PUBLIC OPINION.

Hokitika Guardian, 22 March 1927, Page 1

PUBLIC OPINION.

THTS IS* NOT EOMANdNG “Before another Imperial Conference assembles a British Prime Minister will he able to talk direct to any Dominion Premier or to ring up the Viceroy of India, or to speak to them all in ti m on the same day. This, at least, is not romancing, but a. thing that is surely and rapidly approaching tin sphere of practice. \S ith all the Cabinets and Administrations in immediate touch, the Government of the New Empire may ho carried on as a whole hv consent and co-ordination as though an Imperial Conference like the last were in perpetual session. In a. decade or so after that, statesmen talking to each other across continents and oceans may see each other while they are speaking. When physical meeting is desired aviation will bring it about with a few days. Thus, as we have maintained for years, it is truth, not fallacy, to that science tends to make the British Empire a more compact and workable affair; to create more intimate understandings between the peoples ns well as the Governments of Britain and the United States; and to establish conditions which will impose peace, and make unavoidable a complete World League perhaps considerably different in strvturc from the present League of Nations.”—Mr J. L. Garvin,

IN' TWENTY GENERATIONS. “As one rests one’s confidence less in the achievements of reason and more in the simple wisdom to which the intuitions of the common man so plainly point, one finds oneself hoping all things for his future. After all, lie has these seeds, and lie is yet a very voting thing on his earth. As a civilised creature, at least in our western parts, ho has hardly’ five hundred years to his credit. while the earth can number its millions. Certainly bis civilisation dawned two thousand vears ago. but it was almost submerged and bad to dawn arfani in the Renaissance. Only five hundred years; only twenty generations; that, is to ’say, only twenty sons of a sinpie line, have said ‘Father’ to thenparent. And yet these twenty sons have done much; tlie twentieth is visible nearer The Man than the first.’'—Mr Ernest Raymond, in the “Sunday Times.” A NEW IDEA. “There is no solution of the wages problem which does not bring home to the worker the full truth about Ins wages, and tlie full truth can netei be ""brought home academically or m theory. It is when I pay my gardener that I know what it costs to pay tlie gardener. The unifioation of Capital and Labour is by no means so impossible as we have supposed, 1 only we are content to do it step by step and to face the difficulties as they arise. The prime evil (to my thinking) of socialistic propaganda is that it has driven into our very blood the idea of one grand solution to be brought about by a majestic legislative wave of a wand. If we set to ■work to distribute the ownership ot capital we could do more for social well-being than we suppose. There is plenty of .cjapital for the transitoiy process. The Tokio loan was oversubscribed in half an hour. Suppose some genius—not unlike the genius who discovered V\ ar Savings Certificates —set himself the task of discovering in what wav fifty million pounds could be invested in industrial securities so that bona fide workers in the industries concerned could purchase the shares by instalments, we might get a workable scheme.”—Mr John Lee, in the “Pilgrim.”