CURRENT TOPICS.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LIII, Issue 41, 28 May 1910, Page 4

CURRENT TOPICS.

REFORMATORY SHIPS. The chairman nf the. Wellington Chamber of Commerce thinks it would be a good plan to enlarge the prison system by adding to it a couple of obsolete •warships to which the country might send young men of criminal tendencies. A member of the Upper House who heard the suggestion approved of it. fn our view, Xew Zealand is at present very adequately gaoled. The (Government evidently think so when they snut up some of the .prisons and intend to

follow out Dr. Findlay's scheme of making gaol a home for the evil-doer and a hospital for his mind. It is no oredit t« a country with a few. people in it that the accommodation for criminals should have to be extended. New Zealand has land reformatories for boya and youths, and the boy or youth who cannot be reformed on tJie land cannot be made an' angel at sea. There is not the slightest need for New Zealand to rush into the English and Australian system of reformatory ships. If the youthful criminal population increases there is plenty of room for extension at Burnham and Levin, and a few youths more or jess would not maike a very great tax on the masters. The ship reformatory notion is a very poor one. If obsolete warships are used, the training is useless to make modern sailors of the men. Men do not produce anything on board a ship; tliey are confined in close quarters; they have fewer advantages of reformation than the land gaol inmate; and they represent an unnecessary extension* oi the system. At the moment New Zealand has an obsolete gun-boat, which is used to train boys to be sailors at the State expense. The boys are trained by the State so that they may be useful in an every-day way to private companies. Everybody understands that as a training for the Navy the work done on a boat that was out of date twenty-live years ago is farcical. Unfortunately, because there are reformatory ships in England and Australia, many New Zealanders believe that the Amokura is a punishment ship, whereas it is merely an expensive and useless State experiment for the handling of a few boys who are losing the advantages that most boys on shore possess. New Zealand is wide enough for all the gaols and reformatories that need to be built without creating floating prisons. The suggestion that one ship should l>e used for good young men and the other for bad would be a handicap to the good young men. ■ NW. is not big enough to treat itself as if it were France or Germany. We don't want obsolete warships in New Zealand waters for any purpose. Their proper place is on the scrap-heap.

PEACE OF THE NATIONS. While Kings and Kaisers are talking about the peace of the world there is frantic haste to build engines made only for war. During the momentary sentiment that has seized the nations, whose representatives have seen a great peacemaker laid in the tomb, there seem to have arisen hopes that the world's peace has come. It has not. Lord Kosebery, always an idealist, whose conssruetiveness is hopelessly outclassed hy 'his beautiful theorisiwgs, asks if it is too

much to hope that the strife of nations shall now cease and that the British Parliament shall settle their differences. Keir Hardie, as will be seen by a cable message received the other day, i 9 disgusted at the military display at, me King's funeral, but it is because Jveir Hardie loves fight that he wants Parliament to keep fighting, and the partystrife to continue. Whatever Lord Rosebery, Keir Hardie or the jvaiser say or do, the dominating instinct of all strong people is to fight, either with wit or sword. We read Lord Rosebery's beautiful words, and him setting forth his graceful ideal and turn to a perusal of an account of fierce fighting in Nicaragua or the shock of men in the Balkans. Every record worth reading is a record of fight, and the instinct is just the same whether it is used to kill meji or to beat the other fellow in a aeroplane race. To achieve universal peace, to make it possible for the nations to ''scrap" their fleets, disband their navies and dismiss their armies, it is necessary to re-ma!ke man. At present he 'is a fighting person, who had nothing to do with the making of his own instincts. What nation is going to undertake the destruction of the instincts? Probably if there is no necessity for armed conflict throughout the world for a long period, the people will lie down in peace, contentment and laziness. But the people who have been hit hard and who have hit back as hard as possible are the people who count in the race. People do lose their instincts certainly, lacking use for them, and perhaps in time man will become dove-like, and quite unlike any of the men on the earth at the present time. The men/who yell lor peace are all fighters, wnich is one of the most curious phases of peace organisation. Fighting for peace keeps the instinct to fight in war alive.

THOSE GERMAN IMMIGRANTS. Recently, in writing of the competition of the nations for men, we endeavored to show that if a man were worth sending to a colony he was the sort of person who was wanted at Home. As a man buys in the best market, irrespective of sentiment, so he naturally sells his best possession—the work of his hands—to the person who will give most for it. Every country desires to get rid of its waste humanity, and these new countries which by some extraordinary coincidence are not producing the natural human increase in proper proportion, want only the best. It is a little unsettling that, according to a cablegram, there is an opinion in Queensland that German immigrants are more desired in Queensland than English.. This may have been tb,e idea of one or two persons interviewed bv the Australian correspondent of the Times, and is not necessarily reliable. That the German is an admirable colonist under the British flag is not only a compliment to the colonist hut to the nation that gave him rue chance of being a colonist. Even the Times would not suggest that Germany colonised Australia, "or that ■people from the Fatherland made it possible for German immigrants to attain a superior place in the affections of the Queensland farmer, sugar-grower or railwavganger. The assumption seems to be that England is not sending her best to Australia, but that the Germans who have recently sone to that country are the best the Fatherland produces.' This appears to be a weakness on the part of the German nation, and certainly points to dissatisfaction with conditions of life in the Homeland. The Times' expedient is to populate the waste place of the Empire by ''sending out our town children young." Necessarily, these children would be What officialdom calls "wastage." Tf it were not so. their parents would probably care to have a sav in the matter of their deportation. If "waste" children are capable of being strong, virile citizens of Australia, or New Zealand, it seems that the place of their birth has need of them. This docs not seem to have much to do with the superiority of the adult Gorman immigrant, and it cannot be supposed that batches of English children deposited in Australia would learn the discipline, sobriety and intelligence which seems to have struck a correspondent as being the characteristics of some Germans. The correspondent says that the economic, remedy—that is. the remedy that will cure adult English immigrants in Queensland and make them the equal 1 of the Germans—is healthy work outside the Motherland's crowded cities,and' the educational remedy, that of jiving every lad a sound physical and disciplinary training. The suggestion seems to be, therefore, that German specially trains lads in the country, and gives them sound education in order that thev may leave Germany and become Britishers in Queensland. 'Which is absurd.