SCRIBBLING PAD NOTES

Hokitika Guardian, 27 September 1929, Page 7

SCRIBBLING PAD NOTES

(By “X.”) A deputation to the Mayor of Auckland cla.med as citizens, the right to work; asked that any suggestion to set aside a day to collect money for the unemployed be discouraged as being merely a pall.ative and doing more harm than good. If it had not been for the humanitarian appeals, freely responded to by all classes of the community .in Auckland, hundreds would probably have died of starvation. Belief of distress through unemployment is humanitarian question. The minimising of unemployment may be an economic one, but no assertion of “rights” will find a man a job, and aggressive assertion of rights may well have a tendency to alienate- sympathy and discourage tnose social workers who have so wholeheartedly endeavoured to relieve suffering and distress. A Prince of the House of Hapsburg is reported to have drowned himself because he found that he had inadvertently been financing Socialist bombthrowers, and preferred death to dishonour. The Director-General of Agriculture reports that while there is no increase worth mentioning in the area devoted to dairying, the grasslands farmer is, owing to top-dressing and improved herds, producing 40 per cent, more per acre than he did a few years ago, and witn 40 per cent, more cows the output of butter-fat has doubled. But we are still a very long way from the maximum output of occupied lands; Only 13 per cent, of sown grasslands are annually top-dress-ed, and there are not Jess than six million acres that could be made to give increased yields. The Trades Union Congress at Belfast finds that the Bolshevik Communist minority is acting under instructions from Moscow and under direction of the “Third International’' from which its finances are largely derived. It trusts the unions will prove “capable of stamping out this disruptive activity.” The relief committee of the Auckland Hospital Board required a junior clerk in the office. Amongst the 140 applicants for the position were men witn university degrees representing nearly every professional calling. Many had been out of work for months, and some had held important positions. It would be as well, when considering the changes which require to he made in our system of education, to remember that educating the young people up to professional standards by no means assures their future. The professions are very easily overcrowded, and perhaps no unit of the community more helpless and more to be pitied than the clerical worker out of a job. The manual worker has the advantage every time. With health, strength and that aptitude to take on almost anv kind of work which the old sturdy race of our colonists possessed they were sure to earn a living somehow. But modern educational facilities do not tend to turn out this type—hence the decrease in self-reliance.