The Club Smoking Room

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XLII, Issue 19, 12 May 1909, Page 4

The Club Smoking Room

By

HAVANA.

Pulpit and Pxesa. PARSONS,” began the journalist, “are all right when they talk about things they know something about, but they always go out of their way to attack things of which they are profoundly ignorant. A Presbyterian chap has been lifting up his ■voice against what he calls the boasted power of the Press. He denounces as sinful pride the very harmless vanity of liking to set one’s name in print, which, he reminds us, is ouly printer’s ink. He evidently eonsiders that there is a close and subtle association between the printer’s devil and his Satanic majesty. He objects to a newspaper because it is a business and is conducted with the object of making money. But what would he have? If a newspaper doesn’t pay, who is going to stand the loss? .Some of the best known church papers are excellent money-making concerns, and I have yet to learn that any religious paper has flourished for long at a dead monetary loss. But if he means that all principle is sacrificed for pecuniary gain, then he does not know much about the Press of the Dominion.” Are We Too Serious ?

“I must confess,” assented the padre, •*ithat f think my learned brother has gone a little outside his province in his remarks. I have never known any country where the tone of the papers generally was as high as it is in New Zealand. There are, of course, a few black sheep and some few —but very few > —papers might reasonably be objected to. But we have every cause to be thankful that sensational yellow press journalism has as yet obtained no footing amongst us. Public men are criticised on public grounds, but there is no prying into their private life. The great curse of journalism in some parts of America is that home privacy is not respected, and every little detail of a public man’s life is dragged into the full glare of publicity. This keeps many good men back from offering their services to the State, and the whole country suffers in consequence. If there is any fault to be found with our papers, I should say that it lay rather in their over-seriousness than in their lack of moral fibre. .Some of the leading articles in small country journals strike one as being a trifle pompous in tone, but their morality is always unexceptionable, and their advice excellent, even if the crowned heads of Europe do not always follow the suggestions offered for their guidance by the Wooloomidgee Advocate, with which has been incorporated its erstwhile rival the [Wooloomidgee Mirror.”

The Golden Age. “Our lack of humour,” replied the cynic, “arises from our lack of any sense of proportion. We are quite isolated out here, and local events are apt to assume undue importance in our eyes. Then, again, we have solved so many problems by our various legislative measures and enactments that we lose patience with older countries still pottering along with antiquated methods, and we give them a little wholesome and well-meant advice. That they don’t always take it is their own fault and their own loss. The world would be a small Paradise if it would give effect to the different resolutions proposed by our various Labour Councils alone. A resolution wa.s passed unanimously calling on the State to abolitfli disease; another good idea was that all trains and trams and steamers should be free; a third suggestion was to the effect that we should not be called upon to pay away our hard-earned money to storekeepers er landlords. Yet the

powers that be have so far ignored these really excellent suggestions, goodness only knows why. If we don’t wake up and do something startling very soon, we shall be surpassed by .the State of Maine, •where the legislators are inaugurating a career of progressive legislation by introducing a bill for' taxing those who are irreclaimable bachelors.” Three Proposals. “An excellent and truly praiseworthy idea,” remarked the benedict. “ The modern idea of taxation is to tax luxuries, and if being a bachelor is'nt a luxury then I don’t know what is. Men are showing an increased disinclination to

get married, and the well-to-do classes are worse than any other. When a man is fairly well off, and fully able to support a wife, he seems less disposed to enter the bonds of matrimony than his poorer brother. I see that the proposed bill exempts men who have made three reasonable offers to three different women, or who have made three proposals to the same woman. I suppose they have to get a certificate, duly signed and attested, showing that they have made the

statutory number of proposals. All men over thirty are liable to be taxed unless they are actually inmates of a lunatic asylum. There is a certain grim humour about this last clause that betrays the hand of the married man who reflects sadly on his own idiocy in having iven up his freedom.” The Decay of Romance. “ The fact that it should be necessary to compel men to marry under threat of a substantial fine,” said the dominie, “ goes far to remove the last shred of that romance that is popularly supposed to cling to things matrimonial. It savours of giving men a choice of evils—the tax levied by the State or the tax of supporting a wife. I believe the present tendency towards celibacy on the part of the upper and the middle classes is due to the lower idea of duty prevalent amongst both men and women. We think to much of the pleasures of life and too little of its responsibilities. A man hesitates

to sacrifice his freedom, and a woman thinks more of positon and of money than of love. I don’t know why it is, but we seem to be losing our habits of self-reliance. We want to throw all our burdens on someone else. The smart society mamma hands her children over to governesses and servants, the working class mother hands hei’ children over to the State. As a result we have to deplore that lack of parental control that is one of the most marked features Of our day.”

Too Many Dreadnoughts. “ As a means of raising revenue," put in the M.P., “a tax on bachelors should be a pronounced success, but as a means of promoting matrimony it would probably be a gigantic failure. Still, the great question of the present day is how to find new sources of revenue for our national exchequer. Germany, France and England are all face to face with large deficits, and the proposed increase in taxation recently announced in these countries have not been very enthusiastically) received. It really seems as if some halt! ■win have to be called soon in the building of armaments. The race to build Dreadnoughts cannot go on for ever, and works of social reform are being seriously hampered by our enormous expenditure on armies and navies. Surely 18 should be possible for England and America to come to some understanding that would enable them to unite their fleets, and so offer to the world a superiority) that would defy all competition. Unless

this is done the burden of taxation may] become heavier than we can bear, and national bankruptcy may result.”