The Daily News. WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 30, 1911. HOW WE WASTE THE WORLD.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LIV, Issue 58, 30 August 1911, Page 4

The Daily News. WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 30, 1911. HOW WE WASTE THE WORLD.

Mr. Chi ozza Honey, M.P., contributed a striking article to the London Daily News recently apropos of the Empire Commission suggested by Sir Wilfrid Laurierand approved by the Imperial Council. It has a bread-and-butter aspect which interests us all. "I think I have before pointed out to a careless public that man has so far simply played ducks and drakes with his world. Now, our world is a very small world. In the scale of worlds, as any student of aatronomy will tell you, the earth" is really not worth' mentioning; it is a mote in the illimitable sea of ether. But there is no need to share in the little which astronomers know to be able to decide that our world is small. The industry of man has already been smitten with practical knowledge of the fact. From iron ore to sables, and from tin to bacon,, the majority of foods and materials have come to be dearer than they .were in | those years not remote, when the com-1 mercial mind, after first having done its best to starve and discourage inventors and scientists, found that there was money in the things which it despised, and used machinery and scientific appliances to play havoc with the world's resources. The recipe of the commercial man for the development of a world is charmingly simple. You scrape together all you can lay hands on, and leave waste for posterity. Is it virgin soil? Then plough and sow and reap until crops refuse to rise, and then pass on to fields and pastures new. Is it timber? Then cut it down, regardless of the fact that the passing of two generations of men will not give back to the world the magnificent trees of which you have robbed it. Is it rubber ? Then sap it and stain it red with homicidal hands, and taste the joys of a rubber boom, piling waste on waste and robbery on robbery. Is it coal? Then mine it hastily, guiltily, at whatever cost of life and lamb, so that miners may rot in hovels on the hillside (is not one bed enough for three men, seeing that each works only eight hours a day?), even while there be few, even in a land which knows seven months of winter, who can afford to heat their bedrooms? Is it cotton? Then grow it with dirt-cheap labor, and manipulate it, and hold it up, while the cotton masters of the world meet in solemn conclave and decide that it is necessary for mills to go on short time in order to checkmate the cotton speculators. Such and such are the ways in which the world is now run. Superior beings in the other inhabited worlds which almost certainly exist, armed with the instruments of observation which doubtless their creatures have fashioned, are probably grinning to see what an awful mess we make of it, and to note how, in the parts of theearth reputed to be richest, not one man in a hundred is free from mean and sordid cares. What the world has now seriously to set itself to oppose to the wilful waste of the commercial mind is the scientific conservation of its resources. The struggle with the forces of nature which, consciously or unconsciously, is the material life of man —and what is sadder than that few of those engaged in the struggle are conscious of its real character?—must be organised with the weapons which science has already largely provided, in order that man may win abundance out of the land spaces which he has mapped. Plenty for a population enormously larger than now exists may be won, by existing methods. Indeed, the continuance of existing methods may easily bring the world famines of a character more terrible by far than those purely agricultural famines, brought about by drought and pestilence, which the old world knew. The best thing which Roosevelt did for his country was to give it a Conservation Commission, charged with the care and I oversight of the natural resources of the United States—a land which has allowed itsell to be denuded of timber and of the fertility of great tracts of area.

One of the most fruitful discussions at the Imperial' Conference was the resolution/ moved by Sir Wilfrid Lauder, urging the I appointment of a Koyal Commission to I investigate and report upon the natural j resources of the Empire, 'the I ment attained and attainable, and the ' facilities for production, manufacture, and distribution, the trade of each part with the others and with the outside world, the food and raw material requirements of each, and the sources I thereof available.' This is an admirable resolution, and it is not surprising that it met with general approval; but it is earnestly to be hoped that the Commission will be a permanent thing, like the Roosevelt Conservation Commission. Given such Imperial co-operation, the British Empire might be made, of immense value to each of its citizens and to the world at large. The average man—the man in the street, as he is sometimes called —will have to awaken to the fact that he has an increasing practical and bread-and-butter interest in the ends of the world. . . . We

must hope not only that the British Empire will soon hare its Conservation and Development Board, but that in years not far distant the ■world at large will realise the necessity of pooling resources and co-operating in economic development," concludes Mr. Money. "There is a war which is eternal; it is that which we have to fight with nature to win commodities, and to maintain the material framework of civilisation against forces which arc ever seeking to overwhelm it. There can be no doubt that, short of a cosmic catastrophe, man will rise to such a degree of control of nature as to maintain himself with far more ease than has yet been known. Already, indeed, science has furnished man with the means to abolish material poverty as soon as man cares to use those means adequately. But science will go much further in its endowment of work, and the hope for man is, therefore, almost illimitable. It is a question of sooner or later, and the men of today should strive to make it sooner rather than later. Steps such as are possible as an interpretation of the Laurier resolution, for example, might hasten the abolition of material .poverty Vy a generation."