NOTES OF THE DAY
■ It is a far cry now to the days when a fresh in the Htttt River put large areas of Petone ancl the Lower Hutt under water. Having conquered the [ Hood menace, the Hutt River Board . now proposes to embark on a more i ambitions scheme. By the expenditure of £9000, mainly on a dredge, 1 the board plans to control and '. deepen the river channel, and at the ; same time to produce for sale at a cost of a shilling per cubic yard some hundreds of yards of gravel per day. With an output of only 150 cubic yards per day, sold at 2s. 6d. a yard, it is claimed by the chairman of the board that a daily profit of over £12 will accrue. On these figures the enterprise seems a . thoroughly sound one for the ratepayers, and particularly so in view of the success of the board's undertakings in the past. The one thing that emerges in the news from Russia is the failure of the efforts to extirpate the LeninTrotsicy regime by military force. Admiral Kolchak in Siberia, General Uenikin in the south-cast, and General Yudenitch in the north, have each in turn been hailed as conquerors, but in all these quarters the 1 Bolsheviki now appear to be victori- , ous.' This morning we arc told that Admiral Kolchak has resigned his ' command and appealed for Allied ' protection. This, coupled with the t announced withdrawal of the. Anion- • can troops, will leave the Japanese . Army as the only anti-Bolshevik . force in Siberia—or for that matter ' in any part of .Russia, Meanwhile welcome evidence is supplied by a ' critic in the Fortnightly Review that ■ Bolshevism is rapidly changing' its ■ original character. Lenin is stated ■ to have put in force a now factory ' system by which a minimum output is insisted on. The six-hour day was abolished,last June, and a working 1 week of 48 hours insisted on. ■ In large factories piecework or the bonus system has been made the rule, and the subsequent increases in output arc claimed to range from 22 to C 2 per cent. What we need 'most from ' Russia is dependable information, and until we get it we can only hone that the change of heart pictured by the Fortnightly licvicw writer is val and general. That Europe, so far as it has not been Bolshevised, is almost completely Baikanised,. was the lameut of Mr. Winston Churchill in a recent speech in London. In place of the higher organisation of the Euro- • poan nations which had'been arrived at over centuries wo had now a multitude of little nations. The theory that the little State is more efficient than the big Empire is not one that will he bo™ out by a study of the European principalities, and one is quite inclined to agree with Mr. Churchill that there is nothing iD the state of Europe to-day to cause the profession of arms, to be regarded as obsolete. People talk of the world on the morrow of the Great War as if somehow we had been transformed into a higher sphere. Actually, as Mb. Churchill reminds us, we have been transformed into a sphere infinitely lower than that which existed before Armageddon. All over>Europe, he says, we see pcoplo disposed to turn to courses of violence, and a seething scene of misery and malevolence which is not. for the moment dangerous only because the populaces are in such a state of exhaustion as the world has never before recorded in. all its history. Mn._ Churchill may paint his canvas in too gloomy a tone, but a study of European conditions at the moment does not conduce to excessive optimism. » » « * The law's delay is not the least of the thousand natural ills that flesh is heir to. In some districts at tho present moment it is becoming very much a case of the more law the less land settlement. The members of the North Auckland Land Board, for instance, at their meeting on Monday gave vigorous expression to their; dissatisfactory in this connection. Tho Commissioner, Mr. Greville, stated that he had looked into the matter, and had found no less than f>oo land transactions in which, returned soldiers were concerned hung up pending the settlement of legal details. Most of these cases, he declared, wore three months old. Another member of the board said he knew of a case where a man had heen in possession since August last yet the vendor had not been able to receive his money owing to legal delays. Such a state of affairs as this is obviously not to the advantage of either the State or the parties lo these transactions. * * » The old idea of the criminal as a type apart has been badly shaken by the researches of the late Dn. Charles Coring, of the British Prison Service. Dn. G'oring's conclu- ] sions are set out in a work of extrai ordinary interest recently issued. Ho i carefully examined the .physique and pedigree of 3t)uO convicts, and found no differences in the shape of the head nor other characteristic physical features between them and a battalion <A the Royal Engineers similarly examined. Dr. Goring's chief conclusion is that a tendency, to crime is inherited, like a tendency to melancholia, with equal disregard to social ' rank or surroundings. There are families in which generation after generation a "black sheep" appears and reappears, and this in of the fact that there isno tradition of crime, for the failflres are often kept secret from the younger generation. The criminal is as a rule a composite of physical and mental defectiveness, and much below the average in woight an,d stature. These conclusions, if accepted, mean the end of the theories of Lojibroso and his school of criminology.
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Dominion, Volume 13, Issue 94, 15 January 1920, Page 4
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968NOTES OF THE DAY Dominion, Volume 13, Issue 94, 15 January 1920, Page 4
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