NOTES OF THE DAY

Dominion, Volume 13, Issue 87, 7 January 1920, Page 6

NOTES OF THE DAY

The most formidable embodiment of naval power seen in these waters is the Dominion's H.M.S. New Zealand. With the picture in one's mind's-cye of hci' majestically floating on the waters of the harbour as wo saw her a few months back it comes as a shock to pick up the latest English newspapers and find the Indomitable—very nearly a sister-ship—down" for sale to the ship-breakers as obsolete. _ Tfl.ic Indomitable wa-s launched in March, 1907, tho New Zealand in 1911; the differences in the displacement, horse-power, armament, and speed of the two ships are not very marked. The Indomitable, and the Invincible and Inflexible, which sent voXSrafc and his squadron to the. bottom, were of one class, and the Indefatigable, New Zealand, and Australia of the next. With the Indomitable now on the scrap-heap the New Zealand's turn can hardly be more than four or five years'away. A few years back the life of a capital ship was usually estimated at twenty years. The Indomitable has gone for good at twelve years, and all capital ships over seven years of age are now in the reserve. How much will be left of New Zealand's battlecruiser when the Public Debt Extinction Act has paid for it in 1985 J

Nearly one-half the children of New Zealand reach the ago of fourteen and lenvc school without having passed the sixth standard, and a great many do not oven pass the fifth standard. About one-third of the school children of the Dominion are taught in country schools with one or two teachers, and nearly all .these teachers are untrained and uncertificatecl._ Those New Zealanders who pride themselves that New Zealand loads the earth should take these facts to heart. They will find them set out, with much more food for reflection, in the 1018 report o'f the Education Department. It is pleasant to record that Hie Teach-; ers' Parliament has set up a committee which 'is to suggest means for continuing and improving the education of country children. That committee will perform a public service of importance if it goes 'thoroughly into the problem. The first thing is to drive home the facts into the public consciousness.

At first glance the German submarine campaign docs • not boar much relation to the physique of the tens of thousands of London slum children who swarmed to bathe in the Serpentine last summer. : Yet the connection was close and rail enough. The submarine campaign brought a ( food shortage*. The food shortage brought rationing. The rationing meant that while nobody got too much practically everybody got enough. London's children throughout the war were hotter fed than over before. The medical correspondent of the ■London Times, writing last year of these boys, said:—"They are bigger, better developed, stronger ouilt, harder. They look as if someone who recognised their potential value ns men had been feeding them." This was what rationing did for the part of the population that formerly did not get enough to cat. Yesterday we were told in the cable pews of what rationing has done for those who formerly got too much. It has kept them out of their graves. Surplus fat has been eliminated, and thousands of people rejuvenated. A system of rationing in New Zealand would do wonders, if it made a day's work for certain, classes of office people something more than filling in the intervals (between breakfast and morning tea, morning tea and lunch, lunch and afternoon tea, and afternoon tea and as much before five as seems decent.

Profiteering at the fountain-head was attacked with vigour by a complainant before an English profiteering; committee a few weeks back. The Oxford Committee on its first assembly was requested by Dn. Edwin Cannan, M.A., to consider the fact that a currency note which cost loss than a penny to produce, iv.is being sold 1 for £l. He asked the committee to demand tho immediate prosecution of the Chancellor of' the Exchequer for making the unreasonable profit of 23,900 per

cent, on (ho sale of £l currency notes, and half that amount on the 10s. notes. If the committee merely attempted to prevent high prices here and there without attempting' to cut off one of the souri'-x of supply of paper-money which was devastating Europe and threatening civilisation they would, he contended, be like Mrs. Pautixgton; trying to sweep back the Atlantic Ocean with a broom. Tt is sad to record that the doctor's complaint was dismissed. We understand that as a matter of fact large new works for printing stili greater quantities of English Treasury notes are. being erected near London. There are legends that in some South American republics the issue of paper-money utyd only to cease, when there was no longer any profit in printing it, and dollar notes and shaving-paper stood on one level. It is to r>c hoped that the career of Europe's paper currency clown the same ?' ; - pery slope may be checked before that stage has been reached.