THE COMMON ROUND.

Otago Witness, Issue 4030, 9 June 1931, Page 32

THE COMMON ROUND.

•By

Wayfarer.

r The Arbitration Court, tempering the justice of the contention that wages should be Reduced with a mercy that places the . reduction at 10 per cent., instead of the 20 per cent, that was sought, gives the labourer little save cold comfort, for if he is still adjudged worthy of his hire, helas, the amount of that hire has been contracted by the amount of his prescribed offering to the" collection plate on the Sabbath. In fact, it almost appears that in making the cut to the total of the good man’s charitable benefactions, the court is doing the churches a very bad turn. The only comfort that can be offered on a dismal occasion such as this is that the things of the mind remain free, and if we can turn from motor joyriding, alcohol, theatres, foot ball games, and other expensive pursuits to the more sedate pleasures of the public libraries, we shall gain more than has been taken from us. Could we but place visions of money behind us and walk inquiring and fearless in a philosophical eestaey, we might be able to declaim with the culture-loving daughter of the self-made peer:— I weary of my lucky lot Where all is gold and nothing got; Where every cloud is diamond-lined And all things rich except the mind. Poor comfort, indeed, when the clouds have never had even a sterling silver lining, and are now an ominous black and' named by the sinister name of Depression. But the scientists assure us that every law has its compensating by-law, and we can only trust that as we feast ourselves on the calf-bound, musty legacy of the thinkers of past ages, we shall come to a better understanding of the small’relation money has with happiness, and haply win back to a state such as existed when . Gold was once not the Price, nor the Penalty, nor the Scourge of Living, but only the Sun shining on'a Beautiful Wall. . Mr Gandhi’s recent resolute assertion that he would face the ocean, the Strand, the London populace, Buckingham Palace, and. finally, his Majesty, without pants, darted by Beam. and cable throughout the world. It caused some serious reverberations, not least at bookbanning Boston, -Mass., whose police superintendent, warned that Mr Gandhi thought of paying a call, righteously stated:—

We shall insist that Gandhi be suitaldy clothed. We can’t let any man appear in the.streets' of Boston in,very much less than a one-piece bathing suit. Even an Indian saint must occasionally bow the knee or ratjier more particularly cover it, and Mr Gandhi was apparently not unmoved by the agitations in the Western world. At any rate, lie admitted the other day: “If the weather in London is sufficiently cool, I shall wear ordinary trousers.” The relief, one imagines, must be great. The Londoner' cedes not even to the Bostonian in his allegiance to trousers. He will rejoice that his feelings are not to be ravaged by the sight of a pantless saint. Last week we accused Samuel Johnson of being an innocent doubter of the infallibility of kings; this week we make amends by crediting him with prevision of the Indian problem of 1931, when he wrote words that might before the saint’s conversion have applied to the loin-clothed Gandhi—“ And panting Time toil’d after him in vain.”

Happily, however, Mr Gandhi is prepared to participate in panting time and the question becomes academic, but nevertheless interesting. Why a world that had endured for ages untold without pants should ever have consented to them is a matter for speculation, t>ut trousered we are and trousered we are like to remain. There is a gloomy satisfaction in envisioning the day when, like tl>e Highland warriors of old, we shall dance a seann triubhais of emancipation on Cargill’s peak, high-kicking our discretion and our small clothes to perdition mongst the bracken, but that day may not break in our time. Evidence is to the contrary, indeed,' for even in the places where the desire for freedom from superfluous clothing has engendered an active cult, trousers appear to be still de rigucur. A recent visitor states:

The fashion for leaving off garments in the heat is one of the novelties that strikes the English visitor to Germany. The chances are that you will first notice it from the window of your railway carriage in a group of labourers working on the line or in a field beside it; some at least among them, so the day be warm, will be bare from the trouser-belt upward. ... Or you may pass a football ground—they play football here in high summer—where again there will be bare, brown torsos; a goodly number of. the-players will be arrayed in nothing, but shorts. " ■ .. , Again, pants! The world is indifferent, it seems, to the whims of cults, it encourages a looseness in fashion, but it docs insist that there shall be no return to the kilt and the affable night-shirt.

Mr Gandhi and his brethren of the allsufficient pocket handkerchief are losing support year by year, as a perfect frenzy for trousers engulfs the farthest corners of- thd world. Stevenson has it that change of habit is bloodier than bombardment, but the bombardment has been effective, and now even the happy native races have exchanged the lavalava for the trouser. States a report:—

Clothes are now so closely associated, in the popular mind, With Christianity, that an open crusade against them would be regarded by the native as a deliberate assault upon religion; they must now be regarded as an ineradicable evil. ... Pants have come to stay, .whether they take the form of two tubular garments fashioned from worsted, such as adorn our legs, the silk knee breeches of the Privy Councillor, or the baggy cheesebags of the Dervishes—or is it the Turks? Even in revolutionary Russia, a cablegram states, revolutionaries have not reached pantlcssness, the latest raiment for men being “ two-piece pocketless suits, with wide trousers tight over the ankles, preventing the hiding of dirty boots.” Not without reason did Gorki s “ Seraphim the Comforter ” sing: A pair of baggy trousers! See What different men have got ’em, i’or some-grow big nt the top. like me, And some grow big at the bottom. Being conservative, we shall probably continue to prefer the latter, or Oxfo-d, style, to the Soviet model. The Oxford bag has the advantage at least of saving shoe-shines, even if it does not inoculate its wearer against draughts.

This dissertation protracts itself, but those with an interest in social pheno mena, not least of which is trouserings, will probably agree with “ Wayfarer " that pants cannot be lightly laid aside whether sartorially or merely as a suo ject of abstract discussion. There is. after al), something touching In the solicitude with which the guardians of our moral and mental felicity dwell on tinsubject of attire. One can road with a certain pleasure of that incident on the beach at Copacabana when Prince George, during his Brazilian sojourn, dozed face downwards in the sand, his only protection against the eyes of th-* curious the nether half of his bathing suit. Agitated, the. Brazilian police pirouetted at a decent distance, their respect for the person of H.R.H. warring with their duty to warn him that in discarding the upper part of his costume he was unconsciously offending the law One can imagine their relief when th--Prince, lazily, bestirring- -himself, j soon donned the garment again -.'without nee.Ssitating an international, parley. Trousers are a necessity, if a bitter one, in our civilised state, for the philosopher has written:— You may live without conscience, You may live without heart' You may live .without culture, ■ ' You may live without art, : You may live without'kinsmen—without uncles and aunts, ; ■ But civilised man cannot live without pants. ....