THE SONG OF THE SIRENS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume L, Issue 15482, 13 December 1913, Page 1 (Supplement)

THE SONG OF THE SIRENS.

BY TOHUNGA. The sirens sing to-day as appealingly as whon the wisest of the Greeks waxed the cars of his rowers and bound himself to tho mast in order that he might not follow the sweet singers to the depths of the sea. The difference is that we are, becoming so civilised that we no longer lose our senses when we hear them; possibly our hearing is duller than onco it was, but that explanation is not as comforting as the other. We never like to think that wo are degenerating, that our senses are dulling, that our instincts are perverting—but it may bo so for all that. For example, one hears it said that in a few generations civilised men will not bo ablo to walk, because they use tramcars so much, that they will all bo shortsighted and bald, that they will all use false teeth and need sleeping-draughts to get enough rest. But they won't. The cities do not reproduce their populations from generation to generation; notoriously they would die out if it were not for the rich red blood which comes pouring into the cities from the country, where men use their legs and havo keen sight and hard muscles, and where they will keep their teeth easily enough as soon as the special modern cause of decay is understood. It is in tho cities that physical ills accumulate as well as wealth and poverty, but in the country men and women grow strong with senses undulled and instincts unperverted. Tho time may come, of course, when cities will not be the death-trap to mankind they are at present, when it will bo possible for a family to trace its ancestry back for 10 generations of residence within the limits of a great municipality. At present, this is utterly impossible. Innumerable families can go to their ''home" in some agricultural district of the United Kingdom, of Scandinavia, of Germany, of Europe generally, and find their records in tho " parish" annals as far back as history goes. No man can go to a great city and make the same discovery. Invariably he finds that in a few decades he comes to an ancestor who came into tho town from a country district. In more modern times there are many great names associated with towns for a long period, but such families have 'lived in the adjoining country, their members have never been born and bred in streets and rows, the great problem of the modern city is how to amend its conditions so that it may not destroy its children. If we solve this we may hope to revolutionise tho process of human development. If we do not, history will repeat itself and modern civilisation will die out as in the past all civilisations have died. Tho countryside can only provide so many men and women for the cities, and reaches a point-sooner or later—when it cannot compensate for their destruction of human body, brain, and energy. There is London with seven million people—practically- all dying out. In a hundred years, if London survives as long, and if conditions are- not altered, not a Londoner will then trace ancestry to a born Londoner living to-day; each and all in 2013, will be descendants of men and women born in the shires. Already England and Scotland are feeling tho deadly drain. Wo need not worry about men losing the use of their legs, being bald at 30, and toothless at 13; such men will leave none to follow thorn, will pass and die out, as did the moa and tho strange race which had its mason-yards at Easter Island. The song of the sirens that comes to us now with the warm weather is no lure to destruction, but the sweet calling of the conditions in which our race gained health and strength, brawn and bone, and brain, and for lack of which in every earth-bound city,.men and women drift constantly to eternal, death. For it is eternal death to die and leave none to inherit, to sweat and toil to build up great cities and "Mghty States .and to have them fall to the wild beasts or the Asiatics because we left none behind us to hold them. This idea is hateful to every normal-minded person, revolts tho instincts of every man or woman still wholesome enough to crave to live and not to die. We turn to healthier and wholesomer surroundings as naturally as magnetised steel points north, as surely as water runs down hill. With the summer the towns are permeated with the longing for fresh air, for open spaces, for grass and water and hills and seas and lands. Along the crowded thoroughfares and through the stifling streets comes the sound of the wind in the trees, of surf on beach, of water bubbling and babbling in brook and fall—the song of the sirens which still makes us restless and still draws us by tho tens of thousands and the hundreds of thousands to lake and beach and hill. The stern and stupid moralist who sees m everything pleasant an ambushed vice, and in every sign of human nature a victory to the Evil One, shakes his head at the summer rush of the picnickers, the excursionists, the trippers, the holidaymakers. He cannot understand why in office and in factory, in shop and workroom, in every avocation of our specialised civilisation, there is an excitement of holiday-making as intense as the humming of swarming bees. He thinks that everybody ought to be content "in that state of life into which it has pleased God to call them," quite overlooking tho obvious fact that divine instinct is calling to the towns to escape from destruction while there is yet time, to have fresh air, pure air, sweet air if only for a little while, to tread on grass instead Of asphalt, to listen to the singing of the waves instead of to the rumbling of the trams. These instincts are divine, with this proof of their inspiration that they form the way to Life, and would draw us away from the road that leads to national destruction. There are certain things positively essential to wholesome and healthy living, but of these essentials pure air and abundant sunlight are the chief. The halfstarved ploughman, housed in a hovel and toiling from dawn till dark, will live on, in generation after generation and conquer the world in the end, while the full-fed townman, provided with "every convenience," and working easily for good money, will rarely have a great grandson and nevei a grandson's grandson. For city air grows rank with crowding houses and narrow streets, confined by cliffs of houses. Sunlight is shut out and fresh air is hardly known; but when the summer comes the sirens sing of them and the city populations go in search of them. Just why town-dwellers crave in sum-mer-time for the open-air and the simple lifo the scientists may some day inform us definitely. They tell us already, but not with certainty, scientists being as human as priests ever were and just as likely to be mistaken when they arc most dogmatic and emphatic. Incidentally, have you never noticed how very easily wo are all " bounced " by the gentleman who speaks as though be knew and we didn't, whatever his profession is? To speak with confidence and authority is really the chief end and aim of all professional education, which is not immediately proven by its works. The less easy it is to bowl a man out and the less anybody can know, the more authoritative are his pronouncements and the more contemptuously he tries to look at those who want to argue the point. Whatever the cause, towft-dwellers do long for fields and skies and seas and beaches in the summer time, and in this longing show their underlying craving to livelong in the land. The countryman gets green fields and blue skies, running water and rustling trees until he wearies of them and comes to the city for a day or two or a week or two, thinking of streets and pavements and all city joys as the one thing needful. But he soon wearies of it, and while the townsman turns his back upon his country holiday with regret the countryman turns his back upon his city, holiday with satisfaction. Evidently the son? of the sirens is not in the gramaphonc and is only heard on wild sea beaches and on waters far from towns.