Tin-Hares

Press, Volume LXIII, Issue 19179, 9 December 1927, Page 8

Tin-Hares

i On the ground that it " would encour- " age gambling," in a country in which everybody old and young gambles, and !"serve no useful national purpose" j among a people who are not encouraged to have national purposes, the Dictator of Spain has forbidden mechanicalhare racing.. He has also made some further excuse that tin-hares would be "detrimental to the sport of hunting "the hare with greyhounds," which almost suggests that he thinks meohanical hares race one another. And now, in the latest issue of the Economist, we are told of the pitfalls that await overeager promoters. Although it is careful to tell us (but only in its last paragraph) that it does not believe that "because the public arc going to the " dogs in one sense, the country is goring to the dogs in the other," the Economist is afraid that "the new "craze will inevitably bring forth, as "every new craze always does, and "always will, plenty of bubble com"panies in which thousands of honest " but gullible folk will lose the savings " that they have laboriously amassed." Over seventy companies have already been registered, mainly, the Economist thinks, on the principle that if dogracing pays in London and Manchester it will pay anywhere. It even speaks of one company which is proposing to construct a course with a grandstand to bold twenty thousand people on the outskirts of a town "whose total, popu- " lation, men, women, and children, if " all were present at the same moment, " would barely fill the seats to be pro"vided," and although it does not suggest 'that all the new greyhound flotations are frauds, and all the directors thieves, it is worried because a new way has been found, "in that field which of " all others most attracts Englishmen," for the " financial shares " to lay hold of the unwary.. If greyhounds would not " pursue a new thing " there would be no danger, but they have shown themselves as eager to do so as are mankind, and perhaps with a smaller excuse. Unfortunately, also, mankind's pursuit of novelty is not, like the Athenian's of old, a comparatively calm affair, but a mad fever heightened by Press, photography, cinema, cable, and wireless, so that the "working multi"tudes of the industrial world" are quite unable to resist the temptation to see the " spectacle of the fleetest of dogs "giving a cameo reproduction of the "race of modern life." This is a rather disturbing mass of objections to be piled on top of the fiercer objections of the moralists, who have not so far been greatly touched by the humanitarian consideration that tin-hares suffer no palpitations. But if we have to do without mechanical hares we shall not be much worse off than we are now, and if, on the other hand, we brave the Puritans, it will be better for us rather than worse that we have seen the Economist "hoping (rather against

"Lope) that this particular phase of "the pursuit of a new thing will not "cost the investing public very " dearly.''