CURRENT TOPICS.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LIV, Issue 26, 25 July 1911, Page 4

CURRENT TOPICS.

A'BISHOP OX YOUXO MEN. Tlie Bishop of Christehurch preached a sermon the other day, and was hard on young men. He had noted the "stunted minds" of many of these young men in smoking carriages, saying that they did not understand anything that did not touch their immediate concerns. "Their minds are stunted through bad education and through ignorance." One cannot expect every young man who has the good fortune to travel in a smoking carriage with a bishop to entirely satisfy the prelate's idea of what a young man should be. There are, of course, plenty of careless, stupid, stunted young men (and old ones, too), and no man has even yet been able to see the soul of another by listening to his conversation in a smoking carriage. Supposing the average New Zealand youth who travels in a smoking carriage really lias a stunted mind and doesn't read and isn't up to a bishop's standard of what a boy should be. Whose fault? Bishops and schoolmasters and teachers generally are put into this world in order to find stunted minds and all that sort of thing, and to make them grow. If public teachers could do a little less accusing and a little more spade work, what a difference it would make! Wonder if the bishop really believed that his accusation about stunted minds would make them blossom? Wonder if he thought he was helping those young men by saying what sad failures' they were? Wonder if he couldn't have done a heap more good by finding out just how stunted the minds are? You can't tell what kind of a thing a mind is by hearing its owner make a few remarks. You mustn't conclude that all young New Zealanders arc vapid because an odd specimen makes absurd remarks or is ill-mannered—and you'll never decrease the proportion of stunted minds by blaming the owners. Now, if the bishop would only go out 011 a fertilising tour and get hold of a few of these stunted minds in smoking carriages —he might make them grow.

CLEANLINESS. Lately the health authorities found that insanitary conditions existed in a local restaurant, and presumably the conditions will be remedied. Thanks to agitations in various parts of New Zealand, there is at present a general stirring up of rubbish heaps and at least an official insistence on some degree of cleanliness. New Plymouth itself is net clean. It is a town that requires a great manv medical men to attend to its sick, although it is—apart from the business portion of the town—an ideal place of residence, and, one would assume un hasty examination, healthy. Diphtheria, typhoid, measles, scarletina. and many other epidemic diseases cannot possibly "take hold" among a people who are wholly clean, and the fact that the clean have to suffer for the dirty is a reason why the latter should be carefully looked after by the authorities. It is not only necessary in order to assure the health of the community to look into tlie restaurants, and an inspection to be of great and lasting service should include everv dwelling and every business place and their surroundings. In the matter of (lie places where people eat their food everyone agrees that they should be rigorously inspected. A Wellington city councillor the other day moved that all eatinghouses should be licensed bv the local authorities, and was violently jeered at.' It is a good idea, all the same, and there is, in fact, as good a reason for licensing the premises when' food is cooked and eaten as premises where only drinks are obtainable. If every keeper of an eating-house were licensed. | and his license could be endorsed or rancivnl refused for having premises or methods inimical to health, there would ! be fewer complaints. Cleanliness is one of tlie conditions that the. Stale and every local body should insist on. for on it depends the health of the individual and the quality of the race.

HOW CHINA ADVANCES. Seventeen years in China, doing the work of the Inland Mission, have convinced Mr. H. Curtis, who has recently arrived in New Zealand, that the "awakening" ct the Celestial Empire is not the rapid, seven-leagued-striding thing that it is generally represented to be. China, inland, he told a representative of the Sydney Telegraph, is the same as it was a thousand years ago. The modernisation of China applies only to the coastal provinces, and even then not in the enormous degree that it is sometimes represented to exist. It is clearly obvious, says the missioner, that

in dealing with the teeming millions progress must be slow. "It is really only when you go to some great college or university that you find the modernisation and intellectual uplift that is usually associated with Chinese development to-day. We are doing great educational work there, no doubt; we are building a university that will be second only in the Empire; but you scarcely see any result inland." Mr. Curtis is associated with the Inland Mission,, which was about the first institution of its kind in Western China. Since then other missions have started, and a large number of Canadian Methodists are at present making their way there. Though they all work hard, Christianisation is slow—very slow, though, in the opinion of Mr. Curtis, it is sure. He says that in Japan it has undergone fearful mutilation, and is considerably mixed up with Buddhism. Even in China the ceremonial of the Roman Catholic religion tends in that direction. Ceremonials appeal to the Chinese, and the mission adapts itself as much as possible to Chinese ideas and thoughfs, and introduces forms that are almost parallel to Buddhism. Protestant missioners, on the other hand, have to effect a el'ean breach. ''The Chinese has to absolutely change, and if a man is not prepared to let his heathenism go in toto it means that it will possibly bo years before you really convince him and get him to think your way." Mr. Curtis believes that in the majority of cases the slower the progress, the surer it is, and he says that statement applies alike to the Christianisation and modernisation of China. Education in the Chinese schools is just about as shallow as it can be. Too 'often the teachers are men who have had a year or two, or even a few months, in Japan. Of the teachers schooled in the Christian colleges Mr. Curtis says that they are the finest in China. The trouble is that so many of the Chinese teachers laelc practical knowledge, and they have no idea of discipline in their schools. Frequently the pupils control the master, and practically dictate to the examinations that are to be set them. Speaking of the revolutionary ideas, of which so much has been said and written, Mr. Curtis says: "These ideas are confined to the coastal provinces. All the awakening, as you understand it, touches only the fringe of China. Of course, there is talk of these things in inland towns, and one sees posters depicting China's grievances, and calling on the

people to rise against the foreigner and i so forth, but it is not a fraction of) what one finds in the coastal proyinces.! The average Chinese inland are a qnie-fc,) peaceful, industrial people, steady as they have been through centuries. There is nothing anti-foreign about their working classes. The anti-foreign business . arises among disappointed scholars, for | an education that turns out merely I B.A.'a and M.A.'s and does not give men j up-to-date practical scientific knowledge, j is a hindrance to any country." '