UNDERCURRENTS.

Waikato Times, Volume 109, Issue 18350, 9 June 1931, Page 6

UNDERCURRENTS.

HERE, THERE & EVERYWHERE. (By “Gleaner.”) THE ROCHDALE WEAVERS. A small shop in Toad Lane, Roch* dale, near Manchester, lias been reopened as a co-operative museum and memorial to tiie 28 poor flannel weavers who 86 years ago founded the co-operative movement with a capital of £2B collected in 2d and 3d subscriptions. This shop has been purchased by the Co-operative Union. The reopening ceremony was attended by leaders of the co-operative movement from all parts of England and from overseas.

it was on the evening of December 21, 1844, that the pioneers gathered in their little store to commence business. Describing the "opening ceremony" in his "History of Co-opera-tion,” George J. Holyoake writes—“Mr Wililam Cooper was appointed ‘cashier’; his duties were very light at first. Samuel Ashworth was dignified with the title of “salesman”; hl» commodities consisted of infinitesimal quantities of ‘flour, butter, sugar and oatmeal.’ The entire quantity would hardly stock a homoeopathic grocer’s shop," for after purchasing and consistently paying for the necessary fixtures, £l4 or £ls was all they had to Invest In stock. And on one desperate evening—It was the longest evening of the year—the 21st of December, 1844, the ’Equitable Pioneers’ com-, menced business. ..." | From these small beginnings the' co-operative movement has grown! until, with a membership of over' 6,000,000, it transacts an annual retail trade of £217,000,000 and employs 250,000 workers. * * # * WORK FOR ALL. Mr H. G. Wells’s suggestion that the world may yet be forced to create more work for its citizens by pulling down and rebuilding its cities far more frequently does not exhaust the possibilities of making work for tho unemployed. We might, for instance, have motor registration every month, instead of every year, and there might he bigger and better forms, with vaster and more varied questions. It is beside the point to complain that such work would he unproductive; if we paid the registration inquisitors properly they would be only too, pleased to pay other people for producing things like butter and boots and shoes, and so everybody would bo satisfied and more registrations and more production would go on happily hand In hand. !

In any event the bottom seems to have fallen out of that ones grim and forbidding subject, Economics; even the professors do not claim to know quite how the wheels go round. It is a matter of history that poverty vanished and the standard of living improved during the war years, when there was work for everyone, even though It meant making things that would be presently blown to smithereens. From the wage-earner’s point of view the wheels on the home front then went merrily enough; they might move just as blissfully If half the population were engaged in a perpetual street-weeding scheme backed up by everlasting registration of motor vehicles. * * • * ELKS ON THE FAIRWAY. Strange news from the Alberta front—- “ Elks, driven from their mountain feeding grounds by unusually heavy snows, have flocked in hundreds to Jasper Park golf oourse and are grazing on the fairways. “A Jasper man reports that on one day he counted 300 elks on the course.”

However, there is nothing in the rules of golf which prevents you from removing a loose elk which threatens to Interfere with your swing. And presumably there will be a "local rule” for the Jasper Park course whereby a player can clean his ball on a green and remove any elks whicli happen to have adhered to it, * * * • AN ARTIST IN ANGER. Some commotion seems to have been caused in Stratford by a man who approached the grave of Shakespeare, cast down upon it a card bearing the Inscription “Here lies the ghost of Francis Bacon,” hissed out the word "impostor!" and strode rapidly away. A man with a mentality like that might not be unreasonably regarded with genuine admiration—lf not with positive envy. “A contented mind," according to the adage, “is a perpetual feast,” but a really indignant one Is just as much of a pionio to many people. And how wonderfully remover? from all the ordinary, everyday vexations of life is a man who can fli Into a careful premeditated temper cf the sight of a grave of a poet who hak been dead for more than three hundred years! How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable all our other little idle, contemporary sources of Irritation appear 1 What poor, unenterprising mutts they are whose anger needs kindling by an income tax return, Auckland Art Gallery pictures, or an inquiry on the motor registration form of what number of collar one wears. Many there are who object to trees in business thoroughfares, but their feet arc almost on solid and equable earth as compared with a gentleman who hisses with indignation over the grave of the Bard of Avon. * <• * * PUNISHMENT TO FIT THE CRIME. Over In the town of Lowell, Massachusetts, there occurred an outbreak of the juvenile sport of unscrewing the valve caps of cars parked outside houses and deflating the tyres. A watch was kept, and two small boys were caught after they had let the air out of five tyres. The police captain smiled a sinister smile and sent out for five spare wheels and a small hand pump. Having deflated all five tyres, he handed the silly little pump to the silly little hoys and told "them to get busy. . . . It was five o'clock in the aiternoon before even tlac fourth had been InMated. Then the pair of young malofactors were allowed to go homo Since then no air lias been let out of Lowell’s tyres.