DESERVED RECOGNITION.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXX, Issue 8992, 29 November 1907, Page 4

DESERVED RECOGNITION.

The public gathering which took place in the Town Hall, last night, to recognise the long and valuable services of Mr R. Brown, as Town Clerk of Masterton for thirty years, was honourable to the community which it represented. Mr Brown had been, until his recent retirement from office, the chief executive officer of the borough from its inception, and the services rendered by him from the birth of the municipality to its maturity were, last night, admitted to have been inestimable. The illuminated address and purse which were presented to him on behalf of the residents represent but a small token of the esteem in which the recipient was held as an official of the borough, and is still held as a citizen. The speakers were all gentlemen who had for years been in official touch with Mr Brown, and spoke with manifest sincerity of the great services he had rendered to the town; and it must have been consoling to him to find that his labours were not allowed to go unrecognised. Such recognition as he received last evening must prove a stimulous to the servants of the municipality in their efforts to worthily serve the public. The enormous labour some people put themselves to for a spurious notoriety is remarkable, but then, as Shakespeare says, " 'Tis ' a mad world!" A little while ago some 150 persons assembled in a hall in London for a smoking contest. The man who kept his pipe alight longest without refilling or re-lighting was to be proclaimed victor. One man managed to keep the smoke going for upwards of an hour and fifty minutes, and a section of the metropolitan press flattered his vanity by giving long accounts of the performance. The latest exhibition of human imbecility we have come across is the record of the fact of an old man hav"ng jus: wheeled a barrow, containing his belongings, weighing 2c-vt, from Ayr to London and back —a .distance of 1,000 miles. Upon the return of this ridiculous old man to Ayr he was received with the 'greatest enthusiasm by an equally ridiculous section of the people. Truly, Shakespeare is right. Writing with regard to the Public .Works Policy.the Southland Times remarks:—"lt is a delusion to suppose that the principles of sound finance can be ignored with impunity, and nothing is more eertaiii than that the day will come when the people of the colony will pay dearly for the reckless expenditure of borrowed money on illegitimate purposes which has characterised the Public of the past twelve or thirteen years." Speaking at Toronto, recently, Mr Rudyard Kipling said that the need of the Canadian West was labour. "Pump in emigrants trom the Old Country ; pump them in, pump them in!" he added. Yet Mr Kipling, according to a cablegram received this week, has been awarded the Nobel Prize for literature for 1906!