From the Mailbag

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume LXXXIII, Issue 20109, 30 March 1928, Page 6

From the Mailbag

UNEMPLOYMENT Sir, —I read in your paper on Wednesday the weekly report <V‘ uneni ployed a labour bureau. Now sir, I i have attended regularly, often twice n I week, for nine months, and so far have not had an hour’s work from this quarter, nor a farthing out of the un employment fund last winter, while I I paid rates for the privilege of seeing i outsiders come and get the benefit of [the unemployed loan.. I I have no work to do except for a few days (casual) and have my own [family to keep, besides having to proI vide for another family in distress. This, on top of over four months’ hos- [ pical in the last .18 months comes very | hard, when our Council tells us that I this year’s unemployment loan will be | taken up by the casual employees, and | will not benefit those out of work at I present. 1 think that now is the time for th< powers that be to take steps to gel ready for lhe winter hardships. WORKER. Wanga nui. Alarch 29. BRITAIN AND HER DUES Sir, —Your correspondent “J.H.H. n fails to see that, no matter how distinguished in politics or theology certain believers in prophecies may be, rhat fact does not constitute infallibility of judgment or proof that their beliefs are in accordance with well established facts. The body of evidence relative to the British people’s ethnic origin is now very considerable, and the whole weight of it tells dead against the supposition that the Semites were our ancestors. One can only wonder an the obstinacy of prophecy-mongers in refusing to study the evidence of ethnologists that the British people are of Aryan and Iberian origin. A survey of the cognate facts as set forth by Canon Isaac Taylor in his work “Origin of the Aryans” would—or should—convince any open mind of the absurdity of the dogmatic assertion that the British arc descendants of the Israelites. One need not stress the fact. One cannot deny that the Jews were in captivity, afterwards scattered, etc. Such facts are independent of the theories that prophecy cranks imagine to explain them. Pleased with the notion that human destiny is marked or planned out to an end, as “J.H.H.’s” words show, they think to read the events of history in obscure and vague predictions in Biblical texts. The vicious habit, grows upon them of reading events of history as fulfilments of old prophetical utterances of Hebrew prophets. They even go so far as to predict the breaking out of another world war this year. One cannot argue with such people, for they ignore scientific principles in their mental habits, preferring to theorise and make the facts fit their theory instead of building up a theory from the facts. Good old Bishop South a century ago, in a caustic remark, summed up prophecymongers in his day to the effect that prophecy cither found a man mad oi left him so. A STUDENT OF HISTORY. Wanganui, Alarch 29.