CURRENT TOPICS.

Manawatu Standard, Volume 9163, Issue 9163, 12 March 1910, Page 6

CURRENT TOPICS.

(By Fbank Morton.)

Hot weather continues here, and' so far there is no perceptible mellowing of summer into autumn. Autumn comes late this year, and good Wellingfconians tell me that a late autumn means a bad winter. That is as it may be. I never do like Wellington winters, though last winter was better than most. Tho thmg I admire chiefly in the average W ellingtonian is his splendid lack of scruple whenever he is in the mood to boast about his town. One of the fallacies that the Wollingtonian is everlastingly eager to buttress is the fallacy that Wellington lias a verv fine climate. That also is as it may be; but from my point of view this is not a good climate at all. ,"v hot wealher is too muggy, and the cold weather is too raw: the dust is too dirty, and the wind is almost always too'strong. I am perfectly willing to become enthusiastic over any climate when it is a good climate, but, this climate leaves me cold. People think that the Auckland dust is worse, merely because the Auckland trams are dirtier. The Auckland trams aro perhaps the dirtiest on earth. That is _ Auckland s distinction. That and Captain Ivny\ett.

A WOMAN DEPARTING. A woman friend who oame to us from Singapore a year ago leaves on Friday o~n her return to Singapore. When she came, she fully intended to settle in New Zealand; but a year has been enough for her. Wo are the folks, of course; but other people, other opinions. My friend is a journalist and a. cosmopolitan, past the age of girlish folly or impossible dreams. She came here looking for a- place to si<i\ arid be comfortable in, and I have always found lie:- an eminently reasonable woman. Born in England, she has much in France, m Belgium, in the 1' iii East, and in several States of Australia. She 'says that she would live in Paris or Hrupsols now, if she could afford it. , but. being a working woman, she wants to go back to a place where a woman » work seems worth while. "I had heard so much of New Zealand as a free democracy." she writes. I liatl come "to look on it eager eves as a place of Arcadian premise." I am utterly disillusioned. Out in the tropics life is at once more generous and more free than hor<~|. Tropical whites are, as a rule, much more hospitable and tolerant and friendly than vour New Zealanders are. They don't have to scheme day and night to make ends meet, and they don't waste their leisure in slandering their- neighbours. They don't treat all strangers with suspicion. ?\ew Zealand would be a very good place to live in if there were ten milium more people in it, of whom nine million and a half zealously minded their own business, and if it were possible to keep house decently on a moderate income. _ It isn t possible. You know that it isn't possible. I have seen snlcndid women, of mine here, wearied out of their sweet li\es bv constant irritations of the household. Housewives in the tropics don't have to do the work of parlour-maids and scullions, and they don't have to spoil their hand's .and their tempers over smutty cook-pots. They have Chinese servants, who do all such work admirably and with despatch, and who never dream of i being impudent- to their employers. The housewife of the East keeps an eye on the accounts, orders the meals, and has plenty of time to give to her husband and children. I hav.e had a fair stomachful of White Australasia talk; but you can give mo a white Straits Settlements, with plenty of useful Chinese to do the mean work and smooth tho rough edges. I am perfectly sure ucw that it is not good for women to be overburdened with menial tasks and a daily tale of besetting nuisances. If woman wants freedom, it is freedom from such things that will most surely bring her soul-health and expansion. Those New Zealand women, with all their pother of political freedom, are the bondslaves of. their tradesmen and drc.=srn;ikers. And that- sort of tiling tells. It tells more here than it does in Europe—far more. In Europe there are traditional grooves and rich historical associations, and with that the crowding comforts and securities of the ancient lands. But in New Zealand everything, is very crude and new, and tho women aro constantly forced back into morasses of small talk. Nowhere else in the whole course of my life have ,1 heard so much silly tittle-tattle among women as I have heard in New Zealand. Nowhere else on earth havo I found women generally so intent on digging nasty holes iii- each other's characters. What, then, is this political enfranchisement worth. Your women are not more moral or happier than .the women of the old lands. Their lives are not, nearly s-o interesting and spacious. The women in the Straits are sisterly, good comrades, and straightgoors. If one of them is detected in a- fault the first thought of the others is to conceal or' belittle it, I naturally, hate to leave the few loyal friends I have made in New Zealand, but I want to get back to the sun. I_ havo had a good enough time, and Rotorua and the places up there I enjoyed immensely. But I am sure that the talk of New Zealand scc-nery is overdone. I have seen no scenery anywhere in the Dominion so good 'as the best of tho scenery I saw in Australia. You have no mountain scenery to match the Blue Mountains in New South Wales for quiet, comfortable loveliness. You have no exquisite soothing verdure such as one finds all over the East. You have no such glorious riot of colour as wo have every day in Singapore and Penang. \vtjth all your length of coast-line, you have no watering-places. You have some brave little towns, but they are all too intent on trifles. Rotorua is wonderful because of its strangeness, and not because of. its scenery. If you want to havo a beautiful country you must attend to afforestation. You million people should plant every year at'least a million trees. Wellington would bo a really beautiful -city, if all the hills about it were well- ' wooded. As it is, all the surrounding skylines are harsh and cold. But, after all, the great thing that New Zealand has to learn is that whenever idle talk becomes malicious it degrades the mind and retards the healthful progress of any community. It is because New Zealand is so slow to learn that _ lesson that it is so dreadfully lacking in dignity. Your public men have no dignity at all. In the East white men would not dream of jostling ladies i,n the street, or of letting them stand m public conveyances. The East is best. I am a good cosmopolitan, but. when I think of Singapore I thank .God that I am going back home.'' Home—that's it. I shall never live in Asia- again, because I. am sure that it would not be good for me; but in ai that has been written, by all the •writers that ever wrote, far too little has been made of the essential comfort of the East.

XORMAX LINDSAY. All the evidence so far points to the fact that Norman Lindsay is likely to stav in Europe. Australia is a good country, but when she has a brilliant son she rarely makes it worth his while to stay at. home. She suffers from a constant draining away of her best blood. Lindsay started in London by selling one sot of illustrations for (six hundred pounds. His sister Ruby and h'.-r able husband. Will Dyson the'caricaturist, are reported dointr well. Lindsay can sell at big prices whatever he chooses to draw. London, in short, can recognise genius, without twaddling about "brutality." If Norman Lindsay were merely a designer of pretty women, London would have no special "uao for him. That sort of designer grows on every hedge in the Old Country. Lindsav. if he lives, will soon be the bearer of ono of the world's great flames on that. side. Then Australians, 'who have talked nonsense 'about him often enough, will begin to say that they knew he was a genius all the' time. A queer world.

STRIKES. Despite tho calamitous and far-reaching' results of the Newcastle coal strike, which has gone far towards ruining many people's chances of benefiting from what should have been an unusually prosperous season, Australian Labour has not learnt its lesson. The instigators of the strike, having deliberately and with full knowledge broken the law. arc serving terms of imprisonment; and the labour unions have taken offence at that. If a strike leader committed any other offence, tho unions would not greatly care, however heavily he was punished; but it seems that an offence committed in the cause of Labour must at all hazards be overlooked. So that now there is talk ot a weekV, general strike. No more ruinous and heinous mode of protest could possibly be devised. A week's general strike means temporary paralysis of every industry. and the eifcct of such paralysis cannot fail to be far-reaching. It is an abominable proposal, whichever way you look at it. . . The fact is that every strike is a calculated iniquity. If the men have real grievances, the iniquity is not lessened. For a strike does not merely punish tho employers immediately concerned: it inflicts grievous loss on thousands and tens of thousands of people who ha/\e no lwsiblc responsibility for tho strikers grievance. It is a horribly idiotic way of settling a dispute.

THE FIGHTING BRUTALITY. Among professional boxers I have met a few very decent" fellows. I am told that Bob "Fitzsimmons (whom I havo not met) is a very decent fellow. _ All the same. I am more than over convinced that prize-lighting is indecent and most brutal. Only to-day news conies from London of the death of one Girlcy Watson, ox-chammon boxer of tho navy, killed in a "match* 7 with a negro named Inglis. A few years ago there .was in every civilised country on earth a healthy feeling against fights of this sort; but since "prize-lights have been called "boxing contests" the ancient evil has been re-born. In such a re-birth there is matter enough to disgust and horrify all men and women capable of humane emotion. A prize-fight, under whatever disguise, .is a vastly bad and brutal business, and a world that will tolerate public prizefighting is ovor-hasty or unintelligent whenever it is in the mood to talk of itself as civilised. The respectable persons concerned in the promotion of public boxing in Wellington aro brutalizing the community. however high and mighty their opinion of themselves may lie. However much they may whine and shuffle, they are putting themselves on common ground with tho riff-raff of the

world. Inglis has been arrested. To meet the ends of justice, and i?i the interest of the race, ho should bo hanged. THE GAOLS. It. is too early to give details, but disquieting rumours have again reached me concerning tho condition of one of our big gaols and certain hideous vices and abominations that are said to flourish there. lam told that there is little hope for any offender of spirit, onco he is incarcerated in that gaol. To send a man there, I am assured by a correspondent who has been there, is "to take him out of mischief and plunge him into hell." That may or may not be an exaggerated statement. For myself, I regard our whole gkol system as utterly barbarous and dehumanizing. When a gaol,, which in modern times is supposed to be a reformatory, vitiates a man and does not reform him, that gaol becomes a centre of vileness and corruption. In Christian America a Commission of Inquiry has been visiting certain gaols in the Southern States. Some of the facts vouched for in tho report arc appalling. Take this, as to a gaol in Georgia :

"Wc found over ono hundred men living in rooms unvcntilated and filthy without bathing facilities or opportunities of changing' their clothes, in sickening, indescribable squalour. There is practically no -discipline, and thero aro no hospital arrangements. The superintendent stated that when the men got so that they couldn't get out of bed —'bedridden.' he termed it— they were sent to Grady Hospital." Some revolting details of barbarous modes of punishment and torture follow. Then this: "Wo inspected the quarters for the mules and found them to be almost perfect in their appointments and inestimably better than those occupied by the prisoners." This is a prison in which Christian America herds its emancipated negroes, mostly; but there is talk of worse things than these in one of our own gaols— things only to be hinted at. We have gaols badly managed, stocked by judges, who in some cases have been known to scoff at the science of the world in the big matter of criminology. We have not latterly heard much of the Lionel Terry farce —a tragic farce enough, since the man. is insane, and should not be in a gaol at all—but thero are other things going on. The next time there is money to spare for Royal Commissions, the whole matter of our gaol management might profitably be inquired into.

THE DOCTORS. | There has been a typical silly season correspondence in a Wellington newspaper concerning doctors and their fees. Some few people have declared that doctors in this city are extortionate. From what I have personally seen, I should say that the charge is absurd. I confess at once that I havo a strong admiration for medical men as a class, and that to that extent I may be biassed. But tak-»-ing facts within my knowledge, and giving them simply their face-value, I am convinced that Wellington doctors are humane and unselfish. One or two I know to be worthy of nothing less than unstinted praise. Thrco parts of the talk against doctors is mere chatter of ignoranco and greed. Medical men, working much and posing little, arc the true dragon-slayers of this somewhat barren age. Occasionally they make mistakes, but that., as a rule, is when people take to general practitioners cases that should properly be referred to a specialist. However that may be, I have conic across a very able article on the Ideal Physician, written by Dr. F. Cat.helin, and published in' the French "Revue de Mois." According to this authority, the ideal physician should have six moral senses —the senses of duty, responsibility, kindness, munual skill, beauty, and sociability. He says:

"The sense of duty toward the patient is the very first requisito in a doctor. This sense can arise only from a positive and innate altruism, or love of one's fellow-creatures —a quality similar to that which moves the hospital nurse to devote her life to the care of the stricken. There can be no personal sensitiveness nor lack of, interest in details, as against an absorbing curiosity that complicated cases arouse. And yet, with all this sense or duty, which calls for extreme goodness or sensitiveness of heart, he must not show a trace of emotion when his dutv cails him to operate on a McKincly, a Carriot, or a Frederick 11. In the profession the word equality has certainly found a lasting place. No matter how far he may have gone in his profession, or how rich he may have become, if ho possess this sense of duty in his heart ho will die an active member of his profession, unless old age prevents him from working. "In the matter of responsibility a doctor must follow the traditional'advice ; namely, to do as he ought to do, no matter what the issue. No doctor can be held responsible for results that are independent of his zeal, and to limit his action by undue legislation is to put a stop to scientific medical progress. _ As for the. sense cf kindness. it is certain that the age of the brutal surgeon has gone by. There may bo occasions when it is desirable, on account of a surviving family/ to tell a patient that his end is approaching. But in the generality of cases, to pretend to see recovery in a patient ' s <<mt en e^ec^ve > and is always kind. The proper sense of manual skill

in a physician is founded on reflected audacity; that is to say, an audacity born of a sincere wish to succeed, and of common sense. Bold doctors are frequently characterised as innovators. It is incontestable, nevertheless, that many of these doctors prove the greatest. Boldness is frequently the difference between the able and conscientious surgeon and the simple operator or dissector who has grown bold through indifforenco. And yet tho surgeon's 'nerve' must always be kept in check by his prudence." In any case, the importance of the doctor's function can scarcely bo exaggerated. and only a fool could pretend that the tasks of" the doctor are pleasant. Having regard to their responsibilities and risks, they are the worst paid men in the world.