Topics of the Week.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XXVIII, Issue XVI, 19 April 1902, Page 730

Topics of the Week.

The Vacant Chair. “Good-bye, good-bye!” Tt has been shouted in the cities and re-eehoed in the recesses of the bush, for he is gone. Of course, 1 refer to the Premier, for - of whom else could 1 speak in these terms? And to explain so much is quite unnecessary, for of what departure have we been speaking and thinking so much these weeks past as the going away of Mr Seddon? indeed we have spoken of it so much that one would almost fear his absence from the colony must leave a void this world ean never fill. He hath bestrode the country like a colossus so long and bulked so prominently in the public eye that the outlook must look waste and bare without him. We have been so used to those six letters, S-e-d-d-o-n, staring at us from every newspaper, in telegrams, and paragraphs and columnar speeches, and to hear of his sayings and doings from early morn to dewy eve up to the moment of hi® departure that this sudden cessation of Seddonian news will seem strange. No doubt arrangements have been made for retrospective information touching what he did and said before he left, so that the papers need not be absolutely bare of the familiar name till it again comes to us from South Africa on the heavy laden cable. But no such device nor all the resources of a dozen cables ean make up for the absence of that personality which when in New Zealand was omnipresent. However, we must- try to get along- without him for a little. Great Britain did without Gladstone and Germany without Bismarck. Probably, before the time comes for his return, if indeed he {should return—momentous question of the hour!—we may have even become quite reconciled to our loss, an attitude it might not be amiss to cultivate in anticipation of his not coming back. That thought may possibly have occurred to Mr Seddon himself, for the greatest of us have our moments of misgiving, and it would certainly not be the pleasantest of reflections to ruminate on the voyage to Africa. But, with his statesmanlike genius the Premier has made as perfect provision against that contingency as he well could. There is no. one in the Cabinet save Sir Joseph Ward who could by any flight of fancy be conceived as usurping, or trying to usurp, the throne when the king- is away. Had they been chosen with an eye to that possibility only there could not have been a. better selection." And in the case of Sir Joseph loyalty prevents the same contingency occurring. Yet while the latter, like a true liegeman, will doubtless hold the fort for his chief, public opinion and public affection, so fickle, are-not to be so easily controlled. The Seddonian traditions are pretty well rooted in the land, but like political plants generally they want careful tending to keep them flourishing. "It is nothing- uncommon in the Old Country to see a beautiful Liberal garden degenerate into a Conservative wilderness. Wanting- the stimulating sound of his voice, and tho magnetism of his august, presence, some may easily fall away from the faith, especially when the false prophets of the Opposition get a-preaeh-Ing among them. O O O o o A Distinction, But No Difference. The Federal Postmaster on the other side is quite unexpectedly carrying his crusade against gambling to its logical extremity. Not merely Tattersall’s, that has already been under the ban of all the States save Tasmania, is to suffer, but all letters relating to bookmakers, chureli basaars, raffles and art unions are to be Indiscriminately classed together in the Index Expurgatorius of the Federal Post Office. The effect of such a determination is bound to be most disconcerting in many quarters. The prohibition of Tattersall’s has the approval of a very considerable section of people in the Commonwealth,

who regard the institution an somewhat on all fours with the Casino at Monte Carlo. But they have certainly never been accustomed to look on art unions and raffles and chureh bazaars with the same eye. To take a ticket in Tattersall’s was gambling pure and simple; to take a ticket in a church bazaar, a raffle or an art union was—• well, everyone did it, you know; and the thing was a trifle, and the churches favoured it, and it was generally for a good cause. Perhaps the Federal Postmaster, as a private citizen, found these popular reasons suffice him for making fish of one and flesh of The other, but as a Government official he had to face the true logic of the position, and here's the result. He is fairly- between the horns of the dilemma. If he puts the machinery of the law in operation against Tattersall’s, and .confiscates the letters of its clients or refuses to forward them, he feels that to be logical ne must do ditto with the multitudinous correspondence which the promoters of chureh bazaars, lotteries, raffles, art unions and those interested in the same depend on the post office to transmit. And if he does so then he inevitably comes into violent conflict with a hundred other interests much more powerful than Tattersall’s. The eminently respectable section of the community- which looks askance at races, and brackets the bookmaker with the spieler, will rise up indignantly, with the church at their head it may be, and protest. How many reputable enterprises may not be awaiting a successful art union to make them go? How many widows and orphans may not be looking for their daily- bread to the raffle of the departed father’s watch, the sewing machine, the little bit of jewellery, or the old piano? How many churches may be depending on a bazaar for the temporary salvation a coat of paint w-ould bring? Nay, the existence of the place as a centre of spiritual life, and the retention of the clergyman as a guide and comforter and friend may also hang on the same thing. The difficulties, besetting the position are plain enough, you see, and the real origin of these difficulties is not less apparent. It all comes of the Australian passion for gambling, of which Tattersall’s and art unions and church bazaars are quite as much the outcome as they are the cause. If we had not been a gambling. people there w-ould have been no Tattersall’s or chureh bazaars to vex the Federal Postmaster. Now, when he sets himself to tackle the first, he has to consider how much its suppression may- encourage the others, unless lie suppresses them too. And in dealing impartially he may- evoke such an opposition as will make it impossible to touch any of them. o o o o o

The Litile White Slaves of Taranaki.

We townsfolk are wonderfully conservative in our views of country life. The same pictures of rural bliss which the poets painted three thousand years ago pass current to-day without question. The same poetic veil that drapes the far-away Arcadian valleys anti Dorian shepherds even still hangs between us and the agricultural and pastoral life of the present time. We nearly always think as we sing of “the merry ploughboy whistling o’er the lea,’’ and “the careless shepherd tending his silly sheep,” as if they were representatives of our rural population, when, as a fact, sweating ploughboy and swearing shepherd might more nearly describe them. But we have got to associate freedom from care and worry such as the town can never give with the country and its surroundings, and that is certainly why so many- of us yearn for the simple life on the land. The farmer is still to us the rosy, happy individual, whether wool is at high or low prices, and not even the machinations of flour trusts can affect the independence of the jolly millers who can find time to sing like their

prototype of the river Dee. Least of all, ein you think of the green fields as the home of any but the happiest of children. Juvenile misery may be rife in the dim, dirty city slums, but whoever fancies the country children doing much else than paddling in the burn or making daisy chains? It comes as a shock then # to read, as we did the other day, how very- different is the real state of affairs in our own Taranaki—comes as a shock to those who have always dwelt on the ideal state. There it appears that in some districts the poor little children are literally the slaves of the milk pail as soon as they are able to milk a cow. Instances are given of girls of twelve milking six cows morning and evening. and walking four miles to school, and boys of the same age milking more than twice that number, and then riding three miles to school. And this bare statement hardly reveals to townsfolk the aggravated character of the drudgery which such work entails. To milk these eows and travel that distance to school does not merely- mean very hard physical work, but a sacrifice of sleep which neither the bodies nor brains of these little folk can afford. Few people know the grinding exigencies of the modern dairy. It isn’t like when pretty Kittv milked her one or two cows, and leisurely tripped in from the meadow to the dairy with her pail, stopping to ehat with Dick on the way. Kitty and Diek nowadays are in the inexorable grip of the factory system, which has made them the slaves of the separator as surely as the poor town children were made The slaves of the power loom. Taranaki is a great factory for butter just as Lancashire is a great factory for calicoes, and just as it has been the aim of the Lancashire parent to get his children fit for the loom so in too many cases it is the chief aim of the Taranaki dairy-farmer to get his youngsters broken to the milk pail. In the eyes of scores of settlers there the worth of a child is measured by the quarts of milk he or she can drain from the cow in a given time. Education beyond what you get at the bail becomes a secondary- cotisi deration. The children are turned out of bed in the grey of morning, or even while it is still dark-, to milk the cows; breakfast is hurried through, for the milk has to be taken to the creamery; school follows, but * what can the weary, sleepy, little heads take in of spelling and arithmetic? Then it’s home again, and back to the slavery of the milk pail. Under such a regime Taranaki may- indeed wax great in butter, ■but what about her brains? She must have a care for the latter, which she must not forget are of much more consequence, after all, than many hundredweights of “prime factory,” o o o -o -o The Hfippy fUarn’et?, Next Tuesday the various suburban blocks of land, near to Auckland, acquired by the Government, and cut up into sections for workmen’s homes, will be open for selectors, and we shall then have an opportunity of judging to what extent the desire to become possessed of a little place of their own in the country is prevalent among the city workers. The blocks, of which there are five, have been picturesquely named after South African generals, familiar in our mouths as household words, and arc to be suggestively sty-led hamlets —the Kitchener Hamlet, the Plumer Hamlet, and so on. They are situated at no great distance from the city, with which coiymunication will be' fairly rapid for New Zealand railways, and wonderfull cheap. The section's vary in area of from one to four acres, and the land is good enough to make excellent garden ground, provided plenty of elbowgrease is put into it. On paper the hamlets look inviting places, and fanciful folks have little difficulty in planting them with happy and prosperous homes, surrounded by smiling gardens. I know myself that my latent rural instincts have been strongly stirred by merely glancing at the plans of these estates with their rectangular subdivisions, and have half thought of throwing down the pen and taking up the spade instead, or at least of dividing my attention between the two. I ques-

tion, however, whether I would bo eligible as an applicant; and in other moments I question whether I would be a success if I got a selection. After all, we talk a great deal of insincere sentiment about the happiness of living in commune with nature, and think a good deal of insincere sentiment. “My dear fellow,” says the man about town, who never gets home till just on midnight, “ why do we slave in this wretched hole of a town when we might be breathing the pure country air and leading a natural existence on the land?” Well, why? In nine cases out of ten the answer to such a query is: “ Because you prefer the streets to the fields, old man,” and you might add, “ the glare of the gaslights to the glory of the sunrise.” These are the sort of individuals who, put upon the land, would furnish excellent copy for our comic artist. I wonder whether among the genuine working class there are not many as unsuited for the suburban plots; whether, indeed, the great majority of our town workers are not unsuited. To judge by the scant attention scores of workmen’s cottage gardens get from their tenants, there is not much love wasted between the worker and the land. But a sense of proprietorship will often effect miracles, and many who promise poorly as farmers when confined to the empty ground space of a 33ft x 100 allotment in an uninteresting town street, might with a few acres at their disposal and the independence it holds in store for them, become quite other men- However, as to the desire that exists towards the country, the competition for these hamlets will tell ns somewhat. o O O O ° Rhodes the Idealist The late Cecil Rhodes was an ideal- ' ist first, and an Imperialist afterward. While he lived, however, it was by his secondary characteristic that we knew him; He was a silent man rather, and did not wear his ideals on his sleeve for every daw of a critic to peck at. Well that he did not, for while it was just able to appreciate his Imperiailism, the world would never have been able to appreciate his itleailisms, While he was alive. Not that it can be said to appreciate them now he- is gone. Even Mr Stead confesses that the great man’s political will is idealistic beyond comprehension; but the wonderful generosity of soul towards the race which death has revealed could not but elicit some return from us, if only in the shape of a little more patience with ideals that otherwise we would not entertain for a moment. The average man, I am afraid, has a fine contempt for idealists, which may perhaps be a little disturbed by the discovery that the South' African multi-millionaire was an idealist of idealists. I shall bo glad if it is so. The average man—and the world is composed of average men, is it not?—takes upon himself to limit 'the scope of the term “practical,” and the limit is the standard of his own commonplaceness. Let anyone suggest anything beyond that and average opinion declares him an unpractical dreamer. Lucky for the world that there have been men who would not accept the definition, for . to them, literally as well as metaphorically, do we owe a new heaven and a new earth. But for them, the so-called unpractical ones of their day and generation, we should still have been Jiving in our caves, and the Maoris would have been in undisputed possession of this land. Nay, 'there would have been no one in possession, of it, for who were the Arawa voyagers but the “unpractical” section of the population of Hawaiki?