CURRENT TOPICS

New Zealand Times, Volume XXXIII, Issue 7915, 26 September 1911, Page 4

CURRENT TOPICS

THE AWFUL MOON. The Goddess of the Night, to ■whose pale beauty poets have sung praises, "was given an awful character by Mr Clement L. Wraggo in the course of his lecture at the Y.M.C.A. Hall, Sydney, last week (says the “Telegraph”). The moon, ho said, is fast crumbling to decay. Incessantly great pieces are breaking off the cliffs and mountain tops and tumbling to the arid plains. But not a sound is heard. A dead silence covers the scene, for there is no atmosphere surrounding tho decaying orb. For the same reason there is no vegetation, and, while the portion bathed in sunlight is' for the time hotter than a furnace, the other half—night time—is colder than the nose of a Polar bear—2sodeg. below zero, as a matter of calculation. In point of fact, he could not conceive of a greater punishment to anybody than to consign him to the moon, if such were possible. And nothing is surer than that tho earth will eventually be in the same predicament, and become exactly as the moon is now. But she will still bo fulfilling, her part in the universe. Ether waves will bo passing from her decaying and crumbling surface to light another planet created for the purpose. AUCKLAND PROPERTY MARKET. The remarkable and continued progress of the Auckland City and surroundings in connection with the erection of new buildings would appear from the remarks of prominent laud and estate agents in conversation with a “Star” representative to be no more exceptional than. the. rapidity with which properties and land on tho market aresold. There have been many suggestions that Auckland was riding for a fall, but as a well-known agent said, “They have been croaking for years and years, but tho realisation of those prognostications is as far oft as ever.” A gentleman con--noctod with a firm which deals extensive-. ly in land said that although new agencies were springing up on every side, business continued to be good- In Auckland land agents were on a much more secure footing than in the south. There properties wore sold with practically no deposit, and there were ten times as many mortgages, while hero tho businesses could almost bo said to be cash ones. People in Wellington and Canterbury were begixming to realise what tremendous advantages there were in tho Auckland province, and wore selling out and coming np here to invest their capital anew. As an instance he quoted a property in Northern Wairoa, where .£•10,000 worth of land had been taken up entirely by buyers from Canterbury, while quite recently .£30,000 worth in and about Auckland had been sold by the firm to purchasers from the same province. Buyers kept coming from the southern provinces, and were willing to pay exceptionally large deposits, there being an unsatisfied demand for dairy farms of five, six and seven hundred acres. In reference to his own firm, the agent said that ho expected that within the next few months land they intended to open upiwould bring about 200 families into the province, as inquiries were being made on every hand by would-be settlers for farms. THE UNFIT. Dr. F. Antill Pockley, in his presidential address to the Medical Congress at Sydney, said: “In the present state public sentiment there were probably not many prepared to subscribe wholly either to that plan of eugenics proposed by Plato, and recently revived by Mr Bernard Shaw, or to the modem form, of which the late Sir Francis Gallon and Professor Karl Pearson were the chief protagonists. Tho primary idea of this doctrine was selection for parenthood, based on the facts of heredity. ; The one course which appeared to be approved by‘ biology and morality and humanity alike wag, while caring for the individual degenerate, or transmitter of disease or infirmity, to prevent such individuals from multiplying. They could agree with tho humanitarian who maintained that it was their duty to see that every child born should bo cared for, and with Niotszche to the extent that to abrogate or reverse tbe principle of natural selection was to court racial death, without going with him so far as to agree that infant mortality was a blessing. But, though they might agree that tho perpetuation of degenerate characters was undesirable, some difficulty appeared when they came to decide as to what types should bo eliminated. Would their limited knowledge justify their taking the responsibility? Spencer warned them of that practical atheism which, seeing no gnido for human affairs but its own limited foresight, endeavoured to play tho god, and decide what would bo good for mankind, and what bad. May not the undesirable characters of certain tj-pes be correlated with others for the absence of which tho world would be the poorer? 'Man does not live by bread alone,' nor have science, art, music, poetry, literature, philosophy, etc., been the product of only the physically or mentally sound. Many philosophers, poets, scientists, economists, historians, and heroes have been tubercular, alcoholic, or insane, or degenerate. John Stuart Mill, Heins, Chopin, E. L. Stevenson, Schumann, Nietsche, Eousseau, Conte, Edgar Allen Poe, Grace Darling, to name oilly a few; while such makers of history as'Julius Caesar, Mahomet, Napoleon Bonaparte, St. , Paul (probably), and Alexander the Great, were epileptics, and the last was a drunkard, as have also been many men of groat intellect and .capacity who. have made their mark in the world. It would

appear that it would have been far better to have let Nature manage this business in her own way; but as we have ventured to interfere with the balance by restricting the natural increase of the fit. it scorns that Xvo are driven to the adoption of some measures to limit the undue multiplication of the unfit, or else wo must face logical consequences, which Huxley calls the ‘‘scarecrows of fools, but the beacons of wise men/ "