MAKING GOOD

Sun (Auckland), Volume 1, Issue 4, 26 March 1927, Page 13

MAKING GOOD

BY-LAWS AND REGULATIONS I OPPORTUNITIES IN AMERICA A writer in a recent issue of the “Sunday Times” has some very interesting comment to make upon the efforts of Americans t.o “make good.” The nation, she says, is confident this can be brought about if enough laws are passed to make tin task possible. With the aid of legislation everything can be achieved. Consequently. each year adds an incredible number to the Statute Book. :o which nobody pays any attention. They exist more as a record of opinion and intention than as anything to be seriously enforced. The old Puritan Blue Laws of Massachusetts have never been repealed. They still rank among their three million successors, and. by their edict, no man may kiss his wife on Sundays, no one may travel or uss any means of transport, from railway to wheelbarrow, during church hours, and no mother may embrace her child in public! Some of the modern State laws are scarcely less curious. In lowa it is illegal to smoke a cigarette in the streets, and, if a man’s breath smells of alcohol, no other evidence is necessary for him to be arrested as a drunkard. In a Far Western State there is an unrepealed edict that not more than five may sleep in one bed! The Mann Act is responsible for the most ridiculous anomalies, for no man may transport a woman from one State t<» another, so that a host may not legally motor a guest out of town, to dine with his wife at their suburban home, if it happens to be across the borders of ; neighbouring State. America is torn between those Puritan principles which in the direction of the Middle West are as developed as the prickles of a hedgehog, and thfc atavistic violence which is the heritage of freebooting ancestors, who first broke up the land and stamped it with their lusty independence. The Puritan would be law-abiding, if he knew his laws. As he does not. he replaces them by a host of rules and regulations. These are the barbed wire fencing of American life, and each year adds new spikes. Hard and Fast Distinctions. Habit is cast-iron in the States. Above Fourteenth Street in New York a man is liable to have his hat knocked off if he forgets to remove it in a lift. Below this Rubicon, where business reigns supreme and life is shorn of its frills, a bared head would mark the “sucker.” There are no “ladies” south of Fourteenth Street, only “women”! And Life is punctuated by such notices as “It’s not where you come from, but where you’re going to that matters,” "The shorter the pedigree, the longer the memory”; and “Never underrate yourself. The world will do that for you.” If regulations, born of habit, are so much more important than law in America, it is because they bear the seal of genuine public approval. A minder In a middle-western town might create very little stir, but, if you want to produce the effect of an earthquake or a revolution, try driving in the wrong direction up a one-way street! As long as gunmen and liquorrunners are invested by the newspapers with glamour denied even to the Ziegfeld Follies, it is useless for America to appeal for more effective Justice. And the beginning of the muddle is that politics are a business, not a career. They are as irrevocably based on financial juggling as the operations of Wall Street. If you ask why Prohibition, which does not exist for the moneyed class, and which has eliminated one working day from the labourers’ week by substituting 75 cents worth of the worst of the worst form of intoxicant, “hooch,” for the 5 cent pre-Volstead glass of beer, is not amended, you will probably be told, “Because bootlegging is too profitable and its directors have too big a pull in the Government.” “Made Good.” Youth is always experimental, and, in its passion to be thorough, its aim is lost in details. It is also keenly interested in its experiments, and that is why every American wants to know what you think of his country. Because, at heart, he is so unsure of himself—■ he hankers for a little praise, and richly he deserves it, for the problems of the American continent are just as numerous, as complicated, and divergent as those of Europe. But. in spite of a daily Press which deliberately encourages all that is cheapest and most ephemeral in human nature; in spite of regulations like a strait-jacket and legislation like mosquito netting; in spite of Puritan scruples and Freudian complexes; of graft and “hooch”; of yellow men, red men, and black men, each with their separate problem, America has made good. She has given every man who is willing to work a living wage, and she has turned life from a series of noncommunicating platforms into a ladder up which every human being may climb. She gives no insurance for failure, but opportunity, limited only by the hours of a man’s labour, and a free place in the great American procession, whose goal is success.