THINGS IN GENERAL.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XLIX, Issue 14928, 28 February 1912, Page 10

THINGS IN GENERAL.

THE LIBERTY OF THE PEOPLE.

ike discontented person who wants to find fault with the conditions of life in New | Zealand has always at hand a telling argu- j meat. There is, he says, no liberty here. , ,We are tied up in an inextricable maze of j : prohibitory laws. "You call th.is a free j ' country.," he cries, "and talk about ad- j • vancecl democracy; and there is no free- , dom!" He exaggerates, of course, when h ha says there is no freedom; but he means j thai there are many things one cannot do. i His talk of perianal liberty is often so ab- | surd that it is ridiculous; and yet lor his j , sake, seeing there are so many of him, it j , is needful to say why in any decent coun- i try personal liberty must be curtailed. We ! 1 are policed, so that no man is at liberty j to slay another man without fear, or to j steal away his goods. That is a restriction of personal liberty; and if the moral- ( ity of men were so high that there would i ba no warder, the restriction would still < bo there, each man's liberty curtailed by < his own good sense, We may not drive * Mil the wrong side of the road: and we do j -. not try to. Yet hero is a restriction of < liberty. It is- an interference with indi- 5 vidua! rights to forbid a citizen to pluck a * flower iu a public garden, in winch he, £ through his citizenship, holds a share. ] Every citizen is a party to a vast number < of written or unwritten contracts with his i fellows, and to break any of them is to in- < jure his fellows in soma degree. When the community finds some new contract ( necessary, it is made in a public way, and every citizen is bound by it as by the old ones] through his citizenship. .Marriage itself is an indubitable restriction of indi- | vidua! liberty; yet men and women accept its ties with joy and keep them with what faith they can. There is a freedom about a, democratic people that cannot be known ] in a nation of serfs and overlords; and ; yet that freedom must- inevitably be paid : for in a host of restrictions that take the • place of the older crippling bonds. This is : the day when working men are shaking off < old allegiances. They are abandoning loyally to their employers and crying out ; that they have a right to say and to be < heard. But they cannot bo independent j and claim a share irj governing their own < ways unless they at once become loyal to . themselves and one another, as every sane ' man of them knows only too well. They ' demand and take a seat at the table of discussion and settlement; and because i they bind themselves with new restraints, < self-imposed, and from those restraints I gain strength, their masters find that the ' country is not so free as it, was. Thus ' >; developing government means increasing ' restrajyjts of personal liberties. The point -i that the grumbler misses is that a free t country is not a land where there are no j prohibitions, but one which is fully pro- j vided with regulations for good conduct, t and whose people having themselves made < the la ¥ , are content and abide by it. 1 *~ OUB CBASS IGNORANCE. " , A neatly-worded appeal for the con- ( sideration of small things is made by Pro- t feasor J. Perry, at the close of a lecture « V upon *" Spinning Tops.'*' There is no need i | to apologise.for quoting it, for not many < . people are likely to buy a book upon tops, '' and the matter is worth repeating. It is, , he says, in the study of everyday facts j , that ail the great discoveries of the future ; lie. Three thousand years ago people : boiled water and mads steam; but trie m -steam-engine was unknown to them. They bad charcoal and saltpetre and sulphur, "bo* they knew nothing of gunpowder. They saw fossils in rocks, but the wonders of geology were unstudied by them. , They had bits of iron and copper, but not ; one i.-! them thought of any one of the '■ simple ways that are bow known to us ; of combining those known things into a ; telephone. Why, even the simplest kind : of signalling by flags or lanterns was unknown to them yet a knowledge of this might have changed ..the fate of the world on one of the great days of battle that wa read about. We loos on nature now in, an utterly different way, with a great deal more knowledge, with a great deal more reverence, and with much les3 unreasoning superstitions fear. And what we are to the people of three thousand years ago, so will be the people of one hundred years hence to us; for indeed the acceleration of the rate of progress in science is itself accelerating. The army of scientific workers gets larger and larger every day, and it is my belief that every unit of the population will be a scientific worker before long. And so we are gradually making time and space/ yield to us and. abey us. Think of all the discoveries of the next hundred years; the things that are unknown to us, but which will ba so well-known to our descendants that they will sneer at us as utterly ignorant, because these things will seem to them such self-evident facts; I say, of all these thing 3, if one of us to-morrow discovered one of them he would be regarded as a great discoverer. And yet the children of a hundred years hence will. know it: it will be brought haino to them perhaps at ever;* footfall, at the flapping of every coat-tad. Imagine the following question set in a school examination paper of that time:"Can you account for the crass ignorance of our forefathers in not being able to see from England what their friends were doing in Australia?" ... Or this "What metal is as strong compared with steel as steel is compared with lead! and explain whv the discovery of it was not made at Sheffield." But there is one question, he adds, that our descendants will never ask in accents of jocularity, Tor to their bitter Borrow every man, "woman, and child of them well know the answer;, and that question is this: '.'" If our ancestors in the matter of coal economy were not quite j so ignorant as a bahjy who takes a penny as equivalent for half-a-crown, why did they waste our coal? Why did they destroy what can never bo replaced?" The professor's little sermon upon the old text of " Eyes and No Eyes," thus ends with a sting in its tail. For many years the men who want to know have- written essays and articles on. the subject of the coal supply, and comforting statistics have been ready to quiet them. But now the statistics begin to look foolish, and it is a sign of the times that when wellversed men write upon the subject of coal they write in no light frame of mind, and quote their figures with anger. Moreover, they talk all the time about waste. At the present rate of consumption tho end of the coal is not far off; and coal being almost indispensable for many purposes, as far as we can tell, it is high time it was reserved for those purposes. 1 ho clay has come for a domestic revolution, which shall teach us to cook and warm ourselves with a rational amount of fire, and for a national recognition of the fact that enormous savings in a precious commodity can be easily effected. There is time now to make a sivincr that will be useful: it it is put off till the last million tons is being dug, it will be of no use at all. THE BRITISH COAL PERT!, If the coal miners of Britain should cease work at the end of this month, a situation of extraordinary gravity will bo created very quickly. Coal is the basis of all the British industries, and the stocks on hand arc never very huge. The fuel is necessary for the maintenance of railway communication, for the despatch of oversea shipping and for the supply of heat, light and power in the big cities. An expert, who made some inquiries in the centres of industrial activity last month stated that all the coal already on the surface would be exhausted within four weeks of the beginning of a national strike. Many of tho great industries made no attempt to store coal. They depended on supplies reaching them day by day, and would be paralysed by a week's stoppage in the mines. " The' generating stations that provide electricity for tho London.

tramways and lighting systems are placed where coal can be delivered to them by collier or barge, and they expect to receive consignments several times in each week. The steam era draw their supplies direct from colliers?, and have no reserve for use in a crisis. A strike extending over a fortnight- would cause Britain's ports to bo .tilled with idle ships. The Admiralty alone carries huge- stores of steam coal or the use of the warships, but it would be forced, ill the event of a stoppage, to meet the danger of a shortage by baying coal abroad. Already an order for 10,000 tone have been placed in the United States, the coal to be delivered at Gibraltar. The miners have been reminded in all quarters during the last few weeks that the effects of a strike* would be felt first and most severely among the workers, who would bo thrown idle in hundreds of thousands through the enforced stoppage of industries. This verdict indicates that the colliers of England have as firm a hold upon the national welfare as any section of the community. It is not until some event calls special attention to such a phase of life that we realise how important, are the details of our complicated social existence. The coal miners can paralyse industry, because only coal can keep industry going. Sailors are indispensable ;, the post office and its elaborate service cannot be done without; with the railways suddenly stopped, London would huddle and starve. Britain is fearfully anticipating the greatest industrial struggle in history ; and the fear is well justified, for the strike threatens to hit the humble millions who depend upon coals for work, even harder than those who are refusing the demands of the miners. Tub Gknebal-