CURRENT TOPICS.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LIV, Issue 11, 7 July 1911, Page 4

CURRENT TOPICS.

CLEAN TOWNS. The discussion of bubonic plague, the disclosure of some "jungle" conditions in Auckland, and the general publicity given to "town planning" have, stirred some New Zealand authorities into activity. Auckland, for instance, is in a state of ferment by '■' spring-cleaning." It is demolishing houses in has forgotten to destroy for the hist twenty years; it nas carefully intruded into places where the public food is sold or cooked; it -as entered the people's back yards, and has invaded depots where filth has been deposited for a quarter of a century. Considered nationally, the loss of a life or two by plague is a benefaction. New Zealand is peculiarly liable to the evils that attend overcrowding and municipal neglect, mainly on account of the temporary nature of its structures. With plague to light. Auckland has been bound to face the question of dirt, and perhaps—who knows? -it may yet become quite common for Sew Zealand towns to be kept as clean, say. as Dutch towns or English cities. In most New Zealand towns—and this is particularly true of (lie four centres —there is absolutely no organised and continuous method of keeping an area, clean and sanitary. Somebody makes a. disclosure and the authorities act. The disclosure is forgotten, and the authorities relapse. Nearly always there are too few men whose duty it is to see that a. town is kept clean. They cannot overtake the work, and so it is not done.' In innumerable cases builders have an absolutely free hand in the erection of potential slums, and there are very few attempts being made to build either beautiful or permanent towns. One new town is very much like another as far as its ugliness, insanitation and general .''Blapidttsh" style of workmanship is con'.prned. with the resultyj-hat 'ithe conditions that,, take -JHinHp i r i'years to pfro<lu«« in bMot

every city of New Zealand the organisation in regard to general cleanliness and hygiene is utterly bad, and there is no excuse for it in a community that believes it knows all there is to bo known about progress.

RACE SUICIDE IN FRANCE. Statistics for 1910, which were published in Paris a few weeks ago, show that the problem of race suicide is still one of serious importance in France. Dr. Bertillon, the noted anthropologist', lias declared hiinself very despondent over the latest figures. There were 774,358 births and 703,777 deaths in France last year. The births numbered 4000 more than they did in 1909, but the two years were the least productive uuring a whole century. In 1859 over one million children were born in France. Tnere was little change till 1868, but since that year the Ibirth-rate has declined steadily, and during the past four years the number has never reached 800,000. Dr. Bertulon says that the increase last year is insignificant, and the decrease in the deathTate fails to improve the position. The decrease is observable only among children under twelve months of age, and the , only reason why there are fewer deaths is that fewer children are born. The returns appear to the anthropologist to show one gleam of brightness; the number of marriages celebrated in France last year, 309,289, is one of the highest on record. Since the enactment in 1907 of a law abolishing a few of the amazing formalities which surrounded marriage in France the number of marriageß has increased by some 5000 a year. It is still not easy to get married, but it is less- difficult than> it was four or five years ago. Now men and women over thirty years of ago may marry without' oboaining the consent of their parents. The removal of some of the restrictionshas had the desired effect on the marriage rate, but the birth-rate still remains uninfluenced. This suggests, of course, the alarming inference that the problem of race suicide is not to be solved in France simply by increasing the number of marriages.

"THE GOOD OLD TIMES." Happily executions are of comparatively ) infrequent occurrence nowadays in Great Britain and its dependencies beyond the seas, but in days gone by—"the good old times," as persons of a sentimental turn of mind are wont to call them—the office of public hangman was no sinecure. Hangings were almost as frequent as weddings a century and a-half ago, and tne extreme penalty of the law was exacted for offences now punishable with a fine or a short term of imprisonment. The true story told by Dickens in the preface to "Barnaby Rudge" furnishes a case in point. This is the tale of the young wife—she was only eighteen—whose husband was seized by a pressgang, she and her children being afterwards turned into the streets to starve. The furniture of the little home had been sold to defray some debt alleged to be due by the husband. Subsequently 7 this unfortunate girl visited a draper's shop and snatching some coarse linen from the counter attempted to conceal it beneath her cloak. Being observed by the snopman, she tried to replace the stuff on the counter, but was arrested and thrown into gaol. At her trial she pleaded that "she had lived in credit and wanted for nothing until a pressgang came and stole her husband away from her; but since then she had had no bed to lie upon, nothing to give her children to cat, and they were almost naked, and perhaps she might have done something wrong, for she hardly knew what she did." The truth of her Btory was confirmed by the parish officers, but the inhuman law of the good old times decreed that she must die; and so they hanged her. A year or two earlier—about 1780—Phoebe Harris, convicted of coining, was hanged, or rather slowly strangled, and afterwards burned. Even Blackstone, the great legal luminary, considered the burning alive of women for civil offences a great concession to their sex. "The decency due to the sex forbids the exposing and public mangling of their bodies," he said; "their sentence is to be drawn to the gallows and there to he burnt alive. The humanity of the English nation has authorised, by a tacit consent, an almost universal mitigation of such parts of these judgments as savor of torture and cruelty." The English-speaking world have made some progress in "humanity" since those barbarous words were penned.