Notes and Comments.

Waimate Daily Advertiser, Volume IV, Issue 155, 21 January 1902, Page 3

Notes and Comments.

Quite the latest thing in laboui politics is the demanc "one man which has been formuons lated in Victoria foi business, legislation that will forbid any man carrying ( on more than one kind of business. The composite businesses whicl; are growing up in the larger towns are looked upon by the workers as wrongs to them. Knowing as they <3o that ft dozen separate businesses •doing a certain amount of trade would require more hands than one business doing the same, they ■demand that OU9 man should have one business and one only. This demand is on a par with the New Zealand workers' cry for a limitation of profits. The next cry may fee " One man, one suit of clothes," >or any other equally ridiculous. The workers in both Victoria and Now Zetland are very well off, but they do not seem to know it, and their cry i 3 ever for more advantages. The idea seems to be growing that the amount of work to bedone should bo " pooled " and then divided equally among3t the workers. Any man who is more energetic or more clever than his fellow-workers is coming to be looked on as a [traitor to tho causa of labour. _ The -cry for single businesses has arisen, oddly enough, in the country -districts of Victoria, where the | ■grocer is at one and the same time ■the butcher, the baker and a dozen ■other things. Couimoneense has not been always conspicuous in the rdemftncls of political parties, whether j labour or otherwise. i

'Now that an air-ship, which can be steered accurately tiie and propelled swiftly -conquest either with or against of the wind, and which the air. can be launched easily and can descend safely, iia an accomplished fact, man's over the air must be added to that of the land and the sea. M. Santos Duinont's air ship, which travelled 7 miles in a fraction over half an hour, is the first vessel of the kind which may be said to have conquered the air. Tb. 9 first stop is always the decisive one, and improvements will soon follow. Air ships will become asj numerous as autbmobiles during the next ten years and the result will be astonishing. That they will be of immense value both for pefica and war goa3 without saying, but tho results of the invention are .it present incalculable. Whatever •also it will do, it will render smuggling safe and easy, for a time at all events, until the various governments build patrolling air ships after the style of the old time "rjvanua cutters. A fleet of air bhips starting at night time could laud unseen parcels of dutiable goods wherever they pleased, within tho frontier. One probable result of the air-ships will be the •adoption of an international excise and the obliteration of customs frontiers for all but heavy goods in buik.