OVERSEAS OPINIONS

Timaru Herald, Volume CXL, Issue 20261, 9 November 1935, Page 9

OVERSEAS OPINIONS

SOME INTERESTING VIEWPOINTS The Holiday "A holiday should be a practical lesson in the conduct of the working life to which the holiday-maker must return.” writes the Medical Corresdent of the “-Daily Telegraph.” “It Is perhaps impossible, and certainly never easy, to maintain, throughout the year, the holiday level of mental and physical health. But a very great deal can be done towards it by a little self-discipline and common sense. The tempting tram or bus can be sidestepped for a mile or so, and the muscles used instead. The extra helping of unearned and unnecessary food can be avoided. Few days are so crowded that an hour cannot be set aside for exercise. Few avocations are so exigent as to rule out the cultivation of a hobby. Workers should see that every day has its minor holiday.” To the Speechmakers “Exposition must become drama, must reach the motive and wants. Drama is always quick with life. It means movement, action, and the stirring and satisfying of fundamental desires. This is the only sure way to interest men and women. We are emotional bundles of eager demands, and reasoning interests us only as it serves these wants," says Mr William G. Hoffman. “Speaking must have some allure, some thrill. Nothing is more discouraging than to have a speaker dryly announce his topic, tell us under what heads he will treat it, and then proceed doggedly to explain everything the audience has foreseen in a flash. If he reads a manuscript, we see the pile slowly diminish, and we speculate in torture about the last sheet. Dull speakers make points clearly enough, but these are usually too obvious or unimportant. Philosophers of speech tell us there are four main purposes in talk: (1) To inform (2) to impress, (3) to convince or persuade, (4) to entertain.” A Peace Holocaust “Democracy has sometimes become wildly excited over a microscopic tax on food,” says the “Observer.” “Of this hideous tax on life it seems to be barely conscious. Five hundred children have already been killed on the road this year. In the last seven years 48.042 persons have been killed and 1,418,192 injured. A community that could, contemplate such figures in a spirit of torpor would reveal a strange atrophy of the instinct of self-preser-vation. The other main root of the horror is the default of those who administer the law from the Bench. Killing has become no murder when it is accomplished on wheels. The man who ’drives in a dangerous manner’ puts the lives of his fellows in peril and bears the guilt if they are forfeited. Yet we see such culprits released on payment of a fine, even when the worst has happened. The law is neither a protection to the public nor a terror to evil-doers. It is at the door of a palsied justice that many of those thousands of corpses lie.” Road Deaths and Public Conscience “If anything like the same number of people were slaughtered weekly on the railway as there are on the roads, there would be a public outcry” (says the “Church Times”). “No reflective person could have failed to notice the strange contrast in popular emotion at the death of fifteen persons in the recent railway accident at Welwyn with the apathy at the death of two hundred times that number on the roads. Newspaper headlines were on their largest scale to direct attention to the news of the Welwyn accident. The weekly totals of killed and injured on the roads are of less news value than minor cricket scores. Some unavoidable accidents there are bound to be. but it is surely undeniable that the volume of them could be enormously reduced by the exercise of Christian charity and courtesy. Selfishness is at the bottom of a large proportion of the tragedies. So many persons who are kindly and considerate in ordinary affairs seem to become possessed with a demon of impatience when they are at the wheel of a motor-car.” Foor for Italian Reflection "The past experience of every country in Africa discounts the idea that an area so vast as Abyssinia, with a population of natural warriors fighting in country that offers every advantage to the defence, can be subdued in a lightning campaign. The enterprise once embarked on, there can be no withdrawal, whatever the strain upon the man-power and the economic resources of Italy. The maintenance of such armies as Signor Mussolini has called to the colours involves a crushing financial burden upon a people already taxed to the hilt. With all her energies absorbed in this African en-