The Daily News. FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 15, 1912. LOCAL LOYALTY.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LV, Issue 153, 15 November 1912, Page 4

The Daily News. FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 15, 1912. LOCAL LOYALTY.

In the old days when Eve was obliged to sew fresh fig leaves on Adam's sweaters as fast as he wore them .out, there was no question of patronising local industry, for the Garden of Eden was presumably the only source of supply, and there was no necessity of an excessive duty upon imported clothes, or any suggestion that Cain's and Abel's cradles and rocking horses could be more fashionably constructed in unknown parts of an earth which had yet to be peopled. But with modern inventions and an access of alleged civilisation we have developed an undesirable form of petty foolishness which is popularly known as "fashion." An ancient adage,asks: When Adam delved, and Eve span, Who was then the gentleman?

Nowadays the question is easily answered. The gentleman in New Plymouth is the man who purchases his clothes in London and earns his living in Devon street, and the lady is the individual who subscribes to Worth and neglects the local dressmaker-man. Just what they get out of this expensive hobby it is difficult to imagine, except that their clothes are marked with fashionable tabs. Their hobble skirts may be a little bit tighter and a little more uncomfortable than those of local manufacture, and their coats and trousers may be a sixteenth of an inch straighter in the crease, but it is hard to conceive that these desirabilities are worth the additional cost that they necessitate or are in any -<way worth the sacrifice of local patriotism that they demand. As a correspondent has pointed out, there are people in New Plymouth who, apart from sending to the Old World for their clothing and other necessaries, almost invariably draw upon Wellington and Auckland for their furniture and other domestic requirements, simply from | some vague, intangible conviction that the Chippendale chairs from Christchurch have eurlier legs than those manufactured locally, or that the smoked sprats in Wellington have more smoke per sprat than those in New Plymouth. These people, and there are not a few of them in -New Plymouth, are simply paying "through the nose" for a name, in a snobbish and ridiculous subservience to the mandates of that expensive entity known as "fashion." Clothing and boots and furniture, and the thousand and one

necessities of domestic life, can be purchased from the tradespeople in New Plymouth, or any other Taranaki town, just as good in quality, and just as cheap in price, as they can be purchased in Wellington or Auckland, and those citizens who, in a silly attempt to grasp "the glass of fashion and the mould of form," send their money out of the district where they make it, for their everyday requirements, are not playing the game. They are worshipping a fetish which is at once costly to their pockets and unloyal to their town. We have heard a lot of talk-lately of "boosting" New Plymouth, and there has been a commendably warm response to the appeal for funds for advertising the district, but a much more practical method of showing appreciation of the possibilities of the town would be shown by those who go far afield for their supplies were they to recognise that their necessities can be just as well catered for locally as they can be at more "fashionable" sources.