SATURDAY HALF-HOLIDAY ASSOCIATION.

Evening Star, Issue 2824, 7 March 1872, Page 2

SATURDAY HALF-HOLIDAY ASSOCIATION.

To the Editor. Sin, —This movement has now assumed tangible shape and produced tangible results, as two of our leading Princes street firms have had the good sense and public spirit to set their brother shopkeepers an ex*

ample by advertising their establishments to be closed on Saturday afternoons. From the wide-spread sympathy which the Association has received, I am very hopeful of the successful inauguration of the half holiday movement. When we have such advocates as Lord Shaftesbury cn our side, who considers it not only right but a sacred duty of every one to do everything in his power to secure a half-holiday on Saturday to as many as possible ; when it can be clearly shown that no satisfactory arguments can he brought against closing shops at one o’clock on Saturday instead of eleven and twelve, it is surely not asking too much of the pubic or shopkeepers to allow the assistants in tiie retail trades a half-holiday, as well as our carpenters or engineers. 1 trust all trades will strain every effort to secure the same boon, because there is great danger in this utilitarian age for us all to keep our nose to the grindstone too much for the sake of acquiring filthy lucre. Money is, no doubt, very good in its way, and can be made the means of doing a gr.at deal of good; but there are hundreds of thousands now-a-daj's so bent on making money that they sacrifice the better part of their nature in scraping it together, and even if they succeed (which is not always), they discover to their utter dismay that they have so dried up the channels of their purest joys that they find, when it is too late, that it would have been much better for them had they cherished and cultivated the nobler part of their nature by enjoying themselves rationally and improving themselves mentally, as all sensible people should. I hope no shop keeper in Dunedin will be such a money-grubber as to refuse to shut his shop at one o clock when his fellow shopkeepers uo so ; but should there be one found so inhuman and so cruelly selfish I. shall make it a point of principle not only not to patronise him at any time, hut I shall do all I can to convince others of the folly and unfairness of allowing a man, who must be a stranger to every kind feeling, to flourish at the expense of those who show by their co.-.duct that they can treat men as men. feorry shall 1 be to find such means necessary, but so determined am 1 to give the movement a fair chance, that I shall consider it my bounden duty to do all I can to remove any obstacles that may be put in the w r ay by narrow-minded, soulless individuals lam, &c., _ Notan Assistant. Dunedin, /:h March, 1572.