The Hawera Star. FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 13, 1925. BREAD UPON THE WATERS.

Hawera Star, Volume XLV, 13 November 1925, Page 4

The Hawera Star.

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 13, 1925. BREAD UPON THE WATERS.

Delivered every evening by 5 o’clock in Hawera, Manaia, Normanby, Okaiawa, . Eltham, Mangatoki, Kaponga, Alton, HurleyviUe, Patea, Waverley, Mokoia, Whakamara/ Ohangai, Meremere, Fraser Road, aDd Ararata.

Eight hundred and thirty-seven school children in Leicester, England, ara anxious to enter into correspondence with pupils of New Zealand schools, and shortly four hundred South Taranaki children will be given the opportunity of writing to make friends with tlio English girls and boys. Thus, through the kind offices of the Education Department and the Taranaki Education Board, there is coming to fruition a scheme put forward in connection with one of the special Empire Week efforts made by the authorities of the Hawera Winter Show. Every now and then in New Zealand our spark of Imperial sentiment blazes up to a bright flame and we become, in our talk at all events, intensely British. If the patriotism be more apparent in our talk than, say, in our shopping, and if the flame be seldom remarkable for its steady burning, more often than not the reason is that the Homeland'is far, far away. Yet, if only we realised it, England and Scotland, Ireland and Wales are no farther away than the local store or school, than the nearest pillar-box. Aeroplanes and the cinematograph and wireless have crowded in upon our lives these last dozen years to divert our thoughts from lesser wonders; but through all the competition the penny post remains one of the signal marvels of civilisation. We sit down to-night, and write a letter; then we address and stamp the envelope at a total cost o£ perhaps a penny farthing, and to-morrow morning, on our way to the factory, to the office or to school, we drop the letter in the posting-box. That ends our trouble; yet we know that, as surely as the sun will come out'

of the east again to-morrow, in six weeks’ time, or thereabout, in a little Highland glen, among the smokestacks of a Midland manufacturing city, or deep in the orchards of Devon and Somerset, someone will open that letter of ours and read the message we have written. It would have been romantic to have walked the roads the Romans made in England, to have hidden behind the kitchen door when King Alfred burned the cakes, to have succoured King Harold when the Norman arrow struck him down at Hastings, to have lighted a beacon fire on the Armada’s approach. But is it not more romantic still to shake hands with the world at a cost of a penny farthing? One afternoon in three months at most is what these New Zealand school children will give to their correspondence with the girls and boys of the United Kingdom. But what the ultimate result w'ill be no man can tell, no man now living may ever know. We read in our newspapers of happenings in the Old Country, and sometimes the folk there read of our Dominion. But they know very little of us; perhaps we care very little for them. For many of us there is no personal link preserved. Our fathers, or our fathers’ fathers, were born away yonder, some of us were there ten years ago; but the children in our homes have not been there. England and Scotland and Ireland to them are names—names in history and geography. If one of them writes to a girl or boy in a British school he will tell of this, our country, of its people and their life, of its attractions and its offer of steady employmeht for all. And in return he will hear of the mills and factories of the Homeland that are running short time, and of the thousands of fathers and big brothers who cannot get work —partly because Britain’s daughters are not buying British goods as they might. Is nothing to come of such a correspondence? If Bobby Smith at Okaiawa writes to Jack Jones in Birmingham, if Jack Jones says that he is leaving school to go into a big factory where they make motor-cycles, and if Bobby Smith’s brother is thinking of buying a motor-cycle, do you imagine he will buy one made in France or America? And if Jack Jones’s brother is planning to emigrate and become a farmer in the new world, do you think he will surely go to Canada or the Argentine? "Cast thy bread upon the waters,’’ said the Hebrew preacher of old, "for thou shalt find it after many days.’’ And every, letter written in a New Zealand school to a pupil of a British school will be bread upon the waters of time.