LOCAL GOSSIP

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXX, Issue 21640, 4 November 1933, Page 1 (Supplement)

LOCAL GOSSIP

BY MKRCUTIO

„\ great week is just ending. This ftatement is made without any reservation, although so great an authority as the late Dan Leno onco said one •week was very like another; they all had their weakness. Anyhow this one l.cpan with the eleventh successive wet Sunday, and that doesn't happen every week. It ended with Guy Fawkes Day, celebrated one day ahead of tho due elate. Guy Fawkes Day does not fall every week, a fact for which every jidult will be profoundly thankful — f vervone except the folks .who sell firevorks, that is. Beginning with a wet Sunday and ending with Guy Fawkes Day. the week paused long enpugh to include tho first arrival of income tax Assessments. What more could be needed to make it notable, happy and comfortable? A defence of Aucklanders against the charge of being undemonstrative has l,oen offered; the demeanour of a crowd 3 it. a secondary school football match has been cited in rebuttal. It is an effective point, but is it really relevant? When you come to think the thing over, it • is the crowds in tho streets which on occasions when demonstration would he in order can easily forebear to cheer that has had to bear the gravamen of tlie charge. People who go to a football match readily shed their dignity as they pass the turnstiles, and just as readily put it on again as th?y stream long* the homeward way. But that everyone in Queen Street should cast restraints to the four winds, cheer, wave, yell, throw paper streamers and generally cavort as the cinema shows t!io New York crowd can do when somebody notablo is being welcomed, is somehow hardly feasible. It simply isn!t done, and that seems to be the end of it. Whether the Auckland communtiy is therefore superior to, or inferior to, the New York is a question really not worth arguing. They are different in other ways; size, for example. So why (shouldn't they be different in this? The lady who defended Auckland suggested that the crowd could well be as enthusiastic about weightier things as about football without expressing it in the same way. That is quite reasonable, and not incapable of proof. The results of many and many a street collection, taken even in hard times, fchows that Auckland can demonstrate in a very practical fashion when the cause seems to justify it.

" Canadian problems at the present 1 moment strikingly like those of New Zealand, only on a larger scale." So hpoke Mr. Downie Stewart, just returned from a recent visit to the senior Dominion of the Empire. The statement is interesting, but it is hard to decide whether it should be considered comforting or not. If one is in the soup oneself, is it any comfort to know that somebody else is in soup of the same Jcind-axul i rmpfirfl turc, only in a larger and deeper bowl? If the somebody else also possesses a larger frame, conditions are approximately equal, hut again, does that help at all? It is -true a cynical Frenchman once said "there was something pleasing about the misfortunes of our friends, or words to that effect, but he did not imagine that we would also be sharing these misiortunes. Altogether, it is quite a problem to decide how one should accept this assurance that not only are there others besides our most important felves in difficulties, but that the difficulties are remarkably similar. At the present moment the only thing seeins •to be to add the information to our s-itock of general knowledge, and leave it at that.

Meantime it is interesting to realise that while there is nothing different in the shape of misfortune in two Empire rou/itries on opposite sides of the broad Pacific, there is little new in the diagnosis of trouble or the .prescription of remedies at the present time compared with quite a number of years ago. Take the following, just slightly :imended, and see if it has not a familiar ring: " A conspiracy entered" into between tho gold gamblers of Europe and America to accomplish the following purposes: To fasten upon tho people the burdens of perpetual debt; in destro3' tho notes which had safely brought us through the perils of war; to strike down silver as money metal; io deny to the people the use of silver ifnd paper —the two independent sources of money guaranteed by the constitution; to fasten upon the country the single gold standard of Britain and to delegate to thousands of banking corjiorations, organised for private gain, the sovereign control, for all time, over tho issue and volume of all the supplemental paper currency." One or two phrases seem strange, but tho general thread of denunciation is quite easily recognised. Now, which branch of the —hold on, names had better not bo used. Now, who has drawn that up, fo hurl it at shrinking members of Parliament in Wellington? Nobody. It is an extract from a Populist manifesto issued in tho United States in 1895. An ingenious writer resurrected it for publication in the North American Review recently. Truly there is little that ifc new under the sun.

Every gardener knows that there is no discharge in the war against weeds. Even before ono crop of them is destroyed another is germinating, ready to advance upon the cultivated land and take possession. So, when farmers have discovered that the concentration on ragwort has allowed other weeds to take advantage of general inattention, to increase and multiply, to develop into a menace comparable with ragwort, and to provide cover for other pests, they have found out nothing really new. Broom is the new nuisance indicted. It has not hitherto had the publicity given ragwort, blackberry, gorse, hard fern, wineberry and other vegetation with a record, but it is apparently now on the way to being declared an habitual criminal. Most people know it bears spectacular yellow flowers, but at that, general knowledge of its habits and characteristics halts. Perhaps by the time it has swept over cultivated lands and engulfed them, broom will bo more readily recognised. It is really tragic the way plants, generally well-intentioned, seem to upset man's plans. Nature never really meant them to be nuisances. Some of the most aggressive are specially designed to provide humus and shelter for young forest, growth, then to disappear. That is proved by the way trees will even gorse and blackberry. But man, more concerned with pasture than fprest, grows impatient and declares those things noxious weeds. Thereby ho prepares a scourgo for his own back m the necessity for disposing of them ■ornehow. Nature takes her own revenge in her own way.