A FEW INCHES OF PLAIN ENGLISH.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XV, Issue XIX, 9 November 1895, Page 596

A FEW INCHES OF PLAIN ENGLISH.

Nowadays men are doing all sorts of wonders by means of electricity, both in mechanics and in chemistry. I see by the papers that they expect to be able to produce real diamonds by it. Perhaps they may ; marvels never cease. But we will wait till they do before we crow over that job. Up to this time, anyway, everything that is both valuable and useful is the fruit of hard work. E u en diamonds are mostly got out of rocky mines. And, within reasonable limits, it is good for us to have to work. Ten shillings honestly earned is better for a man than twenty in the shape of a legacy.

. The best condition of things for any country would be when fair wages could be earned straight along, without loss or deduction for any reason. But in the present aspect of human affairs this is impossible. Whose fault it is we cannot now discuss.

One source of loss, however, is plain enough, and some remedy for it ought to be found. In England and Wales every working man averages ten days of illness per year, making the total loss of wages from this cause about £16,000,000 a year. We are talking of the average, yon see. But inasmuch as all working-men are not ill every year, this average does not fairly show the suffering and loss of those who are ill. In any given year many will lose no time at all, while others may lose individually from ten days to six months each. No charity, no savings, no income from clubs, etc., can make up for this—even in money alone to say nothing of the pain and the misery. Alluding to an experience of his in 1888 Mr George Lagdon says, ‘ I had to give up my work.’ How this came to pass he tells us in a letter dated from bis home in White House Road. Stebbing, near Dunmow, August 24, 1892. He had no inherited disease or weakness, so far as he knew, and was always strong and well up to April of that year—lBBB. Then his strength and energy began to leave him. He felt tired, not as from work, but as from power gone out of him through some bodily failure. He sat down to his meals, but not with his old eagerness and relish. There was a nasty copper-like taste in his mouth, his teeth and tongue were covered with slime, and his throat clogged with a kind of thick phlegm, difficult to 'hawk up’ and eject. He also speaks of a nagging pain in the stomach, flatulency, and much palpitation of the heart as having been among his symptoms. As the ailment—whatever it was—progressed he began to have a backing cough which, he says, seemed as if it must shake him to pieces. He could scarcely sleep on account of it. One of the most alarming features of his illness, how-

ever, were the night sweats, for the reason that they showed the existence of a source of weakness which must soon, unless arrested, end in total prostration. In fact he was obliged to give up his work altogether. To him—as to any once active man —this was like being buried alive. One doctor whom Mr Lagdon consulted said he was consumptive, and it did indeed look that way. ‘ For twelve weeks,’ he says, • I went on like this, getting weaker and weaker, and having reason to believe that it would end in my taking the one journey from which no traveller returns. 'lt was now July—summer time, when life to the healthy is so pleasant and full of hope. At this time my sister in-law got from Mr Linsells (Stebbing) a medicine that I bad not tried yet. After having tried one bottle I felt better, and when I had used the second I was cured, and have not lost an hour’s work since.' The reader will notice that between the date of his taking this medicine and the date of his letter there is an interval of four years. We may, therefore, infer that bis cure was real and permanent. The medicine, by the way, was Mother Seigel’s Curative Syrup. It is not likely he will forget its name nor what it did for him. His disease was indigestion and dyspepsia, the deadly enemy of every labouring man or woman under the sun. no matter what they work at or work with— hands, brains, or both.

Is it necessary to draw a ' moral ’—schoolbook style—from these facts? No, it is not. We have talked plain English, and that is enough.