EARLY RISING BY ACT OF PARLIAMENT.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXXI, Issue 9104, 2 June 1908, Page 4

EARLY RISING BY ACT OF PARLIAMENT.

Member? of the House of Commons — to say nothing of the British public at large—have (says an English contemporary) hardly realised the object of Mr Robert Pearce's revolutionary Bill to stay the hand of time. Mr Pearce, the member for Leek, has introduced a measure which calmly proposes to give us more day'.ight by tampering with the hands of the clock. It is an ingenious plan to adance stanJar.l time on each side of the four Sundays in April by twenty minutes, and to knock off the same amount on the four Sundays in September. That is to say, at the end of April we will rise from our beds, siy, at eight o'clock standard time, while the outer world is deceiving itself that it is twenty minutes past nine. This is what is called making us a nation of early risers by law. The originator of the schame ia Mr William Willett, the well-known Sloane Square builder. Under the Daylight Saving Bill, as it is new called, the millions of workers in the British Isles are supposed to gain 210 additional hours of daylight in the year —23 hours in April, 16 1 in May, June, July, and August, and 23 September. This, it is claimed, will mean a saving in artificial light of about two millions of money. This new system of taking time by the forelock sounds all very nice in theory, tut when considered in practice a thousand and one causes must arise that will throw the whole nation into a state of chaos, from the humble worker who earns his living, to the belted earl who doesn't.