CURRENT TOPICS.

Taranaki Daily News, 17 November 1915, Page 4

CURRENT TOPICS.

RENEWING THE MAN SUPPLY. The renewal of the man supply which; is occasioning concern among statesmen and scientists in Britain and Germany is a problem that has exercised the brains of so many publicists in the past, though never so' much as in this steel age of slaughter The present German programme includes suggestions for simplifying marriage and child-rearing by lowering the legal age, offering State premiums for large families, and taxing bachelors and old maids. On the British side, attention is directed to the need] for better care of mothers and children, and the reduction of infant mortality. The enormous depletion of Germany's men makes that country's need of replacement great and pressing. In the land of our enemy, even more than in our own Empire, the losses through the war have deeply affected the well-being of the nation. The fittest perish while the weaklings and nondescripts survive. This is a time when, of course, many established views and convictions are being jettisoned and old ideas remodelled, and so we should perhaps not be exactly astonished to find pologamy aa a remedy seriously discussed in Britain. The voice of science, the cables tell us, is against plural marriages, but the assertion of one learned man that "polygamy never increased families" certainly seems a very hasty generalisation. Our ethics, however, are not those of the Turk. The tremendous waste of child life in all civilised countries, and the wicked old social system which permits a great proportion of the population to remain in a continual state, of semistarvation while another section possesses more wealth than it needs or can use, are menaces to the able-bodied man supply which must be attacked by reformers. The primitive races were often confronted with just such a problem a3 that which is troubling great civilised nations to-day, comments the Lyttelton Times, and they set about the replacement of the fighting population in a simple and thoroughly effective fashion. Often in the old inter-tribal wars in New Zealand, for example, a tribe suffered so severely by war that it was in danger of extinction. When its enemies considered they had obtained sufficient "utu" in slaughter, plunder and prisoners, they left the remnant of the beaten clan to its own devices, to recover as best it might. Then the elders of the tribe would meet and debate their future. Sometimes a nearly annihilated hapu would throw itself upon the enemy until it perished to the last man. Moreover, however, the chiefs led their people to a remote part of their territory, and there, buried in the bush, for the time being out of danger, they would set themselves to the duty of repopulation, the "breeding of men," as they phased it. No personal considerations were allowed to interfere with the paramount tribal duty. The children were most carefully tended, the mothers received more care than is usual among savage races, oad so in »

generation the tribe was itself again, and strengthened by marriage alliances with its kin in other districts. Thus when it had grown its men, it would be in a poßition to make a vigorous attempt to reduce its old foes to the position in which it had been placed itself, and so the great man-killing, and manbreeding game went on. This, on a colossal scale, is the position with which the greatest lighting nations are faced to-day. It is a huge and interesting problem, which will not be solved by serio-comic suggestions to tax old maids.