GOOD TIMES AHEAD

Waikato Independent, Volume XXXIII, Issue 2991, 20 April 1933, Page 3

GOOD TIMES AHEAD

! SHEEP AND THEIR PRICE. THE LESSONS OF HISTORY. At Waiau lately an auctioneer, offering a line of 119 sheep and failing to get a bid, declared lie would take £1 for the lot (says a Christchurch paper), A bystander who, was not a sheep man, saw the chance of a speculation, and bought the line. He paid a drover to take the sheep to Hawarden, and there paid 10/- yarding fee, expecting to make a pound or two on liis bargain. The sheep were offered at auction, but no bid was forthcoming. Then the speculator, thinking that he. had paid enough, begged tho auctioneer to give the sheep away. No one could be found willing to take them. This story is being related in Canterbury, wo understand, with the comment that things were never so bad, but there never was a tale of the kind that could not be capped with an earlier one, and the Waiau-Hawarden story is no worse than the story told by Mr J. T. Matson, who, at Rakaia, knocked down a line of sheep to a farmer friend for less than the value of the tallow. The farmer protested that he did not want the animals and did not know what to do with them. “Take them home and plough them in for manure,” Avas Mr Matson’s advice. ' ’ ■ i % l . 1 Fifty Years’ Interval. Fifty years Avas the interval between these two stories, and fifty years ago men were saying that the world Avouhl never recover from the slump. Yet the half-century that folloAvcd included ten years of recovery and thirty years of amazing prosperity. The world, somehoAV, manages to weather all the storms, for the reason that cur troubles are made by man for the most part and by man can be cured. Nature, it is true, may send droughts or floods, but Nature’s “slumps” are of brief duration, and she always makes amends. As Sir .Tosiali Stamp said re- J ccntlv in England: It Avas necessary to - look the facts fairly in the face, but it was also necessary to see them in historical perspective. It is the will to AA'in through that counts. The peoples of older countries are not dismayed by temporary depressions because they ha\’C centuries of depressions behind them, but tho lesson is one that the younger countries need to learn. And especially they haA-e to boar in mind always that as every boom lias in it tho seeds of a slump so every slump has in it the seeds of re-COA-CrA'.