The Real Simple Life.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XLIX, Issue 21, 21 May 1913, Page 8

The Real Simple Life .

TWO DANGEROUS RULES We have tried earnestly and with humble and a contrite heart to undetj stand some of the initial complexities oS the simple life, and we retire from field, beaten, baffled, humiliated. How’, we have yearned for the simple life, prayed for it, worked for it. (But now ip is all over. Henceforth we shall do as we —— please. j It is the advice to wives that has been issued by the Simple Life Association that has finished ns. It seems a pretty underhand trick to sic our Wives mi to ns, and just as we were trying to, be good. And with such counsel as this, too. Here is the first of three rules: “Teach your husband to abstain front meat and intoxicating drink.” Well I guess not. Nut cutlets for dinner, flanked with protied potatoes, and followed; by uric-acid-free wholemeal marmalade; role. And a glass of apple juice. Anq this villainy is supposed to promote the simple life! Now we are trying to be calm,' judicial, equable, but if any attempt is made to foist this atrocity upon-us after a hard day’s work there will be a pyrotechnic display of the simple life that will probably lead to police remonstrances. And just consider the second of these, rules. “Receive- him after absence 'with, tact.” There are more divorces due io conjugal “tact” than all other caused put together. If there is anything that arouses a man to blind and paralytig fury it is a display of tact. Now if these simple life people had advised the woman to tell her husband exactly what she thought of him, and in that variety of unstudied language that arises unbidden to the lips in moments of emotional inspiration, they would not only have helped the sacred cause of domes--tic harmony, but they would have proved that they really do know something of the simple life. Can’t they understand that the simple life means living withe out rules and not with rules, that it means acting without premeditation instead of by system? Can't they understand that the simple life means doing what you please within the limits of decency, doing it -when you please and how you please? There is. no simplicity in doing something that you don’t want to do merely because you are idiot enough to believe that it is good for you. That is not simplicity. It is complexity, elaboration, intricacy. If I feel that I should like a little midnight Repast in a downtown restaurant with pate dp foie gras and some of those cunning liquids favoured by civilization I am leading the simple life when I do tliesff things. But if 1 eat bran, not for liking bran, and because I believe it to bo good for me, I am not leading the simply life at all, but the complex, intricate, and elaborate life. Therefore let ufi lead henceforth the really simple life. It is the only life of true virtue, an<l therefore the only truly happy life. Let ns eat ajid drink whatever we please, so that our days may be long in the land. And if our wives should attempt to teach us to “abstain from meat,” if they should attempt the slightest display the "tact” upon any occasion whatsoever, we will remember our new and noble principles and we will act toward them with that elemental simplicity that; we have made the guiding star <Jf Our lives.—“ San Francisco Argonaut.”