THE WAIPUKURAU PRESS MONDAY, MARCH 18, 1985. DEATH ON THE ROADS.

Waipukurau Press, Volume XXX, Issue 62, 18 March 1935, Page 4

THE WAIPUKURAU PRESS MONDAY, MARCH 18, 1985. DEATH ON THE ROADS.

VALUING THE QUINTUPLETS The practical premier of the province of Ontario, who probably believes that marriages are made in heaven, has told Air Dionne, the father of the quintuplets, that God never intended him to be rich, and if we regard the babies merely as so many mouths to feed there may be something in it, observes the Christchurch Star” in a recent editorial, which continues:” But the politician probably never heard of Cornelia, the Mother of the Gracchi, w’ho on being asked why she wore no jewels replied, “These are my jewels,” displaying two of the twelve children to whose education she devoted the whole of her life. Much depends upon the economic point of view. We may almost fancy the parents of quintuplets reverting constantly to a false conception of the value of such a gift, and falling into the state of mind of which Dr. Johnson in “Rasselas” wrote: —

Some particular train of idea fixes upon the mind; all other intellectual gratifications are rejected; the mind in weariness or leisure recurs constantly to the favourite conception and feeds on the luscious falsehood whenever it is offered with the bitterness of truth. By degrees the reign of fancy is confirmed. She grows first imperious and in time despotic. These fictions begin to operate as realities. False opinions fasten on the mind and life passes in dreams of rapture or of anguish. It is not easy to know what is in the father’s mind when he protests against his babies becoming State children. They ( will not be State children in the accepted sense of the term, for the guardianship that is now proposed not only protects them against want or hardship for many years to come, but is a logical continuance of the admirable care and foresight that were exercised by the country doctor from the beginning.”

The number of people killed on the British roads every year has now reached staggering dimensions, observes the “Signs of the Times,” in a brief but informative article under the above caption. “In a letter to the “British Weekly” on the subject, one writer says: ‘lt is now certain that the number of people killed on fhe roads of Britain since 1909 (the first year in whiojh the statistics were tabulated in their present form) hate now reached the appalling total of 100,000. equal to the population of Blackpool, and more than five times the total number of Britishers killed on land and sea in the Napoleonic wars from 1793 to 1815. The number killed last year was about 7,500. For every hundred killed in all kinds of industries—factories, docks, shipping, mines, quarries, railways—37s are killed on the roads. And the numbers are steadily increasing—they have doubled in ten years.’ “It is truly a thought-provoking thing that the roads of Britain during the past twenty-five years have been more than five times as destructive to Britons as twenty-two years of fighting in the Napoleonic wars, and nearly four times as dangerous as mines, factories, railways, and other places of industry during the past quarter century.” As the newspaper quoted views matters, “It brings to mind, however, a text in the Book of Daniel, namely, Dan. 12: 4: ‘But thou, O Daniel, shut up the words, and seal the book, even to the time of,the end: many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased.’ We are now living in the time of the end, and truly we see knowledge tremendously increased and great multitudes of people running ‘to and fro.’ The tremendous increase of knowledge has made possible the motor-car, the motor-cycle, and motor vans, and motor-lor-ries, and it is these swiftly moving vehicles that have so largely increased the number of road accidents.”