CURRENT TOPICS.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LIV, Issue 134, 28 November 1911, Page 4

CURRENT TOPICS.

THE HALF-HOLIDAY QUKSUON. The vexed question of a universal halfholiday for Taranaki lias cropped up again. It is always a difficult one, because of convention and custom. Nobody, perhaps, could be found to disagree with the notion that if it could lie arranged Saturday afternoon would be the best afternoon "for a universal half-holi-day. But the Saturday shopping idea is as British as the Union Jack, and will take some killing. It is curious, however, that there should be no uniformity, The Taranaki fanner comes into New' Plymouth pn Saturday finding that he cannot do business with the banks, and the banks open their doors on Thursday when everybody else is shut up and there is no business to do. When the largest number of people are in town the Government offices are closed, ami even the solicitors disdain the unclaimed six-and-eightpences that seem to be so numerous 011 Saturday. Various towns in Taranaki hold the half-holiday on various days, and it would seem reasonable that whatever day is chosen for the half-holiday it should be the same for businesses in all Taranaki towns. The habits of sections of the people are very hard to break, and if Wednesday were chosen as the day for a universal halfholiday, it would be a long time before the community became "broken in" to it. Saturday is the ideal day for a halfmainly because he who ceases work at noon is a free agent until Monday morning a very great consideration in these days of stress and turmoil, but the fact that half the community chooses this day to come to town and do its shopping, makes Saturday the most valuable business day of the week, except for banks, law and Government offices.

SCIENTIFIC AGRICULTURE. Scientists and economists in the United States are quite awake to the importance of scientific agriculture. The only point on which they seeni to differ is whether farmers will wake up to its importance in sufficient numbers to give a new impetus to the oldest of all industries. President Taft thinks that they will. Speakiug at the National Conservation Congress recently held at Kansas City, lie expressed his strong conviction that even with the prospect of a doubled population in 1960, "America will continue to feed her millions, and feed them well, out of her own soil." An American paper considers this quite possible, because, "by intensive farming and a study of the market, the farmer has already learned to increase enormously .his contribution to the world's supply of food." But the farmer is naturally slow to change his methods, and it is in this innate conservatism that the president of the Congress, Mr. Henry Wallace, sees cause for dread. He point's out that production was naturally increased when the new machinery took the place of the old hand tools. But though the farmer had learned how to break up the soil and obtain its products with less labor, he had not acquired the scientific knowledge which would have helped him to apply his new inventions to the best advantage, and the result has been, to a great extent, merely soil impoverishment. "The nineteenth century farmer," he declares, "was, speaking generally, no •farmer at all, but a miner, a soil robber. There was a good farmer- here and there, but, speaking generally, there was no farming, nothing but mining. The nineteenth century farmer sold the stored fertility of ages at the bare cost of mining it. With his gang-plough and his four to eight-section harrow, he could do more soil robbing in five years than his grandfather could do in his whole life-time. It is hard to get farmers of this class to understand the philosophy of crop rotation, of the natural movement of water ill the soil, or of the ideal seed-bed or the fltness of certain soils for certain crops —in short, of the requirements of plant and animal life, or to persuade them to active co-operation with each other, or to get them in actual touch and sympathy with the new agriculture. This is an educational process. and therefore slow, even when there is a disposition to acquire the knowledge." The New York Times, which agrees with Mr. Wallace that in the nineteenth century farms were almost ruined by incompetents, also deplores the slow spread of modern methods. "The old. ignorant farmer," it insists, "must disappear, if the country is to fulfil its destiny. The real farmers of this hour, the men who are making farms pay, are the equals of the city man in breadth of culture and knowledge of the world. But there are too few of them."

THE "PROFESSIONAL" POLITICIAN. Times without number cheap sneers have been levelled at "professional politicians." the assumption always being that polities is such an unimportant matter that a professional knowledge of it is not requisite. We have taken occasion many times to suggest that there is something particularly weak about the system of sending amateurs to Parliament and were naturally smiled at when we suggested that it was considered necessary to examine candidates as to their fitness for the law. medicine, the Church, the Navy, the Army, and other necessary professions, but not at all necessary to examine a political candidate in the A.B.C. of an extremely important business. Tt is therefore gratifying to note that Mr. Ceo. Laurenson, M.P., has lately said that no man should be permitted a seat in Parliament who is not a professional politician. The payment of members has made it possible for Parliaments to be composed of various spe-

cialists, a condition unthinkable in the days when only the wealthy had a chance of representing (or misrepresenting) the whole community. The sneer, for instance, that tho Labor member who is . so frequently a specialist and invaluable to a Parliament is a "professional," and eut after the wages attached to the ollice, can be more easily borne than the allegations against the old-time dilletantu who thought it the "correct thing" to be in Parliament. If there is any subject better worth studying than ailother it is the science of politics, and it is merely a catastrophe for the people of any community to be represented by men who are ignorant of the lirst principles of government. The average untrained candidate confines himself (I) 1 to a destruction of his rival's arguments and (2) to detailing a list of those things . "he is in favor of." Constructiveness, f originality and an understanding of causes is almost wholly wanting in candidates whose sole business is to jump through the same old gap after the same old bell-wether. A study of politics is generally held to be, not the essential needs of a people, the understanding of national -and world problems and the great social needs, but a knowledge of the political-, tricks and guile that may steer a man into the House. It is less necessary to have a knowledge of human problems than to be able to give a correct idea of what may happen if A. and B. split the "Blue" vote. Diligent, study of the vast and complex questions which make statesmen means studying in order tr become a "professional politician," and somo quite eminent people (by accident) have sneered at the self-made man who has tackled the great problems in order to fit himself for a serious occupation.