THE CATASTROPHE OF COMFORT.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume L, Issue 59, 15 May 1907, Page 2

THE CATASTROPHE OF COMFORT.

.Men have always lived the strenuous life. In the olden days, there were no railways to run over embankments in order to rid the world of surplus humanity, a great many diseases hail not been invented, motor cars were not, ami people believed tliey were! going at an enormous pace when Uie heat coach horses took them to their destination at fifteen miles an hour. The natural disposition of man to live the sirenuous life showed itself in lighting one another. The old time man lixed up his little differences with a club or a sword or a mould full of boiling pitch or lead. It cheered the old-timer to see his enemv take his last journey. It raised his'spirits. It gave ze.-,t to his life. It was the strenuous life a< the old-limn understood it. A man might {I rink enough cups of sack to give him heart disease and fall down dead. Jlis friends would f-ay the devil took him. To-day we focus the cold eye of science on the person who is always dropping down dead, and saying nothing about Providence by striking the sinner.

We progress We g : 't greater speed even in heart disease. We have cancel' and appendicitis, and even dying machines and wireless telegraphy; everything 'designed to make man believe lie is more comfortable and rapid than before. lie is certainly mole rapid, lie i* certainly not more comfortable-. There were not so many sluggish liverß in the old days of strenuousness. .Men used to use their feet for get.ing around. Now there is the railway train, the hvjtor car and the electric tram, the ocean greyhound, and that inestimable boon, the telegraph, which makes it unnecessary to undertake long journeys. Uis not enough to gallop nowadays. One must fly. If Santos Duiuont or Lord Kelvin or Hiram Maxim could invent a gun to shoot passengers from one place to another wifu a maximum a*. speed and a minimum of exertion either would be acclaimed as a saviour uf men. Tkere are degrees of modern-day strenuousness.

For instance, the residents of a town or t'ity suburb who have to get to tho centre every tliiy to work, may tramp the intervening three or four miles every day year in and yeur oui. The hardships of the tramp does not occur to them while it is necessary, it keeps l hum tit and free from grizzling, gives them a zest for meals, is nature's ionic. Hut the other suburbs have a tramway service. Why not Wetville? The agitation is completely successful. Wetville gets its service. It used to take W'etvillians one hour lo tramp into tile centre. Now ihe tram does it in ten minutes or a quarter of an hour. Wetville alters its hajbiis. It is strenuous in tin? new fashioned way. It can'; bear to trot. it wants to gallop. "Vaterfamilias" writes lo the papers that the tram service to Wetville

is slow. in Melbourne ur KlondyVe or Buenos Ayres the trams do a similar distance in live minutes. The precious time of citizens must he considered. The. valuable moments if business people is of the greatest possible importance. Paterfamilias forgets that not so long ago he tool; an

hour of his more precious time to do what he now does in ten minutes. ]le| also complains that the cars on the line are not large enough. The tired folk of W'etviile have gone soft in the legs. They have livers and hearts ami ihiugs nowadays. Citizens insist. Corporations obey—and there are Brooklyn tram accident-.

A train or a tram accident may kill a score or two of people nowadays. !n ilie old kind of slrcnuousness the passengers would have taken quite a number of years to kill each other with clubs or in hnmi-io-hand battles, Think what a splendid devastator a modern) iron ship in collision with another ship is. Ktiough people, may lie killed in one or two minutes in a modern collision as in the old-lime naval engagement, when the wooden walls sailed full speed for each otle'r. did little dam-ge except to start a ]ilank or two and allowed the hairy genticmcu on hoard to hack e.-u-h o.hcr with cutlasses, dirks, and other amusing weapons. Wh it miserable toys people uS"d to tight Willi in the olden times! Imagine Admiral Fawkes and his squadron "lighting'' the •Spanish Armada, or the archers of Hast ings, running up agaiiK hilf-adozcii men anncil with l,cc rhiliclds and «. little .Maxim or so. We see a telegraph boy saunter up to our house nowadays

with a message that left a spot hundreds of miles away half an hour at>o. There is nothing to suggest the spla»hed rider on the half-dead hoive ajmui a modern telegram. The telegraph boy doesn't fall down dead with the fatigue of a two hundred mile ride. It isn't

the splashed rider or ihe telegraph boy who has revolutionised things. .It is the pale scientific student, the man of thought.

.Men who have been responsible for the most splendid slaughter with liendish weapons have been notoriously gentle. One of the inventors of death-dealing weapons was a celrgymaii. It seems so unscientific to bash one's brains out

with a club, when by the u>e of a J clergyman's invention one may scatter the limbs of a couple of dozen by merely pressing a button or turning ;i lever. Our forefathers were such siv ages. An insult was wiped out wun a stupid-looking horse pistol. It is to much easier to issue a writ for one thousand pounds damages, and bcsiaes it gives the lawyers a chance Once upon a time, the stupid English made a number of things that were what ibey reputed to be. They used leather for boots and preferred steel to hoop-iron, if you dug a knife into a marble pillar the paint wouldn't peel oil' the rotten wood. The age of modern slrcuuousness bad not begun. Possibly if the old-lime bootmaker sold the customei a pair of brown paper boots the customer would seek hint with a bludgeon. In modern times the customer would try to sell him a horse aged twenty with a certilicate sworn before a J.P. that he was rising live. Methods are so dill'eient nowadays.

Consider tlie comfort one has nowadays. One is permitted the use of all modern conveniences Our forefathers knew no tiling of, and in return one may work all day every week during each month for many years so that tlie lined product of modern, times—the millionaire -

may evolve. It is the privilege of the many, that most modern inventive, thought has evolved the millionaire. In the early days there was not so much theft of brains. Slight ruled and a men became rich by being able to hit harder than the other .fellow. To-ilay the mightiest force is brain-power, but the owners of the brain-power don't own the cash. The feudal baron robbers were not such great rascals as thq trust-rob-bers of to-day, who start out with the intention of achieving comfort for themselves and end up by robbing the millions of all comfort whatever. We have paid dearly for our comforts. In the days of discomfort we didn't know there was such a tliitig\as an appendix. ,\vo didn't know the bottom had fallen out of the universe if the paper was late, and wo didn't declare war by cable and mow men down at a distance of twenty miles. We haven't got any. motor cars, and there were fewer lunatic asylums; tram cars didn't, exist, and the little liver pill was not wanted. Nobody had mentioned Hying machines, and consequent ly nobody dropped a picric bomb into our I>ack garden. The old heroic way of using blasting powder was a little rough on the user. People don't like to take direct risks nowadays.

The modern passion for comfort has "lightly altered the eost,o[ land tenun. No British laborer gets a few acres of land for sevenpcnce a year as lie did in the times of William the Conqueror. Those comfortless times did not permit a man to have all the conveniences po3silil-! in a space of thirty feet square "with hot and cold water," and enough real estate at the back to adequate'! v dry a baby's bib. In the olden dav's peop.V' who hadn't got any teatli had iu cliew with their gums. To day we can afford to lose our teeth at sixteen ycats of age because we have dentists. Our rage for comfort will evolve a. tootlile.-s foods that our forefathers continued (o race, but science, which vetoes 111:1st live on, will probably reduce the irt of feeding to tabloid form before long, and we shall suck enough sustenance in live minutes to last a day. The Ideas of comfort have varied from the comfort that could be obtained by wearing a hundred-weight of steel armor to the comfort that can be obtained by wearing a three-inch collar on a two-inch nesk and a six shoe on an eight size foot. Britons, who once believed that a suit of blue print was chie and comfortable, hut clo not now believe in such simplicity, and the trade in wood has consequently declined. In the Tace for comfort most people suffer discomforts and generally all their lives. The millionaire usually puts in all his life raking gold together for the comfort of his son—and his son may be a Thaw or a .Si an ford White. People do not kill decadents or criminals with a bludgeon nowadays, so Nature takes up the contract and kills them gradually by robbing thorn of brains. Man has risen superior to his instinct.

Nature may have been good cnougii for fools of .the middle ages, but she isn't good enough for the twentieth century citizen. In return for giving Nature the "go by," Nature gives him cancer or consumption. Nature is Uie kind of a fairy godmother who gives lier godchildren whatever they are asking for. Nature invented wealth and man the currency. Man calls the currency wealth. A man may have a million pounds' worth of currency and his heart may not be worth threepence. He is not rich. His i 3 comfortless coinfort, ilia cash is a catastrophe. The ■ man with fifty shillings in the savings kank and fifty years of healthy life in front of him is a richer man than a Carnegie if Carnegie has to die next year. If health is wealth the people with the least currency are the wealthiest. In time, with the comforts of civilisation that are being thrust upon man, the man nuisance may abate. God made man but not money. Most men would rather have money than God, and money isn't wealth. There were no gold coins in the Garden of Eden, and that was the wealthiest spot on earth while it existed. Neither Rockefeller nor Carnegie had any option over it. Man didn't stick to it. He wanted "comfort." He got it. lie has it now. He is going to get more of it. in the years to be he'll have to be wrapped in pink wadding to keep l he draft from him. That is the trend ol modernity.