TOPICS OF THE DAY.

Waikato Times, Volume 114, Issue 19017, 7 August 1933, Page 6

TOPICS OF THE DAY.

China's Temperamental River, The great Yellow River is believed to be getting ready to change its channel again, states an overseas oxcliange, It has done that eleven times in the course of 2500 years ef recorded history, The last time was 81 years ago, when it veered sharply north to empty into the Gulf of Po, 400 miles above its former embouchure. It is now expected to get back into its old channel. In the process, it is feared that a vast destruction of life and property may take place. The dismal economic theory now current about a finished and surfeited world with no outlet for man’s productive energies might give a thought to the Yellow River. Merely to establish that stream once for all in its way of life would mean a market for a vast amount of engineering leadership and material. Slow, but Safe. Sometimes there is an advantage in the lack of rapid communications between distant places, like the two shores of the Atlantic Ocean, comments the New York Times. The American Colonies in their dealing with the British crown derived much comfort from the fact that an official exchange of letters with London took perhaps six months. A Colonial Legislature would pass a law to go immediately into effect. Six months later would come an order from London nullifying the law. The Legislature would then re-enact substantially the same law with technical changes and put it immediately into effect. Six months later another royal veto would arrive. In this way the Colonies managed to have things considerably their own way. How pleasant it would he to-day for an American delegate at a foreign capital to know that it would take at least a couple of weeks for his own government to make hjm look foolish. To this man’s possibly jaundiced eyes transatlantic cables and wireless are not an unmixed blessing. Failures of a Generation. “It would almost soem that in the public opinion the bigger (he theft the less the moral turpitude,” said Ur. J. Angell, president of Yale University, in a recent graduation address. “That the soil in j some men’s souls is too mean and thin to produce such a crop of unselfish impulses as many men are ready to give is a tragic but indubitable fact of human nature. “Certainly tlie generation to which T belong lias made a horrible mess of things, and we pass on shamefacedly to yours the tnsk of rescuing humanity from its woes, hoping that from our grotesque and pathetic blunders you may learn wisdom and live.”