time.’ Huddleston was correspondent for many papers of the better class, whether English or, American, daily, weekly, or monthly, his headquarters being mostly Paris. There he worked through the war and the Peace_ Conference, and followed the interminable subsequent conferences at Geneva, Locarno, and elsewhere. He is of firm opinion that not only are conferences abortive, but they arc an actual menace to peace—peace of the lasting kind at all events. And another factor’he ranks with them. “ What are we to say of the slap-dash, untruthful, screaming Press, which now sets the pace and gives the tone to English public life? 1 cannot conceive anything more perilous to peace and to the Empire.” In the author's opinion the failure of the Press in 1919 was the principal cause of the impossible Versailles Treaty—source of to-day’s European maelstrom—and he maintains that since 1919 it has gone rapidly downhill, having discovered that foreign policy can be made “ exciting ” news.

Originally a fervent believer in the League of Nations. Huddleston underwent complete disillusionment, largely because its conception of collective security was exclusively and revengefully French. Open diplomacy proved a failure as great as Woodrow Wilson proved as peacemaker. “ The old diplomatists would have been far more moral than this professing moralist, who was so immoral as to sell everything for an empty dogma.” “ Never in my life have 1 been so disillusioned by any man as by Wilson,” he writes. In an interview .which Lloyd George gave to Huddleston during Versailles the Prime Minister unerringly sorted out the dragon’s teeth in the treaty, but being attacked over it in the House of Commons he repudiated the interview—unforunately for the world of to-day. One anecdote about the Welsh wizard and his spell-binding: “He is young yet,” said a Welshman when an Englishman protested that L.G. was not God Almighty.

Now the hurly-burly’s done; Now the battle’s lost and won; Now the people of Madrid Learn to do as they are bid. Now that Yes-men Catalans Say “ Amen ” to Franc’s plans One might think that all this Spanish Urge for homicide would vanish.

Surely they might cast away Implements of war array; ~ After all these gory rows Turn to pruning-hooks and ploughs; Woo mantilla-wearing maids With guitars and serenades; Watch the Bull that raves and roars At elusive Picadors.

Well-a-day! I cannot sec Signs of peaceful harmony. Some are Carlists still, alack! Others want Alfonso back. Many seek salvation in Rome—or possibly Berlin. Bandits and guerrillas still Snipe from every rock or hill. When the Dago seeks solution Of his woes in Revolution, Matters must pursue their way As'.'they do in Paraguay. Things must settle as they do In Bolivia and Porn; Find adjustment, willy-nilly, Just like Uruguay and Chile. Things will happen just the same, If Alfonso? wins his claim. If Don. Carlos reigns instead, Shots.will whistle round his head. And if Franco gets a turn, He will find the whole concern, Town and? country, pear and far, “ Revving ’’ like a baby car. Viewed from any writing desk Spain is, doubtless, picturesque. None the, less, I shouldn’t care For a lordly castle there. Southward from the Pyrenees Nobody could feel at ease. Read about the place, 1 say! Study it—and keep away! .