GRANNY AND HER EGGS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XLV, Issue 13722, 11 April 1908, Page 1 (Supplement)

GRANNY AND HER EGGS.

Br TOHtTXGA. One of the easiest things in the world is to teach grandmother how to suck eggs; and one of the hardest things in the world is to understand why she doesn't do just as we tell her. If the Old Country would only do as our men of light and leading advise, what a happy, happy land it soon would be. Mr. Seddon, you will recollect, had a special license to tell everybody how it ought to be done and could teach Lord Kitchener how to end the war, President MeKinlcy how to draw up a tariff, and Sir Wilfred Lanrier how to .-peak French, without stopping for breath. But though others haven't a special license they are rarely far behind m giving advice; and the further thev get from home the more freely they dispense it.

There was Sir Joseph Ward, who brought sympathetic tears to his own eyes when beseeching Londoner, to do their duty to the. Empire, and declaring that New Zealand would never join Australia in making a local navy, but would stand by the Mother Country to the last pennyof our £40,000 naval contribution to the last man— of the 25,000 we have trained for defence out of our 250,000. "Don't let the Empire fall!" he hesoeched. " Watch the colonies!" And pretty sick colonies we should be—shouldn't we?—if the Old Country started to suck the naval egg in the colonial fashion. There was Mr. Alfred Deakiu, .the Chrysostom of the great Conference, who urged the Mother Country to look at German trade and to unite with her dear little children to keep the family home from going piecemeal into the pawnshop. "We are one blood, one flag, one King," he thundered, as though it was news, and the listeners waited anxiously to hear him say what might have happened to Queen Anne "so watch how we colonials trade and join us in giving the Kaiser beans." And if the Old Country had slapped on a 20 per cent, tariff in the Australian fashion, there would have been a drop in Australian butter that could have been heard on the top of Kosciusko. And now Mr. Price is labouring with grandmother, Mr. Price of South Australia, who left Home 40 years ago and has known better how to teach the old lady the longer ho stayed away. " There is no sentiment in London,'' he groans audibly. " All the sentiment is in the coloniesand there are no raisins like the South Australian; and the Empire will collapse if England doesn't wake up, and think more of South Australian wool than it docs of Paris fashions." And Granny smiles, being a trifle deaf, and thinking tiiat lie means that if he can sell some wool he wilr have a fly-round'in Paris; and she says that it is really wonderful how uei boys get- on, and that. thei* is no laud. . like a new land when all's to win and nothing to lose, just as there is no land like an old land when you have sown your wild oats and reaped the golden crop, and want to settle down comfortably into a respected old age. And so we all tell her what to do. Howto run tho Suez Canal, and how to pay her National Debt, and what to do with her railways, and what to do with her paupers, and how to put the fear of God into the heart of Germany, and how very, very silly she is to trust to the Jap. And Granny just smiles and smiles, thinking we are saying something else, and not caring what we say any way; and if she did care to answer, she would probably tell us that she had broken more eggs ror omelettes than would feed the colonies for a century; and that, anyway she never sucks a raw egg, but waits until they are cooked. And if she told us that, we should if we had imagination enough to run for shelter when we hear the rain coming, see great visions of Granny and her omelettes and of the great, grave, slow, silent, sure, patient, persistent, heart of England. We should see her struggling to .her feet amid a world of young giants, holding her own when none other held it, swarming nations as a hive swarms; ever the silent land; ever making up. her mind .before she moved, and ever keeping her mind when she had made it. And to her come her rowdy —the seafarers, the wayfarers, the lads whose nostrils open at the swell of salt water, the lads whose eyes light at the prospect of virgin land, whose every instinct is to throw dice with Fortune, and to make a mistake quickly rather than to be right slowlyand they say to her: Look, Granny, can you suck eggs like this!" And they suck and swallow fastgood eggs and bads, fresh eggs, new-laid eggs eggs, pickled eggs, and election eggs. But grandmother won't be taught. The old lady says that there's lots of time, and that die always breaks her eggs and has a good loot before she goes to swallow 'emthat's England. It doesn't matter much what an architectural mistake you make when you build with bamboo and paper, in the Japanese fashion or even when you build with job-lots of sappy timber in the popular colonial style. For such houses are done before the men who made them; their paper walls have been blown out, or their tin roofs rusted off long before crow's feet have touched the eyes of the brides for whom they were built- But when you build of stone or of well-burned brick?'that are hard as stone, or of cements that harden with age, and in a, thousand years are at their best, then it matters how you scheme and plan and fashion, for your work exists and remains all your life,* and after you are dead and gone and forgotten. '* It is like chopping down trees. - The new lands are choke-a-block with trees ; and the settler has to swing his axe from dawn till dark, from year's end to year's end, to hew j out a homestead from the wilderness. To him trees exist, to be cut down, and axes to cut them with : and so he hews and fells even.shade and shelter trees without much consideration, and usually regrets felling half the shade and shelter trees he clears' away. But. in England, every tree has been planted, every tree has been tended and cared for, every tree has come slowly to maturity. And men know that a tree once felled Cjtnnot be replaced for generations, and would no more think of chopping it down hastily, and without long and careful consideration, than they would of cutting a friend's leg off. A colonial in an English park with an axe would be a vandal and an iconoclast for a year or two, and a remorseful penitent for the remainder of his life. We can teach grandpa how to chop down trees just about as well as we can teach grandmother how to suck eggs. The young can always teach the old; we can "see that any time with our own eyes. A baby-child can teach a man how to make mud-pies, and a boy can teach a man how to ride hare-backed, and a lad can teach a, man how to jump a gate and how to climb a tree. But there are still things which the old can teacli the young —not the least of which is to fill their lung; with oxygen, and stretch their limbs in the sunshine, and know the joy of living while they can, because the time comes too soon when the lungs flatten and the limbs stiffen, and life seems a bit of a mistake, and when neither gold nor gain nor place nor power nor anything humanly attainable _ seems worth comparing for a moment with the health and the youth and the gladness m living, which so lightly slips by those who have these greatest of possessions. And so the- new countries can teach the old— to swing the axe and how to ride with a long stirrup, ■ and how to cook in a kerosene-tin, and how to camp out in the rain. The colonial can teach Grandmother that there are worse things than having a, rib or two broken, and that no man need ever starve for mere want of a baker, and that woman may cook a dinner and sit to eat it afterwards with any prince in the world. But Grandmother has still a little knowledge of her own to endow us with ; for is she not the mother of our fathers, and has she not bred men, and does she not still guard us with her long arm, and her longer purse— who cannot even - guard our own house or keep our own seas, yet. fuss about teaching the old lady how to -suck eggs! «- "