Social Moods.

Alexandra Herald and Central Otago Gazette, Issue 402, 21 January 1904, Page 2

Social Moods.

MUSING. churches are fall of brasses, mnW and our streets of statues, com■Qsfa memorating persons who who are supposed to have conferred benefits on their fellow-men. Let us assume that these persons, one and all, richly deserved to be held in grateful remembrance. But why do we not also commemorate those wretches who have helped to make life more difficult than it would have been had they never existed. We ought to have brasses of execration and statues of infamy, the sight of which would cause the young to avoid the crimes of those thus commemorated. For example, the man who invented steam-heating thoroughly deserves a monument of execration. It might take the form of a port ait st&tue of the offesdar, Heated on a bed of live ocals, and on the padestal should be the inscription, ' To the everlasting infamy Of John Doe, the inventor of steam-heating, • He now suffers as he has mad-? others suffer.' In St. Paul's there should be an enormous brass plate inscribed,' To the infamy of Richard Roe, the loudestvoiced milkman in London. Let us be thankful that there is no water where he now is.' And in the Abbey we might have a marble group representing the inventor of the hand-organ, with his instrument and his monkey. Those who should gaze at this and read below it the legend,' He did what evil he could, kind stranger. Curse him as you pass on your way!' If this scheme should ever beeome popular, as it surely will when people grasp the justice of the idea, I shall be prepared to contribute to a statue commemorating the infamy of two or three publishers, though, of course, I shall wait till they have gone to their own place, for no statues of any kind should be erected to the memory, of living persons. It is interesting, to listen to the cyclist as he expresses the opinion that no man ought to be allowed to drive a motor oar. This is precisely the opinion he used to express concerning bicycles—before he became a cyclißt himself. There is no doubt that when the cyclist hears a motor car coming up furiously behind him, and remembers that motor cars have a trick of getting out of control, and that motor car driver 8 are frequently utterly reckless, be trembles on his saddle, and wishes that the motor oar had never been invented. But there is another side to the matter. All cyclists have svffered fro'm the butcher beys and milkmen and bakers who .drive furiously around the wrong corners and smash cycles and cyclist with trident joy." Rwently a motor ear struck

a butober's cart that," as usual, wa* coming- round the wrong ooraesfe The butcher boy : was,' instantly killed, and thereiwas--aVßhoiirer of meat aid unjust cats, of the neighbourhood,

which brought happiness, and Bußlequent indigestion to scores of feline interiors. Again; and Btallimore^;»e<!en|Jyiammeter /car ran-down a baker's "cart. -'There was |an instant eruption of bread. Hundreds of loaves shot up into the air, and fell within a radius of fall; forty rods. The occurrenoe happened in a poor neighbourhood, an d the hungry ones who captured the.loaves knew how the Israelites felt s ;jrhen mamma first rained upon them, and | ; had f not* yet lost -the ohar m of novelty, which we are told that ib lost after it had been an exclusive article of diet' for some twenty years. Best of fell, the baker was killed; and his remains were gathered in hia own bread-basket. These incidents teach us that although the motor oar may have its disadvantages, from a cycling point of view, it is avenging, the wrongs of the cyclist upon the butcher and the baker. In all probability the motor car will soon kill a milkman, after which all doubt as to its utility <w%ll vanish.—W. L Alden.