CURRENT TOPICS

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LIII, Issue 227, 19 January 1911, Page 4

CURRENT TOPICS

BOROUGH ENGINEER. The Borough Council's action in deciding to appoint an overseer or working foreman is a step in the right direction and will be generally endorsed by ratepayers. An appointment of the kind has been wanted for a long time, as the "News" has from time to time tried to point out. The engineer is an overworked man, and has been for the last year or two. He lias had his office work to do, drawing plans and specifications, getting out estimates, seeing to sanitation, etc.; to superintend the special work going on in the borough; and to supervise tho work of the whole of the outside staff, working, perhaps, in half-a-dozen or more places at the same time. It has been a tall order, and the wonder is that Mr. Kendall has managed as well as he has It would have been unreasonable to expect him to go on as he has been doing. It would have been neither fair to him nor the borough. The wonder to as is that the Council has not made an alteration before now, as it was obvious to the most superficial observer that adequate value was not being received from the expenditure, particularly in respect to street work. To keep an eye on and direct the latter is in itself one man's work. There are so many things in the borough to attend to. Most of them may he small, but if not attended to right away make for inelliciency and lead to greater expenditure in the end. II shouid not be necessary for a rati payer to .write to the Press and draw attention to some work that had been overlooked. With a proper system of supervision in force the necessity for doing so should not exist. Even if lie had the time, which he has not. it surely is not sound business for a comparatively highly-paid ollicial like the engineer to devote his time to these detail matters. A three-poiinds-a-weckman, conversant with the work, would do as well as the engineer, supposing the latter gave up the whole of his time to the duties. Close supervision is wanted, and this the Council could never have under a system like that obtaining up to now. We are very glad the suggestion to put things on a sounder footing came from the .Mayor, and that he has been aide to convince the majority of the councillors of the wisdom of the step. That it will produce the results lie anticipates we have not tile slightest doubt.

THE ACiKICULTCTJAL DEPARTMENT. New Plymouth possesses a branch office of thii Agricultural Department, which is generally closed. Naturally the two inspectors, who are the o'dy officials in the special division, are in the country most of the time attending to their duties. Although absence from the office is evidence of the two officials' useful employment, the public seeking a representative of the Department is in a quandary. Formerly when the office of the division was under Hie same roof as that of the Dairying Division, the clerk of the latter attended to enquiries on behalf of the necessarily absent inspectors. Lahlv a lady fanner of tlie Sentry Hill district lost some heifers from a mysterious disease. As it was obviously spreading through the herd she journeyed to New Plymouth to consult an official of the

Department. The office was closed, as the officials were away on duty. A second journay was made, with the same result. This matter is of some importance, for a farmer coming in on urgent business should be able to obtain the services of a Department specially devised to help him. If it. is necessary to have a New Plymouth office (and, of course, it is) it is urgently necessary that it should never be vacant during ordinary ollice hours A youth would at least be able to inform enquirers as to the whereabouts of the ollicials, and he might certainly be the means of saving farmers needless worry, loss and expense. A closed ollice is about as- useful as a caged official.

POOR CANADA. Members of the Canadian House of Commons are "indignantly repudiating" the. attacks made on Canada by British newspapers. Naturally, these attacks must have some effect on immigration, and as the future prosperity of Canada, Australia and New Zealand depends on the number of people who can be induced to enter them, the matter is of general interest. An Englishman who has just left Canada for the United States after some years residence in the big Dominion, writing to a worker on this paper, makes the following remarks, which we print merely as tne opinion of a possibly biassed man: —"Canadians are not loyal to the Old Land. I have talked with many Canadians who went to the war and I asked them why they went. Invariably came the answer, 'The pay; we. could not earn so much a day in the winter here.' Loyalty to the Crown was always a secondary consideration, if, indeed, considered at all. I, like many thousands of Englishmen and Scotchmen and Irishmen, have turned my back for ever on Canada. The Canadian Government is the greatest liar I know. I am disgusted with Canada and; its people, and I am surprised that the greatest fool on earth—.John Bull—should be so dense as he is to the absolute disloyalty and hate of Canadians to him. I am not alone in this—thousands of English people have been stung in Canada and Canadians hate and loathe the sight of an Englishman and hate England, the King, and everything English." That sounds like the fulminations of a disappointed man. If Canadians generally loathed Britain, it would not plan night and day to make Canada more British by making it easier for them to enter and thrive. The point is that no man can gunge the temper of a nation by interviewing units of it. "Birds of a feather flock together," and as in New Zealand so in Canada—the disappointed growler consorts with those of similar tendencies. For instance, New Zealand is the worst country in the world—if the individual makes it so. In short, every man makes his own Canada, his own New Zealand, and his own Australia. It is not the successful toiler, the independent striver, the man with a backbone, who decries the country he works in and gets his bread from. It is the man who has not the initiative to get all the bread he wants who fouls the whole nest.

■WHERE ARE THE GIRLS? When the frantic housewife has tried without success to obtain a domestic servant, she generally accounts for the scarcity of house helps by saying that girls prefer to work in factories. When, as in the case of a large Cliristehurch firm, it is found impossible to obtain girls for factory work, the firm naturally wants to know' wliere the girls have gone to. At least the manager of one firm which wants fifty girls at once to make coats for railway employees knows where some of the girls have gone to, for he pathetically remarks: -fhe loss of girls by marriage this Christmas has been very heavy, and we cannot get others to fill the vacancies." Nationally, it is a very good thing for commerce to lose the services of girls who leave the factories for tneir own kitchens and to become the mothers of the future generation, and although one may he sorry for firms wmch are unwilling to employ men, even when the cheaper worker has left to get married, we may be glad for the country. It is pointed out that th« Government will not permit the importation of girls from Britain for work in the woollen mills of New Zealand, which, in our opinion, is a walleyed policy, from the national point of vie'w. We want women in New ZefJand, and from the point of view taken, it really doesn't matter whether they are domestic servants or mill operatives. If the prohibition against the importation of factory girls were removed, those admitted would have in view the same goal of those girls who left southern factories this Christmastime to become wives. Industrial occupation is after all merely a half-way house between school and the "altar" to the average girl worker, and it is hoped that New Zealand will never have a class of women factory workers who leave the school for the'workroom.. It is infinitely more important to New Zealand to get a wife than a factory girl, but if New Zealand can recruit wives from factory operatives, it seems reasonable to welcome them from crowded Britain. The assumption that a draft of girls will do some Now Zealand girls out of a job is a heresy that will die, and inability to obtain focal supplies of girl workers is proof positive of the absurdity of the prohibition. Any means that are taken for keeping British people out of New Zealand are destructive, and discrimination between domestic servants and factory girls is mere foolishness.