THE PEOPLE ON SHOW.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XLIII, Issue 13355, 8 December 1906, Page 1 (Supplement)

THE PEOPLE ON SHOW.

Br TOHTJXGA.

Ik the Agricultural Society was animated by the spirit; of, equity which .should take precedence ;of all common business considerations it would pay everybody for going to the show grounds instead of charging them. Because, you see, .most of us° go much more to see one another than to see champion cows, fancy butter and collec-.-lions of noxious weeds; in fact, if nobody else went few of us would go ourselves, : which;is a somewhat involved statement' but true in spirit nevertheless. ;{?o that we are all on exhibition when ,we go to the show grounds and are the particular exhibits which draw the crowd. It is we who make it a great success, in spite of what the select few say:.of; the character and quality of the .exhibits that find, place in the catalogue. And after all, when you-come to, think it out, what ought. to be of greater interest than .types of our own race and people as they are after sixty years' settlement in a new land and of' our bonnets and skirts in the summer of 1906-7? There may be beauty in the leap of a horse and strength in'.the. gleaming shoulders of a bull and gold in the dense fleece of a sheep and hints of ham sandwiches and of bacon and eggs in the fish-eyed. barrel that we call a pig, but what are these. things compared to the swinging stride of manhood in its prime and to the muslined grace of womanhood flushing to mate. The lower animals simply are not in it, even as biological specimens. , For the greatest country is not the one that raises the fastest horses or.the fattest pigs but the one that breeds the bravest men and the handsomest wo-

Now it is passing strange that although when the people go on Show and ourselves with them—all unconscious of their own place as exhibits and all imagining themselves as sightseers and observers only we admit that the handsome women draw our admiration we are mostly reluctant to admit that the handsome are also most worthy of it. Yet it is so. The mental qualities we affect to admire and give personal credit for because !we vaguely feel that it" is associated with individual effort, but the physical qualities we belittle, because we say they are born with us and that we are entitled to no credit for their possession. Which is absurd. A woman is no more born . handsome than a man is born a mathematician— more and no less. In body as in mind we are the results of our own past and of tho past of our family and of our race. And Beauty is the highest physical development of the species and usually accompanied by corresponding mental qualities.

Breeding does not depend, you know, upon heraldic pedigrees and: human standaids. It is stamped upon the body and soaked into the mind. It proves itself and needs no advocate: You need only look at a man -to know his race, whether he calls himself Britisher, German, Italian, Malay, or negro, no matter though he were born in. the heart of London or the heart of Africa. And one need only look upon Bravery and Beauty to know that they are the highest- qualities in human kind, since they are the qualities which in their heart of hearts all men and all women . would possess. Bravery we need say little of. But Beauty, in: which Bravery is enshrined with every other desirable quality, is visible to every eye when i the , People are on Show. f ;,„: :•" ;.;';"'';,'"-'' "';'. •_ r ->"V. ! - , " iV '.-'-'-• : --' ; -\-->-

*"/It_ is always amusing to .hear the belittling: of .Beauty, the possession which is. to a woman what " brains" are to a man— and ■ more. It was the loveliness of the daughters of man" which drew to earth the sons of God" and which from time immemorable has- been the cause of every human joy as of every human., sorrow. Those who have, tried to win it and : have failed sit down solemnly :in the ashes of their failures and rave to one another of the calamitous evils that .Woman brings into the world: but those who have won hang up their harps over .the hearth and agree that' her children shall rise tip and call her blessed. -For Men, and Women too, always judge things by their individual experiences.- We talk of our reason, you know, but we have no more reason than four-year-olds. If biting an apple we find it sour:we hesitate over apples ever after; if biting an apple we find it sweet we double ourselves up with summer cnolera before becoming convinced that they aren't always so. ; And so, living.in a world that is mostly set against the handsome woman,. i/ecaust? filled with (he plainer women whom she has triumphed over and with the less desirable man whom she has refused, we .imbibe mistaken ideas of .Beauty, though not so mistaken as to prevent us wishing that wo had it for ourselves or those belonging to us. We do not perceive what Beauty is, any more than we perceive, the place that Bravery holds among men. " ■•■-.",■„... •• Beauty is the proof of the highest and most perfect breeding known in the race of which it is type. It tells in, our race of countless generations of clean and vigorous, living, of blood untainted by disease or impurity, of a line of sires whose necks never bent, whose spirits never broke, of mothers and grandmothers and great-grand-mothers, whom strong men admired and desired and won against all comers. Kindly they may not have been in the modern fashion, which loves only those whom it does not know, but true they were to their kin and devoted to their own and shrewd to have and to hold—and these are the qualities which stare at us from the fair faces of handsome women. They are the royal line wherever we see them.and from whatever conditions they seem to come. And to them is the future and' the fullness of the earth and all the glory of it—because they spring from the health and the strength of the race and alone can pass its health and strength to- the future in full and unstinted measure. - * . So when wo go to the Show, with twenty thousand others, we see not only prize animals * but prize people. We see Beauty from the sweetness of seventeen to the silvered dignity of seventy and we can judge of the capacity of men more easily and more pleasantly by . observing the quality of the furs and beads which he has bung round his woman-folk than by any other estimate." For there is no struggle in the colonies for bread or even for meat. The struggle is for furs in summer time and for beads all the seasons round. The worst of Beauty i's that it sets the pace of work. The most desirable woman walks away with the man who has killed the biggest buffalo or got hold of the biggest goldmine—as is altogether right, in spite of what the unsuccessful hunters and gold-getters say, provided killing and getting are proof of personal prowess. That would be of no particular annoyance to the philosophic were it not that every man with any ability and ambition is tearing himself to pieces■ trying to get hold of enough summer-furs and gold beads to enable him to make her the biggest offer, find by the time he has married her it has become a fixed habit, like opium-smoking. And there "we are left, toiling away to make the people when on Show more gorgeous and more attractive than a whole mob of humming-birds. And we do it, too. , And Maungakiekie, which of old looked down on flax-skirts and. kumaras, which barring Providence and plenty of dry powder may some day look down on loin-cloths and rice, looked down last Saturday on a great multitude of amazingly well-dressed, distinctly well-fed colonials. As good-looking a crowd and as well-bred is not to be seen anywhere else in the .world; and it had clothes enough on it to be convincing proof that unless the colonial works far better than they do ill the Old Country there is something;: gloriously philanthropic about the way in which colonial drapers and milliners 'and tailors do business. .. . ■. .'-