NOTES OF THE DAY

Dominion, Volume 14, Issue 108, 31 January 1921, Page 4

NOTES OF THE DAY

A very old controversy comes to an end "with the driving of the first pile of the inner harbour works at Napier. In 1881 Sir John Coode, the English engineer who reported ou a. number of proposed harbour works in New Zealand, strongly recommended that a harbour for Hawke’s Bay should be constructed at the locality of the present works. Other reports were obtained, and in the end the breakwater scheme out in the open sea. was proceeded with. A sum of .£450,000 has been expended on the breakwater, and it is etill far from completion. As Mr. Jull, chairman of the Napier Harbour Board, stated at Friday’s ceremony, Napier has waged a struggle for forty-five years against the full force of the Pacific Ocean. The cost of maintenance and repair at the breakwater was found to be extremely heavy, and >ni agitation for the abandonment of the work and the building of a large harbour in more sheltered water at the western end of Seinde Island was led by Mr. George Nelson. .Mr. Nelson fought for this project with great persistence; in 1914 a Bill was passed authorising the expenditure of. .£309,000 on an inner harbour, and the actual beginning with the work is now made. The rest of the Dominion will wish Napier good luck in building this new gateway to Hawke's Bay. **. * *

Australasia’s cheap and plentiful sugar is giving jam-makers and fruit preservers the opportunity of a lifetipie. Our jams and tinned fruit are now able in point of price to compete successfully in markets where they have hitherto been unknown. It does not appear that in all cases the most has been made of this chance to secure, a footing in new territory. In to-day’s messages a Sydney merchant is reported to have declared that orders are not coming to Australia because of bad packing. This is a point to which those who aim at building up our fruit export trade cannot pay too much attention. It is not enough to pack fruit in. tins of neat appearance and nicely labelled. The contents must be as well packed and the tin made to yield as much net weight of fruit, of as good quality, and in as attractive condition as the goods of the American canners. American, pineajiple, for instance, usually fits the tin, and is of a uniform ripeness. Australian pineapple as commonly does not, and has odd pieces packed in round the sides, arriving bruised and broken, while the colour and ripeness vary even in the same tin. Similar conditions are stated to prevail in the packing of other fruit. Fruit packing is a work of art that Australia has been treating too lightly, and for this neglect her fruit industry is now suffering. *-* * *

That arbitration is better than strikes and ballots than bullets is the opinion of the Australian Workers’ Union by the substantial majority of 16,138 votes to 10,157. This vote is further evidence of the steady wane of the mana of the revolutionary extremists. Labour opinion is rapidly coming round to the view that it would be folly to scrap existing civilisation to grope among the ruins with untried theories. Steady, gradual progress is far better than a wild plunge into attacks on all existing institutions, followed as it must inevitably be by a big wave of reaction that will possibly make the last state of the Labour cause worse than the first. Extremist stock is steadily falling in New Zealand. Capit/ilism at its worst does not inflict on the public half as much hardship and uncertainty as do the “class conscious” miners with their perpetual withholdings of the natural supply of fuel. The universe is a very imperfect place, and every country is full of faddists with schemes of their own for remaking it. The only point on which they agree is that meh wants the deck cleared to give full play to his own particular fad. And people who think they can produce a new and better world out of a hook, as the conjuror produces the rabbit out of the hat, are every whit as much faddists as those who would close the butchers’ shops and have us live on nuts, as our ancestors did, when, as some people say, they swung by their tails on the trees and knew none of the ills of civilisation. *** . *

Disposal of the German ocean cable system is proving the cause of much international heartburning. America is aggrieved both over the disposal of the two German trans-Atlantic cables seized by the British Navy. in the early days of the war, and also by the allotment to Japan of control of tho three Pacific cables radiating from Yap to Shanghai, the Philippines, and Guam. Of the two Atlantic cables Britain has converted one into a Halifax-Azores-Penzance line, and the other has been taken over by France. America, however, resents being deprived of direct cable communication with Germany without intermediate censoring. The case of Yap is now in evidence. Japan is the mandatory for Yap, and the laws of a mandatory country ey.teml to mandated territory. Japanese laws prevent foreigners from having anything io do with the telegraph servi-w. America has a cable from the United States to Guam, one from Guam to Yap, but to get to the Philippines or the Far East she must go through Yap. Io avoid Japanese censorship she demands that one of the cables lie transferred to her. The Japanese contend that America is not a whit worse off than when Yap was a German island. Then the cables passed through German hands; now they pass through Japanese. Japan is in possession, and if she eoncodes anything to America it will proto ably be by getting something of equal value in return. America is indignant, but so far suggests no quid pro quo.