ARTIFICIAL NECESSARIES.

Dominion, Volume 5, Issue 1357, 7 February 1912, Page 4

ARTIFICIAL NECESSARIES.

Of course we are all pleased to b:; able to ride again in a tram-ear, and yet a good many AVellington people have been discovering during the last jew days that there are advantages in walking. It lias saved them a little money, mid secured them other savings which cannot be measured in cash. _ It has meant spending more time ill getting about, but the time would have bad to be spent somehow, and it might not have been better spent. The saying that time is money is only half true; time may be turned into wealth, or into what Ri-skin called "illth." It has to be turned into something—every minute of it. How, then, is the average citizen spending during this week that balance of tinie which represents the difference between riding and walking? He has had command of it every day for years; it was taken away from him for a few days, and now it has been given back. It is hot very much every day—for we are thinking of the man with the penny or twopenny ride, not the distant suburban, whose case is different—but in the course of a year it amounts to a great deal oi time, and so when the thousands of citizens in like case are brought into account, the aggregate must run up to months or perhaps years within a single round of the seasons. Is this aggregate of the minutes which people save by being carried like parcels, instead of walking like men, spent any better to-day than when it was absorbed in thousands of separate individual walks from Thorndon, Halaitai. Oriental Bay, and elsewhere, into the city ? Does the average citizen give it to business? Probably not, in this country of regulated hours. He most likely spends it at home. Perhaps lie sits longer over his meals, in which case he may be. either advantaged by more thorough mastication of his food, or injured by a superfluous helping of pudding. The minutes may bo priven to happy converse in the family circle, and games with his children, or he may quarrel with everybody in reach. He may smoke an extra pipe, which may or may not be beneficial. He may read, and, according to what and how he reads, the result, in a large sense of the words, is wealth or illth. Obviously, the'whole question depends upon what kind of man he is. But even if he lays out the minutes in health, happiness, and wisdom for himself and family, it must not be forgotten that those minutes have cost him pennies, and with those pennies all sorts of fine things could have been done.

lieally, it is hard to say whether from the point of view of the people of the city and inner suburbs, the trams are a means of economy or of waste, whether they do in the main build up and beautify tho social life or wear it down and bedraggle it. Some may say that the digestive benefits of walking turn the scale against the cars, but the gastric functions are not helped by trudging when one is over-tired/ And on" the micstion of exercise it;would be unfair to ignore the feats of agility and balance performed in mounting, traversing, and leaving the Cars, or the acrobatic displays of the straphanger when the sudden starting or stopping of a car takes him unawares. All these exertions must be extremely good for the liver. But we can think of no redeeming virtue in the noise of the trams. That vile sequence of roarings, groanings, sereechings, and clangings must be a sore infliction even to the dullest nerves. The sound of the first few cars after a strike may seem like peaceful and joyful music, but soon, too soon, that effect is past. Inquiries like these might be carried on to infinity, and still the moral would be that the cars are good for those who use them well, On the whole, they are doubtless an economy, otherwise man, who is an animal, seeking always to attain his desires at the least expenditure of energy, would not have them in all his cities and bo so perturbed when he Cannot get his usual pennyworth of transportation. By simply enabling men to live a few miles from their work— a boon that needs no praising—they set up a new arrangement of population and industry, and when they ston, all the local scheme of things is thrown away. It is discovered that they have become a necessary. And every artificial necessary is n. thing to be grumbled at, even while we cling to it.