The Manawatu Herald. Tuesday, February 17, 1914. NOTES AND COMMENTS.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXXVI, Issue 1209, 17 February 1914, Page 2

The Manawatu Herald. Tuesday, February 17, 1914. NOTES AND COMMENTS.

Skvkral of our contemporaries are urging tradespeople to take steps to hit the credit system in a vital spot. Keen competition among business people is largely responsible for extended credit and bad debts and the remedy for this evil, in our opinion, is with the tradespeople themselves. We have a business man in Foxton who would not give a penny credit to his best friend, and he assures us that the cash system pays him and those who patronise his business. Our Kltbam contemporary in dealing with this subject says:—‘‘The credit system is responsible for a lot of evil. It encourages people to purchase what they cannot afford, and do not require, and leads to absolute dishonesty in the shape of inducing people to purchase things they have no intention of paying for. If all retail traders were to insist upon a regular monthly settlement of all accounts, it would be the equivalent to trading upou a cash basis, and prove of very general all-round benefit. The retailer would be enabled to purchase for cash, and thus secure all the advantages that are always available to a cash buyer, and offer some of the°e advantages to his retail customers. It would promote genuine confidence in a community, and raise the moral standard. The promiscuous giving of credit does not promote a high moral commercial standard ; in fact, it has an opposite effect, that is highly detrimental to the community.” If people were compelled to pay cash for the necessaries of life, there would be less squandered in useless extravagance.

Scientists have looked rather coldly upon the reports of the curative value of radium iu cancer cases, having in mind the extravagant claims which were at one time made for the Roentgen rays as a cancer cure. This month’s Review of Reviews publishes an interview with Dr Howard A. Kelly, of John Hopkins University, U.S.A., who has been conducting a series of most notable experiments. He says : —The radium treatment does about the same thing that the surgeon’s knife does. The surgeon gets rid of the cancerous tissue by cutting it out en mass ; the radium gets rid of it by destroying it cell by cell. In other words, at the present stage of development, radium works most successfully at the kiud of tumors that surgery most easily destroys. These are superficial tumors —of the skin, the face, the jaw, the tongue, and the like. They are the tumors which are on the outside of the body, which we can see and handle. In many such cases radium, according to our experience, seems to be an actual cure. At first it might seem, since surgery is already quite effective in cancers of this kind, that we have gained nothing. But it is an immense gain. The surgical removal of tumors of the face, for example, involves disfigurement. When radium destroys such tumors —as it does in many cases —the face is restored virtually to its normal condition. When the growth has widely infiltrated surrounding structures, the surgeon is often helpless. After removing the primary growth, however, he can irradiate these surrounding tissues, and so have a better chance of removing any stray cells that may be left. Radium, I believe, can thus be used to make doubly sure all ordinary operations for cancer.