NO FLIES—ON WELLINGTON!

New Zealand Times, Volume LIII, Issue 12559, 23 September 1926, Page 6

NO FLIES—ON WELLINGTON!

In our caption we have a slang expression of a plain, honest man’s eulogy. But the caption is the slogan of the campaign against dirt in which our citizens annually join. Why do they join? Simply because they are not as their fathers, who endured all things, dirt, stench, evil of all kinds, with the stoicism of the most fanatical Oriental. They believed, according to their favourite, most-often and most-comfortably-quoted saying, that every individual was doomed to eat a peck of dirt between the day of his birth and the day of his demise. The result of this strange philosophy of ignorance was that our fathers actually spent their lives in contentedly eating as much dirt as they possibly could. There was the dirt all around them. They had been born to eat each his share of it. Why bother? But some of the sons of These futile fathers took to scientific studies. They were frowned upon and contemned as “newfangled.” And some of these young men were, nevertheless, as benighted as their fathers. For instance, they came out with wonderful descriptions of the common house-fly, composed in a state of mind warmed by microscopic revelations. In fact, this disgusting insect emerged from these studies as the most elegant, beauti-fully-furnished, most gracefully-coloured, and cleverest of the brute creation, a worthy object of wonder, and worthy almost of the adoration of all the aesthetic tribe. Fortunately, science went further, until it discovered the fly to be the most loathsome, filthy, and poisonous of hll creatures on the habitable globe.. Our readers saw yesterday the indictment ot the disgusting, deadly little brute framed strongly by a judge of the Supreme Court or U.S.A. This Dominion and the chief of the same, are in entire agreement with that properly outspoken judge. Heeding the scientific appeal—a plea proved in multitudinous characters, of'food, death, misery, and devastation—we have definitely turned away from the ancestral welcome idea of eating all the dirt that presented itself, and calling it a peck, to clinch our satisfaction. . . On the contrary, we have adopted the superior idea that dirt breeds the flies that spread dirt. And we have determined that where there are no flies, there we shall see no dirt. Hence the health campaign is a campaign against flies. Its object is not to kill the fly when he comes, but to prevent the beast from coming. We have thus achieved a hotse-sense beyond anything possessed by our ancestors, and we have done so for the protection and comfort of our lives. Duritig Health Week all we have to do is to carry on the campaign against dirt, adopting the systematic means approved by the health authorities, and ensuring immunity from the deadly perils which the house-fly brings with him in .virulent abundance.