NOTES AND COMMENTS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XLIX, Issue 14933, 5 March 1912, Page 6

NOTES AND COMMENTS.

THE SOUL OF THE MINER, Mr. Harold Begbif.' has .been down to the Welsh mining districts, and, writing to the London Daily Chronicle, he says:— "I do not know how better to express this ferment at work in the storm centre of the mining world than to say that it is the sonl of the miner moving unwillingly from his ancient religiousness to a new and not yet wholly realised materialism which half frightens and half attracts his troubled and divided mind. Now, consider the thoughts of a miner who comes by train or electric tram into Cardiff for a football match. The Welsh miner of today has not only received all the advantages of a wonderfully efficient educational system—far and away ahead of the English systembut he is by nature a thinking man, a reading man, a reflective and an imaginative man. He sees splendid and beautiful Cardiff, he observes the prosperous and sometimes swaggering people in its flourishing streets, and he asks himself how this great change has been brought about; he asks himself where the money has come from to pay for all this fine architecture, all these rich carriages and motor cars, all the happiness and prosperity of these happy, well-dressed peoplq. And he knows better than any Socialist can tell him that but for steam coal, but for the mine in the valley from which he has just come, Cardiff would bo still a small and sleepy town, little grander than his own village on the mountain-side. He begins to wonder whether he is getting quite a fair share of the plundered earthhe who takes his life in his hand every time he goes down in the cage, who toils in a muck-sweat for long hours underground, who returns to his crowded, tiny, and bathless cottage in a state so black and grimy that his wife can hardly welcome him. He wonders how it is that these fine people in Cardiff, who never descend into the mine, who live happily, safely, and cheerfully in the open air, can make so much more money out of Welsh coal than he, the skilled workman, who cuts and rips it from the bowels of the earth. He thinks that there is something wrong. Now, while a vast number of hard-working and thoughtful men feel that there is samething fundamentally and pervasively wrong in the social order, civilisation is in peril. The miners may bo utterly irrational in the present dispute; the masters' case, from an arbitrator's point of view, may be unanswerable; nevertheless, if a million brave and skilled workmen brood over something which they feel is shameful and unfair, if endless conferences and conciliation meetings fail to remove this dim, infinite, and deep-buried sense of wrong, trouble must be the end of things, peace is impossible."

LONDON SOCIETY. Society in London to-day is thus touched off in a recent book :— We. love the madding crowd's ignoble strife and are seldom so happy as when herding promiscuously together under the hospitable roof-tree of some wealthy acquaintance, who has ensured the success of his entertainment by packing three hundred guosts into a room which, under normal conditions could barely contain fifty. At parties given by the leaders of Society it is a common spectacle to see elderly persons of both sexes struggling to ascend a congested staircase to a. still more congested drawingroom, where they remain huddled together for several hours, with the praiseworthy patience of sardines, until it is time to struggle downstairs again, when, after engaging in a final struggle in the cloakroom, they return to their peaceful homes firmly convinced that they have npent a thoroughly enjoyable evening. Most men, nowadays, infinitely prefer dining in a teeming restaurant, , where the waiter bumps the j back of one'* chair each timaJ

he passes/ to eating their meals amid the dignified surroundings of a WestEnd club, or even in what is technically known as 'the old home.' The spirit of gregariousness, now so rampant in Society, is, indeed, rapidly threatening to undermine the popularity of those solemn family meals upon which rest the very foundations of that domesticity which was once the chief, if not the only, virtue of the Anglo-Saxon race."