EAT, DRINK AND BE MERRY.

Observer, Volume XXXV, Issue 51, 28 August 1915, Page 3

EAT, DRINK AND BE MERRY.

For To-morrow

BRITISHERS sneer at the coolie who can "live on the smell of an oil rag." You may have seen large, lusty niggers carrying coal all' day aboard ship, and have watched them sustaining life and strength on a few bandlsful of boiled rice, doing the work a white man would be reticent about tackling without copious helpings of meat, bread, vegetables, tea or beer, and a general mixture of sustenance. We have all sniggered at the Hun Government which has made potato bread, which ha® found a method of feeding people on straw and so forth. We have seen photos of- the women of Germany throwing in their jewellery to the common war fund. In a country like New Zealand, where the larger bulk of the land lies waste, it is a matter for amusement that throughout Germany the people are not only growing food in their own gardeas, but are even using the sides of the roads—thousands of acres in the aggregate—for the production of the one thing that really matters — food. It is nothing to laugh at. Huge guns and super-Zeppelins and murderous submarines are as useless as an empty water bag in the desert -without food.

Thrift is one of the greatest weapons the Hun is using. He is making every pfennig do its utmost, just as deliberately as he is making every machine gun do its utmost. The nation that carries on in the flippant come-diay-go-day—hang the odds way is a decaying nation. It is de

caying in the brain. The people of New Zealand could sustain their physical health at its highest if they reduced their food bills two-thirds, but no person is likely to be able to convince anybody in New Zealand that thrift and economy are necessary, for these are virtues few people in this country are called upon to exercise. Life has been easy in the past, and so life must be easy in the future. We have no method of comparison. We accept it as a certainty that the King's Navy will give us our breakfast to-morrow and the next day. We can't understand the possibility of a loan failing or the bottom falling out of the financial safe, or of any earthly thing that might immediately reduce us to a primitive condition, in which men had to personally supply their own food or the food of their families. We have become so accustomed to the mere commercial way of getting physical sustenance and the inevitability of next pay day that the real problems quite escape them. The old pioneering days, when our forefathers worked 10 hours for 2s 6d and ate "salt horse" imported from America are gone. We are the aristocrats of "Labourdom." This is "God's Own Country" and "The Working Man's Paradise," and it's always going to be G.O.C. and W.M.P., because we shall be angry if it isn't.

Sir Robert Stout, Chief Justice, does not personally require to practice small economies, but he was perfectly justified, as a man whose words so often carry dread weight, in girding at the wastefulness of New Zealanders, their prodigality and their lack of thrift. We are prodigal, wasteful and thriftless because war has not yet actually touched our shores, and the sea, is open. We, have not prepared! for eventualities, possible or probable. Our faith in next pay-day is supreme, and it is inconceivable to us that a time could possibly come when money could not purchase anything. l Sir Robert StoJut declared that even the bees and wasps made provision for their offspring. He has also said, "The time will come when we will have to undergo very great privations." Who believes him? How dare trouble which touches the whole of the world include us? It is unthinkable that we, an enlightened, rich and prosperous people, should-, gather round a charity table to find! out that a man or a woman can live on a slice of bread a day and fill up the rest of the cavity with water. The Chief Justice says "A time WILL come"— not that a time MAY come. Indeed he can see no reason why this should be the one country on earth to go smoothly along with full purses, full bellies and full credit.

Our remoteness has been our stomach's salvation, but it might conceivably be our downfall. Despite the inconceivable horrors of the war, we have regarded it much as spectators regard a football match. We are interested in it, but not of it. It's the other fellow's war—and we shall come out all right. Despite it all, we are not more self-dependent than before. Everything must go on as usual'—ships will bring in the things we want and the cable the news. New Zealand is not always a mere fool's paradise —it is a paradise where the inhabitants fully expect to be helped along the track indefinitely by outsiders. It does not yet realise that it is actually fighting for its life.