NOTES FROM CANVASTOWN

Pelorus Guardian and Miners' Advocate., Volume 24, Issue 19, 11 March 1913, Page 5

NOTES FROM CANVASTOWN

[From our own Correspondent), The long-coming Canvastowu Post Office is in evidence at last, and the postmistress, Miss Annie Morrison, has taken charge thereof. The Inspector of Works expressed great satisfaction at the manner in which Mr Arthur Wratt had carried out the contract. The mail is delivered to the public through the window above the letter-box, the money-order and telephone office are reached through doors. ' There is a good chimney and a sound-proof telephone cabinet fitted with the latest telephone appliances. I hear there are several applications for the position of Court tailor to the territorials since last Wednesday, and if the recent summonses did no other good they have created an interest in those garments described by Mr Stratford’s great-uncle, Charles Dickens, as “ unmentionable but necessary articles of attire.” Anyone ( who remembers the unhappy fate of Rob the Grinder” will perhaps take a more charitable view regarding the sensitiveness of small boys to ridicule than that prevailing in Havelock. If grown people pick holes in pastors and masters bow can they expect that the young fry will not follow suit ? A good deal of washy stuff has been written about the compulsory training, but there was exactly the same row made over the “ free and compulsory” education system when the truant inspector got to work on those parents who wished to make white slaves of the children on milking stools and in hop-gardens. It is time a few of the parents about here were given Mrs Browning’s “ cry of the children ” and compelled to construe it. England legislated for years : to abolish child labour in factories, i and novfr this free and enlightened Dominion, while hardly allowing a parent to chastise a child in good bid parental fashion seizes every opportunity to grab the unfortunate infants ' and put them into institutions where they labour for the state and come fdrth justly or unjustly branded as criminals, and a host of Inspectors of “ This-that-and the Other ” draw big ( salaries at the expense of the British tax-payer, whose money young New Zealand cheerfully borrows and then skites about the “ Dreadnought ” she . presented to her creditors I I suppose ( if Ido not out this short I shall be . indicted for High Treason and hung, : drawn and quartered on the top of ! Takorika I