PASSING NOTES.

Otago Witness, Issue 3769, 8 June 1926, Page 3

PASSING NOTES.

(Fr®m Saturday's Otago Daily Time*). Welsh coal-mining is still in the Slough of Despond, and every new day we dread to open the morning paper. But, opening a Spectator received by the mail, one learns with surprise and relief iliat there still exists in England prosperous coal-mining. There is a migration in the Midlands *o “a great new coalfield,” 600 square miles in area, with rich seams of good quality coal which within four years will yield an annual output of 20,000,000 tons. This is in South Yorkshire and Nottinghamshire. It is good to read of new villages springing up, brick houses in ten different types, not after the drear monotony of the workmen’s houses that disfigure English manufacturing towns—row upon row, row upon row, staring at each other across the dismal street, each with a backyard to swing a cat in. Every house in the new mining village has electric lighting, central heating, and hot water supply, constant, from the [ pithead. Other features are “ the spacious rooms, the number of cupboards, the playgrounds for children, and the beauty of the lay-out.” It sounds . incredible. But of the new capital found \ for this new coalfield nearly one-half is to be spent in housing the miners. Is . it new capital that is wanted in Wales? Hardly that. Rather should a lot of old capital be written off and old pits shut

down—pits that are “ uneconomic,” unable to pay either profits to the owner or wages to the miner. Owner and miner alike are kicking against the pricks. A magistrate who in that capacity kikes the public into his confidence will always lie listened to with interest; if with approval, ho will not think approval impertinence. Mr J. R. Bartholomew, S.M., tells us that in his view the Children’s Court should for most cases be held in the court building and not, as now, in the Land Board’s offices or the magistrate’s room. On that point 1 give him my vote. The court house for moral effect, and uniformed constables in evidence. It had been seriously proposed that every child brought before the court should be dealt with by methods of psycl.o-analysis. Gracious!—psychoanalysis! Mr Bartholomew considered that this “ would not only he wrong, but mischievous and purposeless,”—and he “ was not lacking in comprehension.” Decidedly not. His experience w'as mostly with boy problems, for girls of the school age were almost unknown as delinquents, and he had found that on the whole they were not bad boys. Problem cases, or the abnormal child, were very few. “Now if the boy steals an apple or i reaks a window he is i brought before tbe court. What need ( is there to build up any mystery com- . plex around the boy? ” queried the I magistrate. “ They were not had boys,”—precisely; they were boys, simply boys, and all is said. Except that a boy before the court is for the court to deal with. Spare the rod and spoil the child; — that is Solomon, I believe; and “The Bible inane hand and the tawse in t’ither ” —that is the auld Scottish dominie; and there was never a better. I suggest a tawse for the Children’s Court and a uniformed official to Jay it on, a posteriori, where it would do most good or least harm. One—two—three—four —five, —ceremonially.

If Mr Bartholomew has looked into the books of Freud and Jung, chief exponents of the subject, he will have concluded that psycho-analysis is mainly nonsense, and, what is worse, nasty nonsense—at times of a nastiness unspeakable. Its business is with tlie subconscious mind, —that is, with a mind that is not a mind, and with a consciousness that is unconscious. In what part of the human anatomy may this elusive abstraction be supposed to reside? The pineal gland? the solar plexus? the spleen?—all are low down, as a sub-conscious mind ought to be, and the function of each is obscure. But the appendix is lower, and the only known physical use of the appendix is that of supplying an easy fee to surgery. I plump for the appendix. There is record of a sect of philosophers in fact or fable who attained to all wisdom by contemplating the pit of the stomach. There they sat, each man with eyes fixed on his own navel. The psycho-analyst is their lineal descendant.

In “ The New Republic,” an American weekly on the Athenseum table, a repentant practitioner of psycho-analysis makes confession with a view to absolution. A medical man already doing well, he thought to do better by adding psychoanalysis. “ Success was as easy as falling off a tree.” Patients came to him, especially women. Probing and peering into a “ sexual complex ” that dated back perhaps to the period of infancy, he often w’akened dangerous feelings and “ realised that it was love, and not just friendly confidence, that was inspired. For some time the feeling was disguised, as a rule; but eventually it came out in its true colours.” “ Patients would ring me at all hours of the day and night on the pretext of an urgent need of my reassuring voice.” Hence a sexual complex in his wife, who, psycho-analys-ing on her own account, showed symptoms of jealousy. One patient was a family-friend, a young girl engaged to be married, “ whose trouble was really vanity—she could not tolerate the possibility of children from fear of spoiling her boyish figure.” Not liking the responsibility, he transferred her to another analyst under whose searching ministrations she broke off her engagement ; after which she left for Europe to consult “ the greatest of the analysts ” Freud and Co., or their successors. “ She was months abroad, and returned a wreck.” He winds up: “I do confess that I was horrified, and that my faith was shattered.” We may now suppose him returned to the paths of virtue in legitimate therapeutics with powder, pill, and'P-Mon. I profess little love for the Americans. Painful though it be to say it, the fact is so. There was once a Melbourne politician of eminence who lost public esteem, lost votes, lost most things that a politician values, by an unlucky boast that he was “disgustingly rich.” The words were his own, and the papers turned them up against him continually. That is what is the matter with the Americans —they are rich. If yon would know why and how the disgust comes in, listen to Mr Winston Churchill speaking in the House of Commons: — We have undertaken to. pay what the United States so insistently and incessantly demanded. That involves upon us at the present time a charge of £33,000,000 annually, rising. 1 think, in seven years to £38,000,000. That is to say, putting it broadly, we have to pay about £IOO,OOO a day every day for more than three generations to the United States. Repaying money that we borrowed to finance our Allies in a struggle that was as much in America’s interest as in our own. Moreover, “ America entered the war two and a-half years after the outbreak, during which time she l ad been very busily and very profitably engaged in making war material for the Allies.” We were fighting, they were profiteering. “ Washington's comment on Mr Churchill’s speech ” —says a New York journalist —“ is that of the tiger fn the Limer’ok — They returned from the ride With the lady Inside, And a smile on the face of the tiger.” “ We air a great people, and we must be cracked up”;—is this Artemus Ward or Mr Lafayette Kettle? I concede as ground for being cracked up that America has achieved a dramatic reconciliation. There is an unintended Bible hexameter— Joseph fell on Benjamin's neck and Benjamin fell on his neck. For Joseph and Benjamin substitute Labour and Capital. “ It is true that strikes still occur”—says the New York correspondent of a London paper—“ but they are regarded as a form of embezzlement. In Passaic, New Jersey, the police diepersed the pickets with tear-gas, in-

cluding even the camera men in the barrage. As a re.sult of identifying capital with labour, the girl of whom Tom Hood gang in the ‘ Song of the Shirt,’ that fa, the seamstress, makes 40 to 50 dollars a week, and even college girls, with all the disadvantages of education, receive 11 dollars a week as waitresses, including tips.” British Socialists visiting this new world are astounded. European economists depend for profits on the reduction of the wage-bill. Americans do not mind how high the wage-bill—the higher the better—if the cost of each unit of output is reduced. The highest wages are paid for the cheapest production. In our world it is the insane belief of 44-hour strikers and “ go-slow ” dawdlers that the way to higher wages and better conditions is by reducing proauction and increasing its cost. Our world—and a mad world, my masters! At the Farmers’ Union—Remark from the chair: They heard a lot about the cry that the price of bread should not be increased. The extra cost of an increase of Id per loaf in the price of bread per family was Id, whereas a man cheerfully spent Is 6d per day in cigarettes. Are these things so? As a consumer of bread 1 am naturally against a rise of Id a loaf; but after all a penny is neither here nor there. The point is cigarettes: “a man cheerfully spent Is 6d a day m cigarettes.” Eighteen pence a day is half a guinea a week; is this, plus the “pictures,” the “standard of living” of which v\e hear continually that it “must be kept up?” In the days of the briar pipe, or in the eailier days of the cutty (nothing sweeter than a mellowed cutty!), which were also the days of Barrett’s Twist, eighteenpence would buy tobacco for a week. And now we have advanced to cigarettes and eighteenpence a day! I suggest a tin of cut tobacco and a packet of cigarette papers. Then, as you may see anywhere in the South of Europe, a deft twisting with the fingers, a touch oi the tongue at the edge of the paper, and your cigarette is made—as good a smoke as you could buy in the shops. The saving would be better than a penny off the loaf and would more than pay your income tax. Dear “Civis,”j-I shall be glad if you would help me out of a little argument. Feople staying in Edinburgh (Scotland) when making a journey to London, always say, “going up to London,” and peole in London doing the trip to Edinburgh always say, “up to Edinburgh.’’ Surely they can’t both be right? A triviality. Bat if the question is big enough to be asked it is big enough to be answered; —1 am not proud. From places in the country you go “up” to London ; from London to places in the country you go “down.” “Up trains” are trains to London ; trains from London are “down trains.” Call London the capital city, or the chief city;—the words “capital” and “chief” are both from “caput” (head) —and as the head is at the top of things we approach it from beneath. The Jew went “up” to Jerusalem, but he went “down” to Jericho. Conceivably a Londoner might say that he was ‘‘going up to Scotland” : and he might add that perhaps he would ‘ go up as far as Aberdeen,” or other place in the distant north. That*would be the influence of the map. In New Zealand we are entirely influenced by the map. A Dunedin man goes “down” to Invercargill, but “up” to Christchurch and the north ; places below Auckland are to the Aucklander ‘‘down south.” The primacy of Wellington as capital of New Zealand doesn’t seem to count. Wellington is “down south” like the rest. Some local usages are hard to explain. A Dunedin man will talk of “going down to Port Chalmers,” and we hear of people who “go down to the sea in ships.” But we go “up” to Lawrence, and “up” to Central Otago. Usage settles these things; and in usage—if only it is general usage—whatever is is right. Ci vis.