CURRENT TOPICS.

Mount Ida Chronicle, Volume IX, Issue 496, 16 January 1879, Page 3

CURRENT TOPICS.

fThis column is open to any one who, in the course of Ms reading or otherwise, has picked up information which may be regarded as ol general or local interest, and who cut express any continents thereon, within the,compHss of a reasonable paragraph. The name of the writer is re~ quireti, although not for publication.}

I notice that in (T think) the town of Dundee,.in Scotland, an obscure shopkeeper was astonished one day to find a polar bear rushing into his shop, jumping over the counter, and establishing himself in a corner under the window. The poor animal had escaped from a caravan which had been overturned and broken. The shopkeeper was not killed as it happened, but he might have been ; and then imagine what a trick destiny would have paid him. If every possible form of death imaginable were placed before him in order that he might choose the likliest to overtake himself the last on the long list would probably have been to be eaten up behind his own counter by a polar bear. I have read somewhere of an individual (a soldier) who, when asked to state the circumstances under which he broke his nose recountea in succession a host of | battles in which be had. taken part; an equally great number of personal adventures, and not a few very serious accidents involving imminent danger to life and limb. At thre end of each one the listener was expectantly waiting for the elimax, but it was not reached until, all adventures being over, and himself retired from

active work, be mentioned how, standing on a chair to reach a book, he fell down and broke bis nose. Now with regard to this shopkeeper, it is a sufficiently curious fact, that he might have travelled over .*»*. every country in the world—in fact ho might have gone as one of the expedition under Sir George Nares to the Artie regions, and then not been in nearly such imminent danger from a polar bear as he was behind his own modest counter in Dundee.—M. *

Sixce the time, some years ago, when it was ; ndisputably manifested that this district was capable of producing as good quality of cereals as any in Otago, although, the quantity per acre has not been so great as has been produced in other parts nearer the sea, this idea has always been uppermost in my mind: that there is an " undefinable something" ' which neutralises the natural effects of the blasting winds to which we are subject —winds which, in other parts would destroy the crops entirely. No matter hjw it may blow—we have had good expe- . rience this season too —the grainis not de—troyed, the only effect being that the straw is shortened. This is especially the «ase with wheat. The health and cleanliness of the cereals have been remarkable too. -Rust has never been heard of in our locality. Erom a letter in the * Queenslander," from a reliable correspondent, which I saw the other day, it would appear that the dry winds have something to do with this, and that the particular " warring of the elements" to which we are subjected are not an unmixed evil. He says :—-" A week of dry westerly win I will check the spread of rust, and often save the crops." And in anotherpart of the same letter he remarks . «*,:-,." when a • wheat crop is once infected with rust, the more favorable the weather

is for vegetable growth the worse it is for * the wheat—the rust absorbing all the -sap, while the grain perishes." All things work together for good, we are told; but I must say that up to the present, I was ignorant of the fact that dry winds . were good for wheat.—D-G-.

"Up till lately the great subject of interest and discussion in Victoria was tliat of free trade and protection. Mr. Berry's Home Commission, of coarse, is now the attraction; but free trade or protection is stiil a matter which is thought a good deal of. Our cousins do not appear to be particularly confident of the correctness of their own ideas, and have on several occasions called for the advice of leading men from Home. Only the other day, an opinion expressed by a high English authority on constitutional law on a late independent action of Governor Bobinson, was made a great deal of. And when the protection business was proposed, the opinion of Mr. John Stuart Mill, the eminent Political economist, was asked, and he gave protection a partial support in certain cases, one of which he considered to be that of the young Australian Colonics. In many quarters he now receives anything but fc thanks for his advice. In the present free trade crisis, the Australians look for advice again, and Professor Fawcett, Professor of Political Economy at Cambridge, has taken upon himself to indirectly father them, by the publication of a book, which, though good as a standard, is peculiarly applicable at present. He is

averse to protection, and points out that the result of it is that the primary producer of the article protected is the only one benefitted, while the greatest number, the consumers of the article, are made to pay extra for it, instead of the cost being reduced. One paragraph in the work states his opinion : —" If matters are allowed to take their own natural course, any difficulties which may now impede the establishment of manufaetering industries in Australia will steadily diminish, and ultimately pass away. On the other hand, if the industrial economy of that country once becomes involved in the trammels of a wide-spread system of protection, every article upon which a protective duty ia imposed will be made artificially dear, and the cost of living will be materially increased. English laborers will fail to obtain the advantages from settling in Australia, which they might otherwise enjoy. Emigration willbe consequently checked, and the result of a protectionist policy must inevitably be to deprive, to a great extent, such a country ,- as Australia of those additional supplies of labor, which, above all things, are essen- • » tial for the successful establishment of « manufacturing industry."—Q."

. Tiaaes must be very bad in America, to judge from the following sentence in an -article on "England and America as Manufacturing Competitors," in the ' Contemporary Beview.' The writer says : —" When wages came to be reduced (in the United States), it was not a question of five or ten per cent., but of fifty or a hundred per cent.,, and in some cases even of a higher ratio." If the above be correct, the somewhat novel spectacle was presented of men paying money to their masters for being granted permission to work I We can promise intending imigrants that it- will be a long time before anything like this obtains in New Zealand.—B.