CORRESPONDENCE

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume LXXXI, Issue 18975, 28 March 1924, Page 3

CORRESPONDENCE

THRIFT. (To the Editor). Sir, —You recently published -some sound advice to the people of New Zealand, urging them to be more thrifty. Sir, the cold fact is that the labouring classes of New Zealand have prospered beyond their mental and moral capacity to use what is paid into their hands. That statement will doubtless be received with open-eyed astonishment in some quarters I know, and be regarded as a causus belli by the socalled reformers: but to us who are in a position to review the situation intelligently, it will be accepted as a very commonplace truth. In the good old days the cobbler came once a year and the shoes that he made must last till his coming again. The handloom furnished the men with home-spun suits of butternut jeans and the women with linsey dresses, thick and strong. The pine-knot and the rush-light were their astral lamps: stove's were unknown; the Dutch oven and the crane-swung pots and kettles were our kitchen ranges: and our wages were a few shilling a day. Were the people of those days ground into the dust? Were they oppressed? Were they howling about industrial slavery and increased wages?

On the contrary, they regarded themselves as the most independent peopS, on the earth. They were content witl their homely but comfortable clothin: and they lived happily in their rud< and rudely-furnished, but debt-free homes. They were indeed less educated than our lower classes, but, God save the mark, when the popular education of our times is mentioned, with its surface gleanings of undigested facts, its distorted ideals of labour-life, its halftruths, its ’ologies, its sciences, its dead languages, its scientific training—all intended only for scholars and gentlemen and those with the means and leisure to pursue and understand them properly. The working classes of today are burning with an unhappy desire to be above themselves, to be rich and live like the rich, yet none of them is willing to make an honest, intelligent, independent, individual effort to effect it. If we force them down on to their proper level as we inevitably must, they yield doggedly and resentfully: the trades and industries to-day arc full of such people; arc they willing to live within their means? Certainly not. Though their wages are ample, many times more in both amount and purchasing power than that on which we prospered, yet these would-be aristocrats find them quite inadequate to their educated and growing wants. Their wives must be in the fashion: bonnets and gowns and wraps must be ‘a la mode’ until it is difficult to detect the difference in dress between the mistress and maid, the wage-woman and her patroness.* their sons must dress and live like gentlemen, and their daughters must be ‘fin-dc-siecle’ in everything: their houses must be of modern architecture and furnished with plate-glass mirrors and ‘suites-des-chambcrs’ until their fathers and grandfathers would stand agape at the luxury of their descendants. The working man of to-day makes more in two months than their grandfathers did in twelve, and they save less in twelve months than those level-headed, class satisfied old men did in two: would they condescend to live as those men , lived? Well, hardly. No grated meal, no dark unbolted flour, no cobbled

■-hoes, no tallow dips. Are they proslerous? Not they, nor would they be f their wages were quadrupled: 'while hey have work their earnings are squandered in riotous living, and when he dark days come thSy have saved nothing and the cry goes up that they are robbed, ill-used, and no better than slaves. Having wasted their opportunities and squandered their substance like the prodigal son they think of the flesh-pots of those wha have prospered, and bold and impudent and unrepentant they purpose to return and demand another portion. Sir, I believe in holding fast to the lines of the old parable. And when they come, saying, ’’ I have sinned and am unworthy, and desire to be as one of thy hired servants,” then, but not till then, will it be wise to consider the arrangements for the feast.— I am, etc., “CONTENTED”