NOTES AND COMMENTS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XLII, Issue 12909, 4 July 1905, Page 4

NOTES AND COMMENTS.

LORD HOSEIIERY'S BINARY STARS. At first sight there is an air of novelty (writes the Saturday Review) about Lord Rosebeiy's recent suggestion that the best Government would bo one in which there would be double holders of every office, one to talk, the other to work; an ornamental Minister, blithe and debonair, who toils not nor spins anything but words, and another, who eats his country's bread in the sweat of his brow. Nature has anticipated Lord Rosebery in her arrangements. There are. two sides to the moon, as there are' to everything else, lilt we never see more than one side, which also applies to many other things, and it is always the same side that shines. But perhaps the nearest ana-: logy to this is to he found in what the astronomers call the binary stars. They are duplicates, one of "which is bright and shining, often visible even to the naked eye, while its companion is black and opaque, and its presence can ofily be inferred from the disturbances'it produces "on the more glorious orb. It may be well that Lord Rosebery was not thinking so much of the moon or the stars as of himself, and did not get his hint from them but from a profound kudy of his own. personality and its incomparable fitness for playing the part of a talking Minister. We do not conceive that the " working" Minister would be more tolerant of the opinions his talking colleague might hold of his work or his way of representing it than the artist generally is of the critic unless the talking Minister's whole duty were merely to hold a) brief for his twin-Minis-ter. Rut if he were reduced to that, the post would not be what Lord Rofsebery's fancy pictures it. To have all the delights of the talking person you must be supposed to have done the work yourself, or else you must criticise somebody else who has really done the work on the assumption that you would have done it a great deal better. It seems rather hard on the permanent officials that they should be debarred from the glory of the talking Minister, but after all we can contemplate their self-sacrifice with more equanimity than we can the prospect of establishing a separate order of human beings whose sole function would be to talk and do nothing. The proposal lis an anachronism as we are now lees tolerant than ever of mere talk, even, from the mouths of people who do'actually work. What is called the decay of oratory in Parliament, the pulpit, and the Church, is very much due to this feeling. We cannot deny to the man who works the pleasure and honour of talking about it; but on the whole we reckon the value by his work and not by his,talk. There have been artiste who had "ghosts" and authors whose works have been written by others in their name; but we have an ugly term to describe their operations, We like the sermons of the clergyman to be the expression of his own feelings and experiences. Too much "devilling," even at the Bar, becomes suspicious ; and the " quack" in medicine is the mellifluous and plausible talker who has more eloquence and artifice than science or practical skill. In short there is a healthy prejudice against the mere talker in any profession; the man who has not done what he talks about. BABIES AT 'SCHOOL. In England, and in England only (a London paper states), are children allowed to attend school at three years old, and com? pelled to do so at the age of five. That they do it at the cost of a good deal more than present suffering to themselves and searching of heart and weariness of spirit to their teachers is very forcibly shown by Miss Bathurst in this month's Nineteenth Century. In her opinion, the unsuitability of existing infant-schools to the needs of very young children is mainly due to the absence of "motherlhiess" in the inspector, and although the attribute is one that, ill strict justice, he cannot be expected to possess, there is no doubt that the want of it must to some exent disqualify him for the duties that are laid upon him. The inspector who wrote in the log book of an infant-school "the 'babies should learn to sit still and attend" probably summed up in that brief sentence the most deeply-rooted convictions of himself and many a 'brother-inspector with regard to the tiny scholars whose early education they were called upon to supervise. But as a matter 01 fact "to sit still and attend" is just what a very little child cannot do, and should not do for more than a few minutes at a time, and the picture Miss Bathurst, who writes from the standpoint of experience, gives of an infant-school on a hot summer afternoon is not an exaggerated one:— after baby, overcome with sleep in the heated atmosphere, falls forward off his seat, banging his forehead against the desk in front, and awakes in tears to find such misfortunes are too com-

mon au occurrence far much comfort, to be his portion. All that the hard-pressed and exhausted teacher has time to do is to fold the child's arms on the. desk in front of him, place his head on them, and coax him to fall asleep again. But consider the conditions under which sleep is obtained. The child is in a close room . . . he is bent forward, Ms back is all crooked, and his body is all sideways. -In this position he spends an hour or two hours of many a summer afternoon." The remedy suggested of transforming infant-schools into day-nurseries properly fitted up, in which children " would enjoy play, occupation, and sleep in an atmosphere of freedom until six years old,'' is one well worthy of consideration.