THE WARES AND THE MARKET.

Otago Witness, Issue 2894, 1 September 1909, Page 73

THE WARES AND THE MARKET.

"In the name of the Prophet, Figs!" Against the eastern sky, all pale and fadnt with cloudless heat, the mosque, with its flower-like dome and slender minarets, gleams marble white. From the sharp j black shadow cas f by those white walls oomes the monotonous voice of the old fig-seller On the shallow tray suspended from his neck, lie the luscious figs, plump and purplish-black ; bursting to show the melting rose and purple of the flesh' within. Nor can the .voice of the melonseller, sitting op his heel? among his musk, and rock, and water melons, and calling on Allah to testify impartially t< his own honesty and the excellence of his wares, ! drown the shrill monotone of " In the name of the Prophet, Figs !" ■ "E'hoa! E'hoa! Pirangi ana koe te tuna? Tuna pai rawa- enei." The soft Maori voices, far-reachin^ in their pathetic minor cadences, proclaim -the freshrrefs of" the silver eels, writhing "duiirbly on their flax string. The heavy scent of rotting wood, fallen leaves, emerald mosses, and 6carl«t fungi pene,tratea the air with tropic suggestion. Warm, • white mists drift down the river flats, and from every" wooded gully, and every raiipo swamp filmy, breaths of the wild lands come down to join them on their lazy pilgrimage to the sea. The sea? Nay, long before even the roll of surf be heard the sun will have drunk them to

the last breath ; for though the mists lie white and warm on the river flats, high up in the central dome the sky is blue and radiant with the promise of later hours. The strings of eels are flung upon the grass ; their silver bellies gleam as they writhe impotently each to detach his supple, slimy length from his neighbour; and the green flax withe thrust through each gaping gill prisons the passive heads together in an indiscriminate bunch ; the ] tows of shiny teeth show white against tlie panting, wide-open mouths.

"Kapai nga tuna- \ Xi wh«a- le Kakahu, hoki-hoki nga tuna?" • ...» ~£he turbanned Moslem, selling his figs beneath the shadow of his mosque ; the old Maori and his wahine bargaining the night's catch from the eel basket set in the dark lagoon foi the old clothes of the " Pakeha Rangatira,*' have the same matter at heart — buying and selling, the wares and the market. The cheap moralist holds up our time to scorn with his mournful "My dear fellow, nothing matters but money : it is a commercial age we live in !" To hear him one might imagine that commerce was the last development of modern decadence, whereas it is long enough since a certain cynic declared tha* "every man has his price." Longer etill since a moralist of a different type clothed his convictions in commercial terms, and declared the price of r virtuous woman to be " far above rubies." We, even. we, makers of a new nation over whom swings the celestial sign of the Southern Cross,, are -too conscious of buying and selling— the .wares and- the market. Boldly enough we can take" ou"r stand as a nation, in the' world's markets, TvitK ;our staple products, out wool* and mutton^.. our bars of gold and" cargoes of coal; -we may well. *be proud of "our country- and our wares. It is not here we need doubt ourselves." How different' our wares amd ourmairketa from the wares and the markets of that, royal rubber merchant of the Congo who deals in terrorised humanity, and. who surely bears

on his shiel J a severed hand, sable ! The vahie of all material things is what we make it. What value would those black severed hands, withered by the African sun, drawn up and contorted like a. bird's^aw, have for you or jne? What was the value of, each lean" nimble hand in life to the. man: or woman, the terrified child, from jrhoee body it was l&cked? What is their value to Leopold's brutal agents and overseers? Strange thought, is it not? Here, indeed, up the stricken, faet-depopujaking valleys of the Congo, "Every man has his, price." Nor there alone, it was in 1905 that Harper's Magazine, through Mr Henry Neimson, made their famous investigation of " The Slave Trade of To-day " in Portuguese West Africa. It is all done "' decently and in order." In the main street of Benguela is the Government office — what, we should call the "Labour Bureau " — known as the " Central Committee of Labour and Emigration for the Inlands." Here the natives from the interior, twice sold alread}' — first by the tribal chief (perhaps hundreds of miles inland) to the dealer ; and, again, by the dealer to the labour agent — are formally asked through an interpreter whether they wish to go to work in the cocoa plantations of San Thome and II Principe. What can they answer but just what they do — " Yes !" What use would it be to say No? What difference is there between one place and another, one master and another, to the simple savage torn from his home,, weary and broken with long days of niarching through unknown country? If he could even hope to find I hi*) way back, preserve his life through.] those long tracts of " hungry country/ where the, hapless human wanderer sinks to the level of the beast, and has. .no value beyond the flesh and blood of the carcase upon which his cannibal captors would feast, of what avail' Would it be? A run-away slave, his indignant " headman " would either kill him or sell him again Prices of " voluntary labourers " have " had a steady upward tendency " during lie last few *years, for thp difficulty of conducting a slave tracte wfjh decent <te-

ception -"^as increased; Tth« meddtasoßfrfc • outer world po£es and pries into the snug , affairs of cocoa growing in -San fhonie and fhe .islands. 4 Neimson spoke of "five-, little native boys, running about the ship like, .rats," who were sold by their Portuguese o~wner for £10 apiece within a week of their arrival at Benguela ; of "the value of a slave man or wonian, landed, at San Thome," being "about £30 "j »nd so on. He -spoke, too, of Portuguese dealer " who; :n: n sheer pityy- bought a little girl from t^ Portuguese lady last; autumn, <md he found her back scored all over • with the cut of the ' chicotte,'just like , the back of a- .trek ox under training."" "Such aio the 'waif&s " and themarkets at one end of the long chain -of " industrial ' enterprise, 'buymg'-and selling, wnich, so, far as we are concerned, ends in ordering our tin ' of coec& ! from .our eminently respectable grocer.' : '" ' Of those black 'depths within the deep — where" the children- of white planters and black slaves are sold by those whit© - fathers. wip~ slavery, flesh of ' their • fleshand bone, of their bqne, yet of no inoTe* value^t-han>. .the inartel^. price* of. 'auof»-. chattelp-^-tfats is Slot "tne place to speak. Atryth'ese i' brutal aspects ' «f> life We tiiiT^"" away^souUsick : oiir o-tfk Jfraififckittg is, in. .its refinement and even: unconsciousness," at" very different thing. ■We all have our modest little goods, our smal> wares, for sale: most of us can; „ but command a local market ; very feweven venture into the world' 6 markets ;, many find no market at all, no market for their labour or their love,, and these settle down to wha* seems -too often- to their aching hearts, '^Love's labour lost."The labour inspired by love, unpaid, unrecognised, unstinted ; the labour whose* reward should be, and so rarely is, happiness.. So few things in life have any intrinsic value : they are only valuable for what they bring us. It is, as our cheap cynic is never tiredof asserting, "a commercial age' ; but has not- all society its very roots set in commerce? — the giving and taking of earliesti instincts, when " might is right," develop*, ing into the buying and selling of free* dom and honourable dealing. All our speculation, criticism, coimmenty is expended on the more picturesque, dramatic, or important markets of the world ; our own buyings and sellings we live in the grim silence that surrounds all "reality. If our concerns go well, and) by, rare good fortune a "fancy price" suddenly attaches to our labour or our life, who so glad as we? — our self-reepecfe revived in tl>e sunshine of Appreciation.If there is a " slump in the market," and? ' there are no buyers " for our pictures, no outlet for our articles, no demand for oar labour, of hand, or eye, or brain, we suffer in silence tHe humiliation, the overwhelm? ing contempt, which' is strongei in" it* silen.o9 than a thousand words, of not beirfg wahteaT Tor l*-taan/-br"a-"~woWrafl ■ either, so they be honest and true, will always be one with their work, ready tostand or fall by if; and when there is no room for our wares, how shall we stand in the market place? , • It is at once a fascinating and a fruitless theme,' "this of" the world's markets, iji itself* i&ii^edu&itlon in worldly wisdom, aji object lesson jn the^ absolute absence 'eSE any intrinsic value. Cmc may imagine [liie CynicV "Child's Guide to Worldly Wisdom,'' its,, qttegfcicais* and -answers — at once so .true "and so 'bajHing : ~^- ' Q* What is-the iise.-*oi American millions? — A. To purchase "English noble--men. ' *'„ - * • * ' '<.- * Q Why do the great Pbwers beggar themselves in preparing for war? — A. "pj»t other nations may understand, they desire peace. Q. What is T thc value of radium? — A* That entirely depends -on the- possessor— to the primitive man it is .valueless, to the scientific man, priceless. Some things in the world must always stand at "fancy prices," juet as some women remain all their lives at their " face value." The New Guinea chief may, have butchered » hundred Birds of Paradise to fashion his hideour headdress, and ! each one of. those, exquisite fairy-like egrets would, lit the hands of -the Parisian milliner. .or, the Court hairdiJesser, have- its fancy price — the price of the rare and un- . attainable*. ' But' the chief would bartei them. aIL for , a . JRemington : rifle, such at ,' our schoolboy brothers use to practise o«, the rabbits. The orchid, snatched from the damp noiseeome jmurk of the tropk forest, might be bought 'for an - rror pot of a- pound' of nails from the" savage who shares, the fever-tainted solitudes with itt marvellous and unregarded loveliness. But when the orch^d-hiuntei has faced a hundred perils and da,red a score of deaths to find it, then the bizarre beauty of the orchid finds its fancy price in the appreciation of the horticulturist,- the aggrandisement of the millionaire. And so the standard of price is regm lated by the rarity of possession, the difficulty of attainment. • If I were not -tirftd of morals .and moralising, I might suggest the personal application - which inevitably grows out of such a conclusion — never to make ourselves cheap or our friendship common