HARNESSING THE FALLS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XLVI, Issue 14235, 4 December 1909, Page 1 (Supplement)

HARNESSING THE FALLS.

BY TOHUXOA.

From the lime when the big-jawed man first realised the advantage of making a woman carry burdens, while his lordship looked jubilantly on and felt that humanity was at last- progressing, to the time when in New Zealand the engineer is harnessing the Hora flora Falls, and making the sea-seeking water do some of tho rough work of Waihi, is a far cry. And the strange thing is—if you come to think about it—that it isn't the top of the ladder by any means. We may think that electricity is the last word, of course; but that is only when we don't think much.

It is pretty certain that every succeeding inventor who has managed to get some new force to work for him, has thought that he had got inside the gates of that Paradise where there are to be no more thorns and thistles for the elect. You may be sure that the genius who first realised the potential value as a burden bearer of the lady of his family, was filled with a rapturous sense of the dignity of living and that he called all his friends around him to profit by his discovery. It was, possibly, the first spark of the divine thing we call Reason, a flash of inspiration which forthwith separated Man from Beast, displaying to his delighted soul the possibility of leisure. No brute-beast has ever done such a thing. Wherever he turned, to the birds of the air or to the fishes of the sea, or to the prowlers of the forest, or to the cud-chewing animals of plain and mountain, he .could see that they each bore their own burden, and had no* idea whatever of having it borne for them. He grasped the little fact that by close reasoning toil could bo escaped, and by that inspiration leaped at a single bound into a new world.

Turn then to the first labour-saving inventor, to the primeval father of civilisation, and admire him ! See him stalk free and straight from the forest to his cave, without a weight upon his shoulders, or a care on his mind, and see behind him, staggering and tottering and bent earthward, the woman whom God had given him to wife, and for whom lie had discovered a vocation Over hee shoulders the big lizard that he had killed with his club, the bunch of bananas he had twisted from the tree, the snake that he had reserved as a tit-bit; in her hands the hollow gourd filled with water from the last spring—in those happy days, brethren, there were neither prohibitionists nor suffragettes; under her arms the club itself and on her skin the marks of it! There was no fire in those days, no flint knives, no sharpened spears, no thatch, no anything, not even a tamed wild dog. Yet man was satisfied with himself and felt himself the lord of creation, for had he not made woman slave and thus attained over toil a mastery such as his benighted ancestors had never even dreamed of ?

What was in the woman's mind we leed not worry over. Was she not the weaker, and what could she do but, submit? And . submit "she dMV or ' 'rather' seemed to—submitted to her father, submitted to her husband, submitted to her son, as she submits to-day, on this fair earth of ours, wherever she is petrified in savagery and is thus doomed from her birth "to unutterable slavery. The savages do not really concern us. For when Humanity rose from that pitiful beginning it kicked away, as it rose, the rungs of its own ladder, and we can no more descend again to the savage than we can descend to the ancestral amphibia which crept timidly from the water to the land. Suffice it to say that while progressive man bent his newly-discovered wits to the enslavement of others, of woman, of weaker men, of submissive beasts, of natural forces, until to-day he masters the air and harnesses the falls, progressive woman bent her wits in her seeming submission to the enslavement of man himself, and is to-day, throughout civilisation, wherever she knows her power and how to use it, not only equal, but mistress and queen.

-Far is the cry from the harnessing of women as a beast of burden to the harnessing of the falls in the service of civilisation, but farther still the cry from the brutal cowing of the weaker human, whose cries none seemed to hear, and whoso tears seemed to fall unheeded upon the unresponsive forest path, to the age when a woman's tears are her invincible weapon »nd when her aspirations sway the policies of men as the moon sways the susceptible sea. If we study the question we shall see that wherever woman is accounted noble the inventor is now the leader of men and labour-saving tools, and tricks arc part of the daily life and common thought, and that wherever woman is of no'account, saving only as a toy or a burden-bearer, the inventor has no standing and laboursaving inventions are practically unknown. From which we may deduce that the man who was predestined to progress in those days was as inately ambitious, and determined as the man who is predestined to progress and survive to-day. He did not merely lie down and grow fat after he had taught v woman to bring him bananas and to fetch him a drink. He lay down and thought and got up to put thought into action, primitive theory into primitive practice. He perceived that if the stronger man could enslave the weaker woman, the stronger man could also enslave the weaker man, and thus win leisure and plenty, not only for himself but for his own family. Having leisure he diacoverel that two sticks rubbed together, became warm and having patience he rubbed together sticks for years, while his slaves bought him food and—wonderful to relate— last, the inconceivable happened, and fire came. The first great step we call it, not perceiving that man's foot was lifted for the first great step when he used it to persuade woman to carry his burdens. And so came Humanity! To the possession of, fire, of weapons, of stock, of seed, of tools; to the making of canoes, of sailing boats, of keeled ships, of steamers, of flying ships; to the weaving -of flax, of linen, of cotton, of silk, of wool; to the building of family, of clan, of nation, and Empire; to the burdening of ox and horse, of wheeled vehicles, steam-engines, electrical cars; from the harnessing of woman to the harnessing of Horahora. -Always, we may be sure, thinking itself amazing! Always taking off its hat to itself, and wondering how it did it! - Yet it is only within the past century or two that we have got beyond tue first dimension of labour-saving. To load things upon the wind or the water is no great advance upon loading things upon a woman's back. But to use steam was the second dimension, and to transform steampower or water-power into electricity, and, to transform this into applied energy, is the third dimension. And before -us looms the fourth dimension of labour-saving, that mysterious fourth dimension which lies to-day in front of. every science, in this case the problem of how to harness the universal forces themselves . '