CURRENT TOPICS.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LIII, Issue 131, 12 September 1910, Page 4

CURRENT TOPICS.

THE BUTT RAILWAY LINE, A small matter of £35,000 is required to finish the duplication and straightening of the Hutt railway. Everybody knows all about it, for this few miles of work has been in hand for seven years. It was mainly undertaken because the Wellington and suburban people were in such a hurry that they wanted to shorten the railway journey to the Hutt by twenty minutes or half an hour. And so by the time it is finished, this work, which will in no way help the real production or wealth of the land, will have cost £335,000. Everybody believes that Wellington is crowded and has no outlet and that the reclamation of the foreshore between Kaiwarra and Hutt will be a tremendous boon. But at the southern end of Wellington are unoccupied Miramar, sparsely-peopled Seatoun, and stragglinsr Island Bav—room for three or four Wellingtons. Wellington can push out along the Manawatu line if it wants to, but the State, which is so anxiouß to straighten the Hutt line, treats the hill line to a suburban service that is by no means vigorous or frequent. The money spent on the reclamation of that foreshore cannot do New Zealand any good, but will very probably be an excellent) thing for land speculators and the class' of person who has made Wellington land dearer than go.ld. In order to serve a section of people, an enormously expensive work is painfully undertaken with money that should certainly have been : used for roads or railwavs that are really needed. The pathetic method of making that line will become historic. Yet some have been found who allege that economy was practiced. To make a sea wall, for instance, stone was brought across the harbor from Pencarrow by scow. There was an army of men and officials over there, a railroad and a quarry. The stone was loaded into scows and measured on the Pencarrow side. Sometimes a scow took half a day to get aeross. and very likely a few tons accidentally fell overboard on the journey. Some of it may have been washed away when it got to Kaiwarra, or Ngahauranga, or wherever it was supposed to stav, and nobody felt anxious, because there were plenty of years to keep on getting more stones from Pencarrow or Paekakariki. There are spots in New Zealand, where if the same money had been -spent on roading or railroading, there would have been a definite chance of return for the expenditure. There is no need for the Wellin<rtonian to rush to Petone—and he could not rush much slower than the duplication. There is also no need for the reclamation while the southern end is unpeopled, and there never was, nor can there be, any use for land speculation which for years has been the biggest blight in the capital city. THE WANE OF THE NOVEL. According to a writer in an English periodical the novel in book form is rapidly losing its vo<rn<>. Even when it took the shape of three volumes at half-a-guinea it used to be a magic spell. Now, however, it has arrived at a mercenary length, the common forinula being 00,000 words, and is dispen* ed to a discriminating public practically by the yard. Of course, a literary product must adjust itself in the end to the public audience to which it is addressed. The novel has become a diurnal production, and the dose for its initiates is one capsule per day. The bestpaying part of 'Eb.e reading pyramid is ■ naturally the IboSe, which in these days is coterminous with; the' public. Two { hundred years ago, when women in Bri- i Ifejn began to read, the essay formed, the ' mse of a new literature. But our own I

which, from Feilding to Meredith, attracted tho aristocrats of letters, has grown to be democratic by virtue of an alimentary product. It has become a market, in other words, to which substantial spoils are attached, and from which no one but an enthusiast of the i the lyric, the short story, the ballad and the fairy tale begin more and more to attract better writers and better readers. AH the same the continuous novel has remained the staff of life for the literary multitude. Formerly 500 novels were written that one might survive, to 5000. The play, the opera, the essay, fall into the hands of stouter men. Meanwhile the seekers, the novelists, with their autobiographies, their erotics, and their numberless vain inventions, swarm and multiply literally by their hundreds. Still ,the newspaper press is cutting them out, the snippet papers are crowding them into their corners, and the magazines are setting them "a main" that it is hard to throw. As for the poor critic, who lr.is to follow them with the expedition of a ouick-change artist during their brief sojourn on the literary horizon, he is simply a person who earns the sincerest sympathy of a world that is not always too generous.