SKIT AND SOLUTION.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXVII, Issue 20722, 15 November 1930, Page 1 (Supplement)

SKIT AND SOLUTION.

A WORLD WITHOUT WHEELS.

BV J. J. NORTH.

A long while ago, when the while inhabitants of New Zealand were " tho scum of tho earth," the man who so described them landed at the Bay of Islands from H.M.S. Challenger. Ibis was in 1835. Charles Darwin subscribed his guinea for the Anglican Church, admired Waimato and the missionaries, shuddered at the tattooed warriors and sailed away one summer day to set the world afire with his evolution.

Twenty-five years after a very different man came to New Zealand and stayed four years. Samuel Butler was brim full of unsuspected ability. He picked up " The Origin of Species " and read it by the banks of the Ilangitata. He thought he Saw a great light, and immediately quarrelled with the Bishop of Christehurch over it. We mention this because Butler came to quarrel with Darwin himself, and because he wrote him into the skit, which he proceeded to write against the hypocrisies of England, a skit which he located in Westland, and which is one of the few immortal books of last century. There is some likelihood that in the present impasse occasioned by the labour-saving inventions of our day Butler's satire "Erewhon will be called for in new editions. It will not be amiss here to recall that Butler was a rebel clergyman. His rebellion was occasioned in part by his observation that there was no difference observable between baptised and unbaptised ragamuffins in his slum school. His irate father, with whom he never lost any love, sent him out to the new Anglican settlement. He wandered over the interminable plains, which were being " gridironed " by rapacious settlers. He pushed up the Rangitata valley and found open grazing country till then unsuspected. He hurried back to the lands office in Christehurch and secured the " find " on easy terms. He called the place, in his whimsical way, Mesopotamia, a name it still bears. A Mare's Nest. In the intervals of shepherding he explored. He found a mare's nest that excited the little settlement. From a pass near his station he thought he saw open country lying in the blue distance. He told of his find. The land-hungry followed his lead. They discovered to their disgust that his blue distances were virgin forest. They were eloquent concerning the " have." But Butler made his fame out of those blue distances. He pictured a land in the beyond whose life was England's exactly upside down. The follies and maladies of mid-Victorian 1 England j were thrown' with vivid humour into our Westland.

Just as that England was being altered by the book of Darwin, so that dream land beyond the Alps had been altered by the " Book of Machines," written by a professor who had persuaded a whole countryside that machines are supermen, evolving in the Darwinian way into such tyrannous forms that man will inevitably become their slave. He makes the people of Erewhon break every wheel of every machine under two hundred and seventyone years old. That margin was allowed in order to save a mangle that was popular with washerwomen. The skit mado Darwin rather raspy, and some letters were interchanged. The breach between the two became absolute later on. Commercialism. Let it be remembered that when Butler was grazing his sheep in Mesopotamia the commercialism of England was at its height. The mother country had no rival. Manchester clothed the world. Sheffield armed the nations and Birmingham hung trinkets round the savage neck. Ruskin was fuming at the devil's work in the new factory towns, Carlyle was erupting in his best stylo and Tennyson was writing " Locksley Hall." No one could see where things were getting to. .That they were getting somewhere at a break-neck pace was plain. Butler took the gloomiest view of it all. The green countryside was doomed. Merrie England was stoking the furnaces of the new inferno. lie put it thus: "Day by day the machines are gaining on us. Day byday we are becoming more subservient to them. More men are daily bound down as slaves to serve them. Moro men arc devoting the energies of their lives to the development of mechanical life. The upshot is a question of time. But that the time will coine when the machine will hold the real supremacy over the world and its inhabitants is what no person can for a moment question. Our opinion is that war to the death should be instantly proclaimed on them. Every machine of every sort should be destroyed by the well-wishers of the species. Iho ridiculous skit in Erewhon had enough well-hidden truth in it to make it important. Things have, however, taken an unexpected turn. Men are being bound to machines in the one little country that was the factory of the world. Men are being kicked out by the machines. For the machines of a dozen manufacturing countries have overtaken the world s demand, and in addition are being so improved that they aro next, door to automatic. Thus in the last dozen years the now typesetters have replaced two hundred and forty-fivo workers with fifteen. One steam shovel does what five hundred men did. In a new machine shop thirty men do what two hundred and twenty used to do. Oil fuel on steamers sends thousands of stokers on shore for good. Tinned music drives musicians on to the pavement. Triumph ol the Machine. The position lias become almost irremediable. The cleverest brains in the world aro deliberately plotting the destruction of the domestic peace of thousands of honest and wholesome men. Butler did not forosee this exact development of the machine age. It seemed in his day that England's monopoly would be perpetual. Ho was afraid that men would be tied to the iron monsters. We are afraid of new monsters that have been " evolved " and that toss men with contumely on the slag heap. No one knows what next year will bring forth in the form of labour-saving device. Specialised brains are become the terror of the world. That some inventions would bo better smashed to atoms is probably true. That the world's governments, tormented bevond endurance by the evergrowing armies of the unemployed, will take power of supervision over new devices that make private fortunes at the cost of public misery Is very probable. The shrunken birth-rate is the depressing answer of the people to the triumph of the machine. Prince Kropotkin made the only sonsiblc suggest'on we remember to have seen. Let us go, not to Erewhon but to Eden, said lie, where Adam was a gardener. Growing lettuces and raising cucumbers, and thrusting our hot heads into beds of perfume, we may check off some of the threats made to our peace by the evolving machine.