ROADS AND CIVILISATION.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LI, Issue 15563, 21 March 1914, Page 1 (Supplement)

ROADS AND CIVILISATION.

BY. XOHUNQA. If the civilisation of a country is known' ty its roads— some wise men tell us— where are we? In the Dark Ages, in the Stone Age, in the Mud Age, or in the Age of Timbuctoo? Surely there or thereabouts, or possibly in the Age of the Flyers, where the highways of the air are open to the sons of men and their country daughters stay at home and wonder in their hearts at the folly that talks of progress. For roads, our New 'Zealand roads — the roads of Canada, and the States, and South Africa, and —generally depend upon the weather, as does the springing grass and the gentle dairyman, are furrows of dust % tHe drought and morasses after rain.

Of course there are good roads in the world. They have 'em in France. Away in the Alps are -mountain roads that? are as good as Queen Street. The " London Road '* stretches Broad and white and hard and smooth from every English centre to our Imperial Mecca. There are even good roads south of the Line that travellers speak of with hushed voices and lifted hats as they speak of the story-tellers they have met and found joy in listening to. There is the Great North Road—of New South Wales, not of New Zealand, worse luck — the river-shingled roads of Canterbury and the Wairarapa. There are odd bits of good road dropped here and there, even in Auckland Province, as if to keep our memories green, lest we forget good roads utterly. But, broadly speaking, if the greatest happiness in life is to be found in anticipation, those who hope for good roads in Auckland and the North Island should be the happiest people in the world. • Our good roads are mostly anticipation : at least they are not yet.

Talking of the odd story-tellers, one meets, whom it is a joy to listen to, it must have occurred to every man who can laugh at himself that enjoyable conver-. sation usually consists in listening to one-' self. Men always admire a good listener, which is why women make such easy con« quests of the superior male. And we have only to bethink "us how wearisome is the

talk of those we meet when they escape from the well-fenced pastures of their daily life and daily doings;- and try to be humourous or descriptive or argumentative, to realise how wearisome we ourselves must be ' to anybody who tries to follow our verbal ' meanderings. Such conversations are, usually give-and-take; we pretend to listen to the other fellow in order that he , may pretend, as courteously, to listen to us and we are generally -waiting all the time for a chance, to break, in with our little stock of stale stories, half-baked theories, juiceless humour and.' dull pet platitudes. Yet there are some story-tellers whom to hear is a joy, and humorists who purvey more health to their fellow-men than an army of doctors.

And talking of talking, it is a singular proof of the general emptiness of words and the general dullness of conversations that we universally and unanimously find an enormous interest in anything said by anyone to whom we are deeply attached. A very fond parent, is, qui* certain that no child was ever. so/clever ; arid witty as his or her own. And diverging again, from 'roads'-to talking and from talking to grammar, \viJQ. somebody, explain why the very clever; and worthy gentlemen who want to •shift" the clock to. make us get up early, to reform our spelling in order to save us trouble and to trim our colonial twangs into an Oxford ■ drawl, or a Northumbrian burr in order to purify the language, have never taken the trouble to give us a word to replace the ugly, clumsy and, irritating "his or hear." We mustn't say "It's me," or "that's him," as our forefathers have said since English was English, but we must go on saying "his or her," if we want to, avoid the reproach of the suffragette. •• Anyway, the fond parent who is quite convinced of the uninterestingnesss of all other children, will dilate at large upon the extraordinary sayings and doings of "his or her" little Johnnie or Polly, and will shut "himself or herself" as tight as a clam against the knowledge that "he or she" is being absolutely uninteresting to the average other one. And the lover will listen to his sweetheart as though pearls of wisdom fell from the lips he thinks sweeter than honey and the honeycomb; and friend will converse with friend, trivially and long. Yet who shall say that love and affection do not illumine? la it not possible that the sympathy of soul which uses dull words as the electric spark uses wire may not be the only thing which teaches us of one another? For is not the highest condition of sympathetic understanding that wordless, voiceless silence which only friends and lovers can maintain, and across which thought passes and repasses as the wireless message passes on cloudless, starlit nights,? It may be— may it not?— we wandered from the upward path when our babbling tongues found speech and that perfected Man will speak no more, and will keep printed books in museums with flint-knives and prognathous skulls. And what a world it would ho if Thought were free as air and understanding clear as the ether that links star to star; if our poor, stammering tongues, our blundering speech, our crude and paltry words were swept to the scrap-heap of tools out-worn; '.f distance could not separate those with I souls attuned in harmony and we looked down as gods from the high atmosphere upon the muddy track where now we stumble and trudge! Which seems to bring us back to roads, those heathenish roads of ours, that wind by hill and swamp and farm and forest from town to town, from settlement to settlement. Perhaps there are worse roads in the world than here in the North Island, but surely not in any land where the King's Writ runs unchallenged from sea to sea and where no man arms himself against the footpad and the bandit. Knee deep in viscous mud, the horses strain that carry the King's mail along our provincial roads. Like boulder-strewn river-beds are mountain roads that daily hear the purr of the motor-car. Robbers there are not in all the land. The Maori wars no more. The pas are deserted on the hill-top. The militiamen no longer keep stern eyes on the King Country. The lonely policeman is everybody's friend. The "territorials" know no enemy nearer th?.n Japan. Yet the roads are as though a blight had descended on the country- , side, as though the last engineer had died, and road-making was a lost art. Also, among these weird back-country roads of the North Island, where dustclouds in summer and morass in winter mark the track by which the pakeha travels, there is the impression that bad as they are the wonder is that they exist at all. For everywhere they traverse great blocks of unrented, unoccupied, unproductive land, untaxed and unrated and uncontributing. The few settlers, the struggling local authorities, the overburdened Government, are labouring like Sisyphus to make roads and to'improve roads through vast areas that only burden roads. Good roads, that earmark of high civilisation, are hard enough to make and keep in closely-settled districts. They are a literal impossibility where the land is locked from settlement," and the sooner the settler understands this the more quickly he will figd his remedy.