TOUCHING EVOLUTION.

King Country Chronicle, Volume I, Issue 48, 20 September 1907, Page 3

TOUCHING EVOLUTION.

[By "W. 8."

That Evolution as an immutable force is as active to-day as ever in this world's history, is an assertion supported b} r observation and scientific research, and may be verified by the most ensual student of Natural Law. It pervades organic and inorganic creation, and in no department of Nature has it proclaimed its industrious presence more potently than in arranging the atom of thit convoluted mass of greyish matter called a man's brain to adapt itself to all the stresses and strains its owner may call upon it to bear. And not that alone : coincident with the discoveries of steam, electricity and chemistry and their manifold uses, Evolution has developed a "wider and deeper sense of humanity; the importance of the unit, and the responsibilities and the duties of each fellow unit; the inherent freedom of such units from unreasonable restraints other than those necessary for the orderly liberty of all; the futilities of hereditary class favouritisms and distinctions ; the abolition of slave-ownership as chattels for traffic; the amelioration of such hardships as are inseperable from the labours of the miner and like arduous occupations ; all these betoken an advance to ideals our fathers scoffed at as Utopian and impracticalbe. But customs die hard; greed and selfishness are Nature's first line of self-preservation; therefore Evolution works slowly upon unearned vested interests the centuries have hardened into masses of obstinate resistance, but Evolution's secret drill and wedge though not patent to the passer-by ceases never from its labours. Even to me, as I write, passeth a review of what my short life has witnessed of this mighty force of humanising Evolution; and what, though much remains to be done, great care is required to so temper our demand that we do not exceed our speed, and force it into premature maturity: I recall two sheep stations bounding on ours, whose owner contracted with his labour to pay it " one pound_ a week and found " for a daily service of from six in the morning to six at night, without the intervention of a holiday, exempting Sunday, excepting at shearing time, when it ?Jso paid its tribute of labour unrewarded, and although this infraction of labour's universal day of rest was not mentioned in the contract, a time-hoary custom made it an nnwritten law, and those who objected did so with the knowledge that they were the next in order for the " sack." This I have seen, also the " found" meant: for meat, broken-mouthed ewe culls and old stags, too poor for the boiling down po£ of which as it hung on the gallows and split down one half was sent to the men and the other to the dogs, but which even the lap poodle refused to more than sniff at. And that this so-called mutton and potatoes, sour bread, no butter, cheap milkless tea sweetened by brown acarus infested sugar, spread on a table in a cubicle measuring; ten feet by sixteen, in which the focd(?) was cooked and eaten, and in which eight men slept, smoked and spat, and at shearing and mustering time twelve were crushed in ; and that in the orchard season the windfall fruit was raked up and wheeled to the pigs, but which no man, on pain of the " sack," dared touch to eat; that the men had to wash their filthy sheep-soiled clothes on their only day of rest — Sunday—or atnlghfcLor not at all; all these abominations I have seen rendered as a quittance of the bond of " a pound a week and found " ; and have also been swept away by a legislative actuated by an evolution trending toward the higher humanities. I have seen employers of that necessary trade, the carpentry, in the absence of the architect, disregard every stipulation of the time and timber bond, who to snip off a ten minutes here and a fifteen minutes there of their workmen's legal hours, begin a job, such as raising a wall of studding, just before knock off time, knowing well that no self-respecting workman would leave it unbraced or unsecured for the night, and charge the time thus crimped as overtime, and if he did, he would be a marked man and be decorated on the first excuse with the order of the " sack !" At which theft of time the ghoulish rotter grins diabolical enjoyment! Incompetent charlatans, whom no city foreman would employ and hence set up in count-ty districts as designers and building experts, but whose skill is such that they place doors and windows where full architraves have to ripped and mutilated of the beauty of their shape —such as a full moulding for a head, and half-mouldings for the side : who so long as they can get the job out of hand acquire a reputation of "smart builders," care no jot for trade pride or to perpetuate an honourable esprit de corps; and who to acquire the fame behave as inhuman niggerdrivers to their men; brazen frauds and sub rosa detractors of honest trade rivals, who if they happen to possess a conscience and take a little longer over their work, do so from no incompetence but they may give pleasure to. the owners, and not impose on people ignorant of the jerry builder until windows leak and jam, and doorlocks. miss .the snicks. All these tmpostors and their impostures I have seen, and are still with us, but which the Evolution of the higher ethics will surely sweep' away. And yet another black smudge disfigures our hypocritical humanity, which evolution is valiantly endeavouring to efface : I have seen ships my father bought in the trading days, whose foc'sle no breeder would pen his pigs in : a pest-house reeking with the essences of damp clothes, lamp grime, bilge water, and stale toljacco stenches ; hovels where the men were packed like dried stockfish in the hold of a Soffoden Island fish-trader, and who, when father had the bulkheads knocked down, and the place widened and lightened with deck prisms, looked on as if stricken with a coma, surprised at the courage which dared to defile a sacrosanct of ages! I have seen the food these brave extenders of a nation's empire were fed

on : beef, salt-hardened to the density of a rail-splilter's top maul; biscuits in which lay glossy fat biscuit-mag-gots ; pea-soup like clay puddles between the four and five mile posts on the Awakiuo road ; coffee, boiled in the same boiler as the meat after a perfunctory cold sea water rinse; and if the toil-worn wretches complained, were replied to with an ogres' fist, or an iron belaying pin across the mouth! And if they deserted the floating hell and were caught, were hailed before an ignorant of sea-life Magistrate, who preached them a dreary homily on the iniquity of mutiny, docked a part of their miserable pay, and sent them back again. All these enormities I have seen, and are not quite yet amenable to Evolutions' slow but sure advance.