The Sun 42 WYNDHAM STREET, AUCKLAND TUESDAY, APRIL 9, 1929 LOCAL POLITICS AND ETHICS

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 633, 9 April 1929, Page 8

The Sun 42 WYNDHAM STREET, AUCKLAND TUESDAY, APRIL 9, 1929 LOCAL POLITICS AND ETHICS

IF Auckland fails next month to secure better local government than it has suffered or deserved during the past two years, the cause of failure will be attributable only to the . apathy of electors or some other weakness on their part. There can be no other excuse for repeating an unsatisfactory experience. Representative men are doing their utmost to impress upon the community the necessity of appointing able business men and earnest, intelligent citizens as municipal administrators. One wants to be optimistic right up to the declaration of the poll, but a shadow of pessimism obtrudes with the suggestion that such collective wisdom will prove to have been nothing more, as usual, than a counsel of perfection. The right men still are laggard in coming forward to serve the community as successfully as most of them serve themselves in business, and the wrong men with excellent intentions are as eager as ever to get places in local government and exercise their vanity on poor municipal service. There is some hope of better results, however, in the fact that civic consciousness of the need of more efficient local government is much more alert than usual, and infinitely more active and serviceable in its expression. For example, the vital question of local government in Auckland received yesterday the special attention of a magistrate, a university professor and a progressive association of manufacturers. Each commentator in a different way but with similar sagacity made it clear that the subject called for serious consideration and constructive action. Mr. E. C. Cutten, S.M., advised Rotarians, who prosper in a genial sphere of their own and do not always put their admirable motto to the best service in the wider workaday world, to use their business qualifications for the benefit of the community. Then, Professor H. Belshaw, in opening a kind of promising night-school for members of local bodies and the general public, demonstrated the importance of municipal finance and revealed its tendency to beat the proverbial sparks at flying upward. Lastly, the Manufacturers’ Association deplored the rush of candidates for municipal honours and noted the prospective confusion of voters at the May Day poll. Without any practice of a derogatory spirit, it may be observed that the magisterial comments on the ethics of business and the duties of business men in relation to their community were a little contradictory. Mr. Cutten mentioned as a surprising fact, for instance, that there were filed last year at the Magistrate’s Court no fewer than between 15,000 and 16,000 plaints, also that, while there were at least two parties in each case, in each case one and sometimes both showed a lack of business ethics. “But these cases were only the ones which found their way into Court. Think of the number which did not!” Many citizens have already thought a lot about that missing number, but thinking does not appear to do a great deal toward improving business ethics. And if it be true (as Mr. Cutten has averred) that business gives men wide traits which include organising capacity, width of vision and honesty—exactly the traits which are needed most in local government—it is to be hoped that those of the commercial community who may respond to the call to civic duty will not come from the multitude whose plaints at the Magistrate’s Court “showed a lack of ■ business ethics.” The professional lesson to municipal administrators (Dr. Belshaw’s first class included many prominent members of local bodies) went nearest to the core of the necessity for better and more efficient civic government. With essential wisdom the lecturer took the precaution to explain that it was not his intention to make the special course popular in the ordinary sense of the word. No doubt as the professor goes deeper into municipal finance he will find more reason for unpopularity than for the opposite sentiment. As it is, Dr. Belshaw has discovered that local body expenditure throughout the Dominion now closely rivals the State’s extravagant financial outlay. National taxation increased by 40 per cent, between 1917 and 1926, but that expansion was really trivial in comparison with the grotesque inflation of rates which, in the same period, increased by over 100 per cent. It could be shown that New Zealand ratepayers have gained many improved facilities for social comfort and happiness in return for their money, but it would not be difficult for a professor of economics or for anybody else, to prove that much of the tremendous expenditure represented muddled squandermania. #4. FRENCH AND THE SYLLABUS GEOGRAPHICAL isolation, and the fact that the nearest neighbour is an English-speaking nation, give New Zealanders a pronounced tendency to become a unilingual race. This tendency will become a settled fact if the arguments of Mr. F. L. Combs, a Wellington schoolmaster, are accepted without dispute, The assertion that modern languages, particularly French, are useless to any more than one per cent, of students is held to be a valid reason for their absolute deletion from the secondary school syllabus. But it seems also a convincing reason why the methods of teaching them should be improved. Admittedly the student of French who fulfils the immediate aim of his secondary school career by getting a matriculation pass will not find his knowledge of the tongue very helpful after a year or two has elapsed. The same may be said of Latin, except that after wading through the involved futility of Caesar’s Gallic Wars the scholar may retain enough knowledge of Latin roots to help in his reading of English later in life. But if French and Latin are to be attacked for their practical uselessness, what is to be said of algebra, geometry, chemistry, and physics in relation to the aid they may give the average citizen in his commercial or professional career? Within five years of his leaving school the mysterious algebraic symbols convey nothing more than the memory of hours spent in acute discomfort. Boyle’s law and the matter of a theorem by Pythagoras lose any significance they ever had. Should the boy or girl specialise after matriculating, then the position is altered. But the same argument weighs in favour of languages. What New Zealand has not realised is that the standard of learning implied by that be-all and end-all, the matriculation examination, is mediocre by comparison with the standard demanded of the well-informed man overseas. Its primary value is in its encouragement of perseverance and application, and languages have their place in that scheme as much as any other subject. There is, too, their cultural significance. The French scholar turned out by a New Zealand school may be utterly unable to comprehend French as it is spoken, but he will be able to translate, possibly laboriously, from a French play or newspaper, and has the groundwork to help him if ever the occasion for serious study arises. There are many ways in which the New Zealand syllabus could be improved—there is a sad lack of attention to New Zealand history—but care must be taken that it is not so shaped as to produce a nation of yokels. French or at least one other modern tongue, properly taught, has a place in any general syllabus. If the present results are so entirely ineffective, then the teaehers must look to themselves.