This Passenger Business

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 538, 15 December 1928, Page 27

This Passenger Business

Kipling Writes on World-End And Week-End Habits

God made men; God made women, and then He made passengers. Mr. Rudyard Kipling has many amusing—and not a few wise—things to say of passengers in general, and of those who had adopted the “Worldsnd habit” in particular, at the annual dinner of the Liverpool Shipbrokers’ Benevolent Society at Liverpool centlyQuoting the above lines, he added: "This libel is based on the cruel superstition that if you put people into a ship, and roll them round TJshant, by Bn; time they are decanted at their first port, they look and behave like nothing on the face of the waters, except passengers. “1 expect that this accounts for the way we were treated within human memory,” continued Mr. Kipling. "Our cabins used to open directly into the dining saloon, and we were warned by notices on the mahogany inlaid mizzen-mast, which comes through the table, that we were under the authority of the master, and that •the limit of his authority was the needs of the case, having regard to the seoirity of the ship and those on board.’ "But now that we have imposed the world-end habit on the week-end habit, the case Is altered.

scheme of things. This—and it is not a little matter.

"When we are home again, and have arranged the snapshots of ourselves standing in front of the Pyramids or the Parthenon, we have, at the lowest, realised that there are other lands than ours where people live their own lives in their own way, and seem quite happy about it.

“And when interest in one’s neighbour, curiosity about his housekeep-

“So long as we passengers muster at boat-stations with our belts on, and do not try to alter the ship’s course or set her alight, we can do absolutely what we please. And we do. “We arrive in 20,000-ton liners to assault lovely and innocent coast towns, a thousand of us, under cover of a gas attack by 200 motor-cars. "We roar through the streets, a pillar of dust by day". We come back at night, with our picture postcards, to dance to amplified gramophones on promenade decks till It is time to call the boarding parties away to carry the next place of interest on the programme.

ing and understanding of his surroundings are waked in hundreds of thousands of hearts, they make for tolerance, goodwill, and so peace. •‘Much of this good the world owes to those big companies who foresaw that after the war people would need a little fresh air and exercise, and supplied it. I do not accuse them of undiluted benevolence: but organisations that have to visualise the full circuit of the globe, as a matter of daily routine, are given—gloriously given—to building better than they know. The history of Liverpool since the Restoration is proof. “The mere constructive imagination used to order and equip a port that serves every sea far outmarches what is known as “imagination” in the imaginative callings. The demands on it are more incalculable, the difficulties of execution greater, the penalties of failure more severe. “But these trifles do not affect us passengers. All we demand of you is to be taken everywhere as punctually as by train, as cheaply and as quickly as possible, in the greatest luxury, and, of course, in absolute safety. Nothing more.”

"And this prodigious ♦tourist traffic is increasing,” continued Mr. Kipling. “Time and distance only excite it to wilder effort. There is a man at this table who expressed his regret to me that he could not for the moment- —for the moment, mark you—include the Galapagos Islands, where the gianf tortoises come from, in a tourist itinerary. “Well, even supposing we may be able next year to cruise about scratching our initials on turtle-back sterns, what is the good of us?

“Apart from our dividend-earning capacity, what moral purpose do we passengers subserve in the general