THE WORLD’S WISDOM.

King Country Chronicle, Volume XVIII, Issue 1857, 4 September 1923, Page 3

THE WORLD’S WISDOM.

WRITINGS OF THE TIMES. WHY PASSPORTS ? “Passports serve no practical purpose. They are an obstacle to business; they waste money and time; they are a pure formality as regards any supervision of immigrants, and entirely worthless as a protection against the movement of undesirables. People of that class readily obtain passports, genuine or otherwise. The passport system is a tax thinly disguised. It is high time that the futility of the whole business was recognised. The public are tired of being saddled with these old war-time nuisances.”—The “Daily Mail.”

THE VOTE-SPLITTING NUISANCE

“There are some things of a legitimately Conservative kind which even a humdrum Ministry may do, and one of these that is quite imperative is to produce order in our electoral system. It is a scandal that Governments should allow the present disorder to continue on the off-chance that they may benefit by the splitting of votes at the next election. It is really becoming impossible to say which party will benefit if this goes on, but it is anyhow a dangerous absurdity that the fate of Governments should hang on the unpredictable hazard of the fall of votes in three-cornered contests.”—Mr J. A. Spender in the “Westminster Gazette.”

FATAL EXPERIMENTS. “Opinion in informed circles is crystallising against any experiments on our economic system, such as the Capital Levy, and we have some hopes that that opinion will permeate the factory and the workshop. Every sign of the times reinforces the certainty that, with stable political and financial conditions, the Capitalistic system will justify itself in the future as it has done unquestionably in the past. It supplies the only satisfying answer to the riddle: How do 40,000,000 people manage to live in so small an island and live ordinarily at a higher standard of comfort than is to be found- in any other country in Europe? Is it imaginable that the electors, in face of a gradual recovery from the illnesses of war, will drop the bone for the shadow? Tins undoubtedly they would do if they allowed themselves to be led away by the will-o’-the-wisp principles of Socialism, of which the Capital Levy is a typical example.”—London “Daily Telegraph.”

AN INTERNATIONAL SAVAGE. “The fact of the matter is—man is only half civilised. In international relations he is still a savage. There has to be a very different attitude in the nations towards one another. You must ' induce a sense of right and justice. You must introduce into the relations of nations the principle of the moral law.”—Mr Lloyd George.

THE WORLD WAR ON DISEASE. “The kingdom of science is ever extending. Diabetes is yielding to treatment by insulin, the discovery of two Canadian doctors. Even botulism, which lurks in certain preserved foods, has its effective serum if the trouble is promptly diagnosed. The reduction of tuberculosis is among the definite achievements of medical treatment. It is no longer the national scourge. Cancer is now the enemy. Even there hope is drawing nearer, though as yet concentrated research has not discovered a cure.”—The London “Daily Mail.”

SCIENCE AND RELIGION; “A joint statement issued by a group of forty distinguished Ameri-. cans holds that science and religion are not antagonistic. The names of the Secretary of Commerce (Mr Hoover), the Secretary of Labour (Mr Davis), three bishops, many college presidents, leading scientists, publicists, and clergy are included in the list of signatories to the document. The purpose of the latter, it is explained, is to correct an erroneous impression that religion stands for ‘mediaeval theology, and that science is materialistic and irreligious.”—London “Daily Telegraph.”

It has been proposed to make a paper horseshoe that shall for general purposes be the equal to the steel article in the following way (says the New York Herald): — Parchment paper is cut in horseshoe form and built up to a suitable thickness by the use of a mixture of turpentine, Spanish white shellac, and linseed oil treated with litharge, and the whole is placed under an hydraulic press. This produces very light and uniform pieces, and it is an easy matter to stamp out the nail holes and grooves. Instead of nailing to the horse’s hoof they can be applied with adhesive composition whose principal part is a solution of rubber in bisulphate of carbon. Paper waste could be also moulded into the shape of a horseshoe by use of the press, but the result is not so good as with the above.