TOPICAL READING.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXIX, Issue 8238, 17 September 1906, Page 4

TOPICAL READING.

Sir Douglas Pox has been commissioned to prepare the new plana for tne long-talked-of Channel tunnel. It is owing to his creative and instructive genius that the Cape to Cairo railway has developed into aa actuality instead of an impossible dream. The great bridge across the Victoria Falls on the Zambesi river will always remain a monument to his oreat abilites. The twenty-year-old plans of the proposed/ Channel tunnel are obsolete, and require many modifications to get rid of the military objeo-, lions which have been responsible for so much paßt opposition to the scheme. The company will apply to Parliament next session for 1 the necessary powers. A judgement of considerable interest to music publishers and composers (says a Rome correspondent) < has just been delivered at Milan against a gramophone company, in an aotion promoted by several celebrated publishing firms in conjunction with the Society of Authors. . The tribunal has decided that without the permission of authors and publishers, no ffurk or any selection therefrom can ho repro duoed on the gramophone during ! the first period of copyright J(furty I years), and that even after the ex- ! piration of that time the recognised royalty must be paid. The.oompany ! was condemned to pay costs and damages to Messrs Ricordi and other firms, and to pay also an indemnity to Ma'soagui, Leoncavallo, Tosti, Cilea, and other well-known Italian composers. An interesting scheme by which the Admiralty encourages workmen who are fertile in Ideas is described in a memorandum on changes at the 'dookyardsissued recently. All the workmen in the dockyards are invited to contribute saggestions regarding improvements In touls aud methods of work, and a committee of dockyard officers sits once a month to consider and adjudicate on the suggestions reoeived. A sum of £2OO has been authorised for distribution during the present year in awardc for suggestions either adopted in their original form or successfully developed., A premium system has also been adopted experimentally iu the dockyards by which an expert workman'is enabled to inorease his wages by completing his work in less than the time allowed.

The other day (says tho Sydney Mail) Dr Arthur wbb urging Eussian Jews to come out here and form agrioaltural settlements. Meantime a correspondent has been showing that a provision of our state law, deharrng 'aliens taking up Government lands until they have been twelve months' resident in New South Wales, has prevented a party of from five hundred to six hundred Austrian landowners, with from £2OO to £3OO capital each, ooming out here. The two statements plaaed side by side show how far we are from au intelligent imtni-

gration policy. One of the moat promising suggestions was that made a little time ago that the Calabrian peasants, all thrifty agriculturalists, who were leaving their own land on aooount uf earthquakes and famine, should be turned to Australia, but particularly to the empty Northern Territory. No one took that matter up, yet it was far more promising than the Jewish sobeme of Dr Arthur. The Russian Jew, largely owiug to bis treatment, is not a desirable type to introduoe here: but the Austrian farmer is, and so might have been these Italians. Both "ola9Hea hare done well in America, where Ausfcriau and German farmers are specially welcomed. Such men absorb speedily into American citizenship, and no doubt they would absorb as quickly into the people of the commonwealth.

The plain truth, aooording to the Speotator, is that the greater part of the talk about disarmament, or the reduction of armaments, is at present, at any rate, unreal and paradoxical. The nations are turning uneasily on their beds cf pain—of pain produced by the sacrifice required tby militarism—and in their malaise they call out for a reduction of armaments. Yet in truth none of them are willing to make these reductions. Some refuse »iecauso they cherish, either openly or secretly, ambitions which make a paramountoy of miltary power essential to *hem. Others, again, dare not reduce their armaments for fear of what may befall them. They know—that the knowledge is unpleasant dues not v make it untrue —than in the last resort man is not governed by philanthropists or Sunday school teachers, but by hard, cynical, anxious politicians, who, whatever they may say when they make speeches in Parliament, are as keen as American business men to snatch benefits, or what they consider to be benefits, for their own countries. It is essential that the British democracy should remember this fact, and should realise that on ail previous oocasions public obatter about disarmament and the federation of the world and so forth has ended in bloody warfare. The people of Britain may, and, as we think , should, do in a quiet and unsentimental way whatever they Giut to promote arbitration and to increase friendliness among nations; but for them to indulge in, or at any rate to act upon, the opportunist rhetoric about disarmament would be madness, and might imperil the liberty of the whole world.