TOPICS OF THE TIMES

Southland Times, Issue 18834, 29 May 1920, Page 4

TOPICS OF THE TIMES

The “Village of Edgware” is reached by the thoroughfares known to all Londoners as the Edgware Road., which starts at the Marble Arch, and it is a plot in this locality covering 1171 acres that is destined to he the scene of a novel enterprise—a garden city laid out after the fashion of the American adfiitions to modern towns, with wood instead of stone or brick houses. There will be wide, graceful streets with cemented footwalks; a large space with trees will be left in the centre; the houses will be built on spacious plots and will be 20 or 30 feet apart, and no two houses will he alike. Hugh H. Sutherland, now in London representing the F. S. Sutherland Company of Toronto, which is sending 1000 wooden houses for reconstruction, gives it as his opinion that people in England, when they hear of wooden houses, come at once to the conclusion that they will be some sort of army hut affair, of which kind of building they have had quite enough. They do not know in what luxury Americans, Canadians, Australians and New Zealanders live—and yet more than 75 per cent, of the people of these countries live in wooden houses. There is one class which will not compete for the dwellings in this garden city—it is the large class that loves the lights of the Edgware Road. One woman whose husband had to live near some temporary work in the Thames Valley amid lovely scenery and bright and cheerful surroundings confided to a friend it was all dismal to her —in (he Edgware Road in her Mont room the glare of a neighbouring shoplight was all the light she needed, and to sit by the window and watch the streams of people passing below was more to her than all the rivers winding by mossy banks in the world.

It is fairly well-known that in certain parts of the world natives refuse to work at roadbuilding'and kindred pursuits unless they have the accompaniment of music. The part played by music in sailors’ tasks is common knowledge. Less known by far is the role of music in carpet-weaving, and its delicate adjustment to the various colours involved. In British India the carpets arc woven to a particular tune. The custom harks hack to time immemorial. The loader of the group chants the 'song in a monotonous, quasi-liturgicaf style, and the song varies according to the colour of the carpet, being repeated by all the weavers in a chorus. If the general colour of the carpet is pale, the chant is monotonous; if it is a bright hue, the chorus becomes animated.

The various movements throughout the world that more or less group themselves under the name of Zionists are by no means a novelty, as the official publications show that a century ago Napoleon apj>ears to have sought to use Jewish faith in the restoration of’ the kingdom of David as an aid in his Egyptian adventure, or rather his offensive on India through Egypt, TOc “Moniteur” of the 3rd Prairial, year VIII (May 22, 1799), published the following, dating it ostensibly from Constantinople three weeks before: “Bonaparte has had a proclamation published in which he invites the Jews of Asia and Africa to range themselves under his banner in order to re-establish the ancient Jerusalem. He has already armed a great number of them and their battalions threaten Aleppo.” And again in the “Moniteur” of June 27 it is stated that “Bonaparte has not conquered Syria only for the purpose of giving it back to the Jews. He had vaster designs. ... To march upon Constantinople for the purpose of throwing terror into Vienna and Petersburg.” The French writer that treats of this in a recent issue of the Revolution Francaise thinks that these steps were taken more for a

political than a military object, and concludes indeed that all his polity in matter of religious worship tended, in the words of the writer, ‘'to make a profit” out of what could be called the “trust of religions.” This was the same polity that the former German Emperor pursued with the Mohamniadnns in Asia Minor, and is a political manoeuvre that commends itself to more Mum one tiiieipie of "leal pohtik.”