PUBLIC OPINION.

Hokitika Guardian, 5 January 1928, Page 1

PUBLIC OPINION.

THE LENGTH OK WORKING HOURS. We have consistently worked shorter shilts than competitive nations, and to that extent have set a good example. It needs to he observed that it is not the number of hours worked, but the actual work done in the days or shifts that counts. Costs of production, or selling price, is more important in the competition than the length of the working day. The proposed universal forty-eight-liour-week, even if attainable, would do little or nothing to equalise international competitive conditions. It would not make American engineers adopt the British “ one man one machine ” slogan, and reduce their output to the British level. It would I not put the wages of German engineers up to the British level. It would not make British bricklayers work at the American rate. It would not make British shipbuilders reduce their efficiency, to, say, the Russian level, nor British cotton operatives cut their daily output down to, say the Chinese standard.—E. T. Good in the “ English Review.”

WELFARE CENTRES. From personal knowledge of one or two welfare centres, and the health visitor’s functioning at them, any one may persuade himself that the work now being accomplished by this organisation is both efficient and conscientious. But it would be pleasant to see in these institutions, as in all the public* services of the nation, a little more of the spirit which works with the object of one day making its peculiar function superfluous. For it is only modern and artificial conditions which, by destroying sound tradition in regard to the care of the mother and her infant, have created the need for the child welfare movement. And when once the whole population has again begun to establish a sound tradition in these matters, and the acquired knowledge begins once more to descend, as it always should, from mother to daughter, and not from health visitor to mother, there may he an end of child welfare centres, and the cost their upkeep entails.—Anthony M. Ludovici in The “ English Review.”

MANUFACTURING LIFE. Sir Oliver Lodge is a stimulating thinker because lie never tries to dodge facts or their consequences. In another age anyone who predicted that life might one day he produced in a laboratory would either have been burned as a heretic or locked up as a madman. But Sir Oliver not only ventured on this prediction, hut stated his opinion that the probabilities were all in favour of it. In other words, he believes that the chemist will one day evolve a mass of protoplasm which will ultimately assume vitality. The processes of nature which through the ages worked to produce life will thus be duplicated in a laboratory. What used to he called “ revealed religion ” will thus have to readjust itself to the discoveries which the future has in store. It ought to be able to do so without difficulty and to take an even higlie. view of mankind than in the past. The nearer science is able to come to reproducing the powers of nature and the creative intelligence that made life possible, the more reason have we for refusing to regard life as a matter of blind chance.—“ Tlie Sunday Times.”

NERVES AND FEARS. “Nerves and fears are very prevalent to-day, and are often regarded as inevitable and incurable. They are curable. The cure may be helped by a number of very simple practices,” said Mr Eustace Miles in a recent lecture. “ First and foremost comes the use of purer foods, and especially of less acid and stimulating foods, together will l more water to cleanse the body, and more greenstuff to supply the antiacid ‘salts’ and vitamins; for the nerve troubles are generally connected with a state of ‘acidosis’ —an acid condition of the body. Another help is the practice of the right posture, and the right expression ; for, as Professor William James has jiointed out, when the body is in the right position, and has the right expression, the right state of mind tends to follow. this is one reason why muscular relaxing helps to prevent or cure nervousness and fear. There is also the habit of deep and full breathing. It may take a long while to establish it ; but, when once it is established, it is a great stand-hv for people who arc timid or worried.”

THE PRESENT GENERATION. “You are going out into a generation which is witnessing the breaking down of the old well-defined codes of right and wrong by which your fathers lived, into a generation which is rapidly coming to recognise as a criterion for behaviour, standards of good taste in all realms and situations, both old, and new,” said Dr Fosdick in a speech reported in “Harper’s Monthly.” “To try to send a new generation into the world without a definite code of right and wrong is to behave like the mother who said,she was bringing her daughter up to think all the thoughts she wanted her to think until she was 18

years old. and after that the girl could think for herself. There is plenty that is rotten and hypocritical in the old codes concerning love and the relationship of the sexes. SureJv they can be (hanged and the simple standard can he substituted. Whatever debases personality is wrong and ugly; whatever elevates personality is right and beautiful. Finally, the standard of good taste is not a negative thing, merely keeping us from wrong. It is a creative thing. That is why your'generation is so fine, so much cleaner, healthier, more promising than my generation. For when a generation-discovers that the old codes cannot be used and they set tip for themselves high standards of their own, they have much firmer ground on which to proceed.”

REJUVENATION. Living things grow old and die, and life is handed on from generation to generation as a torch from runner to runner in an unending relay. This is the law; yet rebellion against approaching senescence, yearning for perpetual youth, are surely as old as mankind itself : the dream of rejuvenation lias over haunted the mind of ageing in in

That this is so is revealed in liis religions, myths, and folk tales, for throughout the ages the common thought of eternal life, of resurrection, of the transmigration of souls, runs through them all. -Many have been the efforts to capture this elixir of life; hut until recently all such attempts. even though they were not dishonest, must necessarily have been well-nigh hopeless, for it is only within recent years that accurate knowledge concerning the nature of youth and of old age has become available. Manifestly. there can he no intelligent control of such conditions as these until accurate information concerning them has been gained. 'This knowledge is as vet by no means complete, but already there exists an understanding of the principles underlying the important facts concerning youth and age and to-day we can agree in a general way with the illuminating of Seneca, “ Senectus ipsa morbus.” It will be recognised that the attitude of medicine lias ever been based upon this assumption, for it has always striven to avert decay, and thereby to prolong life.—F. A. F. Crew, in “Tlie Nine* teenth Century and Aften”