THE CITY AND THE HIVE.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XLIV, Issue 13414, 16 February 1907, Page 1 (Supplement)

THE CITY AND THE HIVE.

BY TOHUNGA. Wherever Mother Nature makes the shell who makes it fairly fitting, whether she makes it of fur or of hide or of skin or of lime, for bear, cow, butterfly or conch as the case may be. But whenever Art steps in Art is perpetually making mistakes, whether it is practised by bee or beaver, ant or man. For don't be witless enough to think that Man alone makes mistakes or that, the winged mayors of the waxen cities don't have housing problems to keep them awake nights j«i»t* like Mr. Arthur-Myers!

As a matter of fact, the housing problem is chronic among the bees. In tropical countries, when" their food is abundant the tierce Ligurians— warlike of all the -gatherers—have been known to multiply to 50 hives in a single year from one swarm and that without any interference by man. And the bee only swarms when driven out by forte of circumstances. A. strong hive is packed so closely that its energies are exhausted in fanning itself cool on warm nights. The males are massacred by the independent and enfranchised females at the first pinch of hard times. Foul brood and other diseases parallel our typhoids, measles, small-poxes and bubonics and are certainly fought against by the hive organisation, which abandons its home if the disease becomes too strong for it. And we may see in the very fact that the "queens'* are made from the ordinary female larva, whenever the latter is given ample room and generous feeding, proof convincing of the frightful degeneration of the bee under the pressure of the housing problem.

To survive any extraordinary change in conditions rapid increase is an imperative necessity and this capacity the bee possesses to an extraordinary degree. By the aid of its extraordinary powers of increase the bee has been enabled to surivive under slum conditions of the vilest, and most repellent type and to evolve a phase of animal-civili-sation to which that of the Chinese is mirthful and hilarious. From the earliest moment of its being the ordinary bee is starved, stunted and imbruted. If is so frightfully starved by the age-long pressure of the hive upon the food-supply limits; it is so horribly crushed in the hovel-cell of the glorified slum into which for past sins its present life is cast; it is so deprived of everything which can be dispensed with while leaving it life and a sufficiency of energy for working; that it is a monstrosity, a barren, sterile thing, an irredeemable slave, a living lesson to us that there are no inherent " rights" in the world and that unless we guard and treasure what seem to be inalienable qualities our very emotions will some day be stripped from us, and with them go all the strong lights and blaekshadows, the keen joys and the biting sorrows, that make up together all that is worth having in Living.

This wretched slum-product, this stunted worker bee, this unsexed female thing to which can never conic the impulses that inspire song and. colour, beauty and emotion, which leaves none to cany on its loveless, soulless life when it is gone and spends its fruitless days in blind servitude to its hive, is fortunately not possibly paralleled in humanity. Man is higher than the bee, for he cannot go on living under conditions as low and constrained as those which have lMtfe*"ift«r'fiee™'wh"at it s fs." Man ffiust have room, must have air, must have joy in life and decency in living and possibility of something more than mere food and: shelter, or he dies out altogether. Yet none the less his housing and his living affect him. To a less degree only because he can endure less, slum living affects him as it docs the bee, stunting his growth, warping his instincts, and destroying the noble emotions and ambitions that are the pride of humanity and strongest in the highest races and nations. For the individual is the creature of his immediate environment and if we allow children to be reared in slums what sort of man and women can we expect them to be?

It seems strange, does it not, that while the world is so wide and so fair, that while on every hill the breezes blow sweet and clean, and while from rim to rim the arching sky bids us remember that it is good to be alive, and while there is room on the earth for the beast to roam at liberty and for the savage to call land his own, we should allow society to begin to cram our own countrymen and women into the foul slums that poison the soul and make citiescankers on the bosom of the earth? Yet the bees, too, have done it. Possibly the ants also, and the beavers and every other animal that has- attempted to live in society, and to build cities and to forego living isolated and alone.

For wherever cities are built, whether by bees or ants or men, the same conditions press. The space question enters. Storey is added to storey ; room is cut into rooms ; there is a perpetual tendency to pack and pack. In the bee, by-the-way, the pressure has been so great as to force the wonderfully geometrical cell, completely economising all space. We wonder what made it. But surely we can see it to be a part of the whole "slum system instituted by the most degraded of animal-associa-tions—that so-called' "republic," or " monarchy" of the bees, in which every activity has been merged in, every instinct subordinated to, the deadliest struggle for mere shelter and food.

That looks very much as though the mancities must descend to the slum-level by sheer pressure of inexorable tendency, and so they will—if we let them. If we once allow packing to start, .xlum-making to gather head, there is no human possibility of any remedy in our 'time. But if we never"allow it to start, if we ehoke # and throttle it every time it begins, then we never have any slums and save ourselves from ultimate degeneration. There has been a great prayer, " Give Peace in our time, O Lord," but there might be a greater one, " 0 Lord, give us elbow-room !" for without elbow-room peace is only dry-rot and decay. We talk of starvation and feel a maudlin pity for the starving millions of Japan and China and Russia, but which is worst ; to starve for food occasionally or to starve for air always? And in the city slum baby lungs choke for lack of God's own oxygen, for the pure fresh air that envelops the whole earth and is for the hillmen and the seamen and the peasantries, without money and without price. And not only do baby lungs choke in the foul air but the babymind is- choked and the baby instincts. If they struggle through, the slum-born are stunted and vicious, peaked of face and flat of chest and vile in imagining, as conscienceless as the rats they resemble, as fraught with evil to society as the pestilence* that decimate them, doomed to people the prison and choke the gutter, for they are outcast from their birth from all decent and Christian living. And for this worthlessness of the human slum-born we should all go down on our knees and return thanks to Him who has made us men and not as the bees. For what hope should we have if in our cityslums patient industry survived as it does in the hive slums, if a few generations of stunting and starving would produce a stock that had lost every instinct hut those of the miser and the slave? '1 he hope ot civilisation is that our cities cannot become as the hive, that we must make them so that in them men can live, in the average, human lives or must watch them perish off the face of the earth.