American Notes

Taranaki Daily News, Volume XXXXV, Issue 259, 1 December 1903, Page 4

American Notes

(Dunedin Star Correspondent.) THE PANAMA CANAL. A special envoy from Colombia has arrived in this country, and is now in Washington. It is understood (though unofficial) that he carries with him a demand for £5,000,000, instead of £2,000,000, and a guarantee of perpetual sovereignty over the strip, for the privilege of building the iwaterway, coupled with a threat that if the new proposition were not accepted promptly, negotiations would be opened with other Powers. This pretence on the part of Colombia is too transparent «o delude anybody in the United States. No European or any other Government would enter upon any enterprise of that sort at the present stage of affairs. When England, two years ago, revoked the ClaytonBulwer Treaty, and consented to give the United States a free hand in building and controlling a canal -across Nicaragua, she virtually surrendered any intention she may have had to build or obtain possession of any inter-oeeanic waterway in Central America. This attempted "hold up" will not win. WHY WOMEN WORK FOR WAGES. The economic position of women has l-eceived large attention 1 of late from different standpoints, and with widely-varying conclusions. Some have assumed that the wage-earning woman is a perverse creature, voluntarily and needlessly making war on the established and natural order of things, and deliberately and with malice aforethought filching from men the employment that rightly belongs to them. Over against this we have the view of an able writer in a woman's journal, who maintains that it is mainly man's fault that woman works. ''She works because her father was or is incompetent, or a drunkard, or unthrifty, or a poor business man, or because he married too soon, or along wifch other men he carried the home industries out of the home and made them activities of great factories." From this premise the writer concludes that in the last analysis it will be found that it is always man who is to be censured (if any censure is due) for the latter-day entering of women into pursuits which men have labelled as strictly masculine. In view of this, then, it seems that the majority of woman wageearners are but the victims of adverse circumstances, and only the craziest imagination could concur that ml}Hpn§ of women would voluntarily toil in mills " and offices through summer's blistering heat, when trees, wild flowers, woods, and sea beckon to holiday-making-, or that in the bitter weather of midwinter they would brave the terrors of blizzard for anything less vital than to keep body and soul together. Instead of being a problem of perversity, it is insisted that the wage-earning j s none otne f eh , an the result of a social evolution set in motion and maintained by man himself,