New Zealand Truth THE NATIONAL PAPER THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 27, 1928. Sows' Ears

NZ Truth, Issue 1191, 27 September 1928, Page 6

New Zealand Truth THE NATIONAL PAPER THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 27, 1928. Sows' Ears

4 TN all probability, it was a long time before the full significance of the maxims we laboriously scratched" on the pages of our copy-books occurred to many of us. . There was one about silk purses and sows' ears, m which the impossibility of making one from the other was brought before our immature notice. Likely enough, it was not until later years that we appreciated the parallel between the idea and the mumchancy moods of our politicians. \ And since the wordy nothingness which has enveloped the Licensing Bill of 1928, the sheer futility of attempting to construct a body of clear-thinking, sincere, talk-saving statesmen from <among the wobbling phal-' anx of politicians m the House of Representatives reduces one to despair. The verbal cantering of politicians up and down, back and forth, on the course of licensing, inclines one to the belief that the men, who, three years ago, were placed m control of our national well-being, have limited their functions to the sublimation of the science, which, saying much says nothing at all. And, of course the .country pays. Writhing m impotence, the taxpayer observes his money being frittered away m the dissemination of forensic nonsense; watches the course of the licensing bilge through first and second readings, its progress and extinction m the third. And the achievement? None. Apart from the pathos revealed m the attempts -of grown men trying to prove their worth by the emission of vacuous splutterings, there is a faint smear of humor m recollecting those strident blarings of Premier Coates and his party at the g last election, when they bleated: "Mpre business m Government." Had they the merest regard for the climbing figures of cost on the national. ( balance-sheet, they would confine themselves to filling precious moments with commensurate opinions. If verbosity were a criminal offence, a good -many party pump-handlers would long since have been on the gallows, whilst the country would be spared its groanings over the futility of snuffing a measure m its third reading when it might well have been dispersed m the first.