NEW WINE.

Observer, Volume XL, Issue 7, 18 October 1919, Page 2

NEW WINE.

In Old Bottles.

A PUBLIC writer scatters much seed, most of it falling on stony ground. The perpetual motion artist or writer regards the work of his hands much as a blacksmith regards a horse-shoe—"that's finished anyhow!" The artist draws a picture, the writer evolves a screed, and each may say of his own work "Rotten!" No man is a judge of his own work—not even a politician. Poets have fired their finest works under the table, where busi-ness-like wives have discovered them and sent 'em to the publishers—and immortality—and some poets have even made money and kicked up a dust like that spectacular chap, D'Annunzio.

On the whole, however, people with ideas rarely get the credit of them. A politician will perhaps read a journalist's screed, preen himself before his shaving glass, and exclaim, "That's what I think," although he hasn't thought anything about it before. Many of the maxims of Napoleon were invented by journalists many years after Napoleon had been dead. Many of the remarks believed to have emanated from the sparkling intellects of politicians may be found in Shakespeare. * * *

With some assiduity—because it is an easy subject, and still worth writing about—this paper has at intervals during many years insisted that one of the largest handicaps to New Zealand is government by the aged. A man' is hardly considered respectable in New Zealand unless his joints creak. The fact that exceedingly young New Zealand soldiers have attained field rank in a year or two on the greatest trying ground ever mapped out would seem to be one reason for the entry of young Ne.w Zealanders into the Government of their own country. The young New Zealander is handicapped by the smallness of his country. If he should be a candidate for high place there are dozens of greybeards who will say, "HIM?-— why I knew him when he was a child SO high," and it is only when the memory of his childhood has passed away, and he is gone in the knees, and has his thoughts in an octogenarian groove, that he is considered competent to reach for a large salary or a big "honorarium," or a large waistcoat with a free railway pass on it, or a place in the Legislative Council, or a judgeship, or any other of those little things reserved for the thoroughly * matured and crusted —especially crusted.

Mr. Tom Wilford, M.P., and who, by the way, was permitted by some extraordinary mistake to enter Parliament when he was in his early twenties, having read somewhere that octogenarian rule of a childcountry was not necessarily the best rule, has repeated the idea in Parliament, much to the amusement or the aged, who wisely wagged their heads and thought over all the young men they had ever known, and saw how impossible it was for a young man to possess brains. They may have noticed that very large numbers of enterprising New Zealanders have gone to the ends of the earth, and have made good— the one place where the young New Zealander is kept from interfering with the rights of his grandfather being New Zealand.

This antipathy to young men is unknown elsewhere, and since New Zealand is trying hard to Americanise herself, (the seller of even a patent pill or a new kind of fireshovel exclaiming in his advertisement, "We stand back of these" or other priceless gems from "l'il ole N'Yark,") she might go further and get the American idea of "Young men for a young country." * * * There is some public talk lately about the scarcity of apprentices in trades. Politics—especially the higher branches of the art as personified in the Legislative Council —is the only trade to which there is no apprenticeship. If you want an apprentice to the cabinetmaking trade or the pork butchering you do not advertise "Wanted—An apprentice, Must be over sixty-five years of age. Applicants must be prepared to stay away from business at least three parts of the working day." We lately had a visit from the greatest British .sailor. Under the New Zealand politician system, John Jellicoe should not have been permitted to enter the Navy until he was fifty or fifty-five and then he should have ben given a large command at once. As a matter of fact John Jellicoe had command of men when he was thirteen years of age. One might mention a pageful of people who were considered worthy of note before they were eighty. * » « It is inconceivable that Napoleon at twenty-five would have been considered competent to enter the New Zealand Legislative Council, or that the man who was editor of London "Times" at the age of twenty-one, would have been deemed worthy of three hundred a year as a New Zealand M.P. * * * Quite naturally New Zealand young men do not try to enter politics because Parliament is inhospitable to the young. Mr. Wilford's appeal for young men was greeted with laughter—wheezy asthmatic laughter, many ancient joints creakin" in unison. The political battle in New Zealand is not to the swift but to the patient tortoise who has won his spurs with the aid of Father Time and if yon want metaphors better mixed than that go to Ireland. If, during the coming political struggle, which a gentleman has assured us, "will be the greatest in the history of the world, —men under thirty years of age intend to be candidates, may one advise them to assume an appearance of crusted age? Youth will be the severest handicap—age the entry. Everybody is declaring that we are face to face with a new era, and really we might avoid the ancient sin ot putting new wine into old bottles.