The Daily News. MONDAY, MARCH 13. GIANTS OF THE PAST.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LIII, Issue 260, 13 March 1911, Page 4

The Daily News. MONDAY, MARCH 13. GIANTS OF THE PAST.

Extract from an excellent paragraph by a country correspondent: ''Reminding one of the heroism of the settlers' wives in the early days. They (heroic settlers' wives) are not so frequently met with as in the long ago." If it is true it is at least ungallant. As it is not true, the nation will bear up and get on with its work. It has been the fashion in every age and among all folk to believe that the backbone of the people is not so stiff as it used to be. Dear old gentlemen get hold of their sons and grandsons and tell wondrous fairy tales about the great things they were able to accomplish in youth, emphasising a belief that the attributes of the human animal change in fifty years or so; assuming that although "a thousand years . . . . are but as yesterday seeing that they are passed f a watch in the riight," the instincts and accomplishments of a people change in a few decades. There is a good deal of romance about the term "early days," and in Now Zealand it does not mean the days before William the Conqueror, but merely forty or fifty years ago. The "early days" women and men were not specially manufactured for pioneering. They all came from crowded countries. They did not know they were heroines and heroes. They tackled the troubles that came to them and took the joys. They were in no essential different to the people they succeeded, and the people who have succeeded them are in no essential different or inferior to them. It is the occasion that makes the hero or the heroine. Because there are no brave natives to fight nowadays, and it is impossible to fight bush fires on treeless country, the instinct to fight trouble has not died. It is merely dormant, waiting for oppoTtunity. In lesser things than pioneering, moderns are frequently convinced that, there are no giants nowadays. Even the average football barracker will tell you in confidence that football is not what it used to be,, and that there are no men nowadays like the old leatherpunters. It cannot be proved, for it is impossible to rouse the dead to try conclusions with the living, just as it is impossble to Teproduce the conditions of 1840 in order to test the pioneering qualities of the people of 1911. Heroism and the pioneering spirit are not given only to the large and the strong or even to the person who has been bred and born in the midst of danger or hardships. The factory hand of ? crowded city under the necessary circumstances may became an heroic pioneer, the ?;tj servant is not necessarily a coward on either side of a swollen river, and there is no division of humanity that possesses all the virtues and quaU> ties so admired by everybody o \y. serve ,thc town or the town man, &n3 <sfthnot conceive that, heroism or the pioneering spirit can hide behind a hobble skirt or a belltopper (to be a little Irish), but it is the occasion that produces the real man and the real woman. For instance, we know a man. He is a very particular sort of person. He iftsists that the : sheets of his bed shall be well aired. He will walk a whole "block to a crossing rather than step over a muddy road. He becomes very angry at unpunctual trains. He has written to corporations demanding to know why the street cars don't run more conveniently. He is particular about the height of his collar and the color of his tie. But for many years that man slept under the sky, fought i nature and savage man, got wet and | got dry, thirsted, starved, and forded I rivers, climbed mountains, sought gold, buried his mates in desert sand, helped his fellow settler—in fact, just pioneered. Can we believe that after a lapse of a few years the sons of such men, and the daughters .of the pioneering women, icannot fight and pioneer, too? We have a habit of admiring the people who are under the ground. Humanity frequently starves its great ones during their lives. The great artist paints a picture and receives mere bread and money for it. He dies. His work seems only worthy when he is dead, and the millionaires struggle for possession of his masterpiece. Few giants are anything but pigmies during their lives, and the added stature isn't much good to them in the cemetery. Sudden catastrophe, national calamity, urgent necessity awakens those human attributes dormant during normal periods. The San Francisco earthquake, for instance, herded together the wives of millionaires and the wives of street hawkers, and gave each the opportunity for the display of qualities as common in the first century as in this last. Humanity wants "a good time" but knows what to do with a bad one. Nature is infinitely patient in reproduction. We might argue, if we believed that the old spirit was dead, that it would be insane to tackle a naval war because Nelson and his "tarry-breeks" were dead and nature had forgotten to replace them. We might hold, because the brave old New Zealand pioneers had passed away, that it was no good to struggle on with theinferior clay the Creator was moulding to-day. We ask in a helpless kind of way, where are the political giants of the past, the men. of deeds, the great leaders? How do we get along without Julius Caesar? What will happen to us now that Sir George Grey is dead? Somebody even went so far as- to complain the other day that latter-day potatoes were not like the old-time potatoes. The simple fact is that a reproduction of old-time conditions would spur present people to tackle them. We can't cross swollen rivers in a mercantile office and perform feats of bush-fire heroism in a draper's shop, but, if necessary, we can transform the mercantile man into a pioneer and the draper into a hero, heroism being interpreted as an ability to tackle the trouble that comes one's way. We do not believe that the old-time folk were better folk because they lived in (he long afro, or that their deeds are impossible of performance by the modern.

Nobody stood aghast at the thought of getting to Thibet because most of the Crimean heroes were dead, and nobody sits with folded hands in the presence of a catastrophe because none of our greatgrandfathers are there to "take hold."

The impulses that stirred our great grandfathers are the impulses that stir us. When we allege that we are not so good as the "old-timers" we are merely hankering for an opportunity to illustrate that there are just as many perpendicular vertebrae as there used to b«.