Rural Advertising.

Press, Volume LXVI, Issue 20092, 22 November 1930, Page 14

Rural Advertising.

The four doctors who were prosecuted in Dunedin recently for destroying an advertising sign in the Cromwell Gorge have taken the advice of the Magistrate to appeal to a different tribunal. "We print an appeal from them to-day, addressed not only to the " authorities concerned" but to " all " lovers of New Zealand " who would resist the desecration of the country- " side before it becomes too late." Their own piece of resistance cost them, it will be remembered, five pounds each, aad a. degree of notoriety which they must all have found deeply embar-

rassing. Tet they return to the attack, in spite of their years and dignity, and come again into the glare of publicity, though they are all grave professional men to trliora demagogic tricks are anathema. That in itself would commend their appeal to the earnest attention of our readers. But the fact of course is that we have been saying everything the Dunedin doctors say for many years, and know, as they know, that "the evil continues only because the public go on "paying for the spolia- " tion of their country," and when they occasionally pause and reflect, find that the Government itself is the gravest offender. >*or does it make the situation any more tolerable that we have not yet drifted so far in New Zealand as business has been allowed to go in older and more populous countries. It would be altogether shocking if we had already done to our semi-wild landscape what has been done on the outskirts of some of the business centres of England and America. We have not had time to do that; but we have also not yet begun to undo our work, as they have in those places. Perhaps the earnestness of the appeal from Dunedin, added to the circumstances in which it has been made, will have the effect of bringing the evil so prominently before travellers during the approaching summer that legislation will either be unnecessary when Parliament next meets, or will have been so prepared for that it will meet with no resistance.