NOTES AND COMMENTS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXV, Issue 19957, 28 May 1928, Page 8

NOTES AND COMMENTS.

BUSINESS AND GOVERNMENT. " The regulation of business, in our complex social order, is the regulation of life. I confess to a dislike for regulation. Ido not want to leave the regulation of business to the business men any more than I want to leave the regulation of traffic to the motorists when there are so many other interests on the highway," says Mr. John T. Flynn in Harper's Monthly Magazine. " Our business friends are fond of saying there should be more business men in the administration of government. I heartily concur with them. The government is a vast business machine, and good business men ought to be charged with the administration. What the business man overlooks, however, is that if the government has a business side, business just as surely has a human and social side. And if good business brains aro needed to cope with the purely commercial problems, good statesmen are no less wanted to understand the troublesome and pressing human problems. I, therefore, respectfully submit to the slogan makers this germ idea, from which, I am sure, they will be able to fashion a euphonious and forceful phrase: Less business interference in government/ and tnoro statesmanship in business." INSECT ENGINEERS. " Man's respect for the ant will be increased by the latest discovery about these intelligent and industrious Lilliputians," says the Daily Herald. "For many years scientists have been puzzled by the fact that, in South Africa and other hot countries, the white ants' nests are always saturated with heated water vapour. This mysterious steam supply never fails, even after three years' drought. The explorer Livingstone believed that the insects had hit on some way of manufacturing water synthetically. And others hazarded solutions. But now the astonishing secret is out. During the digging of a well on a Transvaal farmstead a 2Ain. shaft was found running down into the earth. Careful excavation showed that this miniature boring ran from a neighbouring ants' nest io a reservoir 65ft. below the surface. Up and down the shaft passed an endless chain of white ants carrying water to the nest and to the fungus gardens which provide their food. It took half-an-hour for each 'water-boy' to travel down the shaft, draw his load, and return. The convoy never stopped for a moment: the insects climbed on day after day, night after night. Toilers appointed to other tasks during the daytime were, apparently, transferred to the irrigation shift after sunset, when the unceasing stream of carriers grew thicker and their tiny trumpetings could be clearly heard. A remarkable story, this tale "of the ants and their artesian well—a story fit to rank with the most ingenious achievements in the realms of human engineering." CHILD EMIGRATION. A valuable experiment in migration and land settlement has been established by the Child Emigration Society, which is sonding children from Britain to a training farm at Finjarra, near Perth, Western Australia. The school is named after Mr. Kirigslcy Fairbridge, who started his first farm school in Western Australia in 1912 with 13 small boys. There were recently 100 boys and 100 girls at the school, and within the past month they have been joined by a party of 115 boys and girls. In a letter to the Times, referring to the departure of this contingent, the High Commissioner for Australia, Sir Granville Ryrie, said the average ago of the children is ten years. They will remain at the Fairbridge Farm School until they pass out from their State school education at 14 years of age, and on through at least one year's intensive farm or domestic training, which will fit them for continuous employment as agriculturists and highgrade domestics. Some, early recruits already aro landholders in the State. He remarked that had these dependent children remained in Great Britain, all, at the age of 14 or 15 years, would have found themselves in the keenest competition for remunerative employment. The position is reversed in Western Australia, where there are ten applicants for every Fairbridge boy. Obviously it is at once an excellent piece of Empire settlement work and also good business on the part of any organisation, whether official or voluntary, to transfer these children through the kind offices of the Child Emigration Society. This society subscribes to the standards laid down by the Australian Government in selecting boys and girls who, while the "poorest of the poor," must be sound in body and in mind and likely material for the development of Australia's apparently unlimited resources.