REFORM

New Zealand Mail, Issue 1533, 18 July 1901, Page 21

REFORM

(By “John in the Bush.”)

Heform is the watchword. A man, like a nation, if not progressing, is going the other way. Organised industry, wise and humane laws, are still a long way off. We are doing better, much better, than ever we did before, but while we grapple with the old problems new ones spring in our paths. Wo cannot afford to neglect the old adage yet—‘‘Waste not, want not,” for all our prosperity. There are many homes in this, our land of promise, not too well furnished, and some must be even, dreary and desolate. Study a little our Police Court records and think; look into our gaols and think; look into our asylums and think; look into our streets and highways and think —Is there no waste there ? The day is coming, and is even here now, when we will have to gather up these broken fragments, mend them, and make sound ves. sels of them again. Time was when we reared children and threw them broadcast o ver the land, to be trampled in the mud under the feet of greed, avarice, and ambition. They were plentiful then, and of course cheap. But civilisation has awakened at last and says—“ You shan't trample them. We won’t give you them. We will give fewer of them, and better perhaps, and you shall give- them a chance-”

Time was when we hanged them by th e dozen at a time, and burned them for God’s sake by the score, and allowed plagues to kill them off like flies because the city fathers were too mean to buy a broom. To-day we pay them little, put sore temptation in their way, and ruin their young lives if they but make a little slip. You hustle all together in a common den of pollution, murderers, fire-raisers, ravishers, housebreakers, with the poor clerk who made a slip in his books, the shopboy w'ho forgot his honesty for a moment, the barman who forgot to ring the changes, the wanderer without a home, and the dipsomaniac with a ease- And in the asylums the man with unstrung nerves, through stress and worry, is herded with the hopeless ‘mbecile, and both go down the same straight path to the grave, with but little effort made to save the one or alleviate the gloom of the other. The families of many of these are left helpless and stranded, their homes made desolate, thus making more waste. The law takes its course, and so do they—downward.

Are we not advanced enough yet to utilise this great waste product for cur own benefit and its own good? Once on a time it was shipped off to waste places of the. earth, to purify in the wilderness or die in the process. Now that is prohibited, and we must keep it at home and purify it here, as w® do with our sewage, which we used to pollute our rivers with. The cry against any reform has been the bogey of “competition with free labour.” Well, Mr Free Labourer, we don’t want to compete with you; wo would only want to produce the things you don’t do in sufficient quantity and thus benefit you by helping to .pay your taxes. There is wine to make, and jam to make, and honey to gather, and flax to spin, and tea and tobacco to grow, and many other things to make and to gather and send to the outer markets of the world and so get cash or goods in return. Those miserables would be healed in the process, society would be purified and our Treasury would be replenished. The manner of doing these things need not be complicated.. There is plenty of land for the digging. You have only to go to your gaols and asylums and sort out the utterly hopeless, leave them to “dree their weird,” and take all the others and teach them to be useful, to be men and women once more, and be a blessing instead of a curs© to the land thAt gave them birth. Jam is very much wanted for the British army and navy in place of limejuice. Wholesome wine is wanted in piace of bad whisky. Honey is going to waste for want of gathering; flax is useful for binder twice, scrim and matting; tea and tobacco can he grown and prepared for use, and,last, but not