The Way We Go
Ins and Outs of the Life

Told By Leo Fanning

He who believes firmly in the freehold of land regards an agitation for leasehold as a mischievous fad. In the view of the leasehold theorist the practical freeholder is an unreasoning, selfish, conservative hobbyist.

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A cynical French philosopher wrote to the effect that speech was given to man to conceal his thought. Some of the loquacity of public speakers rather gives an impression that the speeches are concealing a lack of thought.

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A proverb which alleges that “all things come to him who waits” has two words missing—“and works.” The things which come to him who waits, without working, are the common and the uncommon cold, very large doses or douches of hope deferred, and the order of the boot and the sack. With that proverb you have to take about a dozen others, of which one is “Patience and perseverance conquer all things,” or in the modern vernacular: “Persistence gets there,” or “Hustle does it.”

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One of the men most to be pitied is he who believes that the public is just a multiplication of himself, with the same likes and dislikes. Against this kind of self-deception shrewd editors of magazines and newspapers have to be ever on guard. An editor who lacks a sense of humour and believes that the public has the same defect is headed for trouble.

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Man's belief that he is the natural overlord of the world is not admitted by the animals; indeed they often fiercely dispute the claim; and even the insects have very emphatic opposing opinions on that question. The truth is that each species of beast, bird, and insect believes that the world exists for itself, and that the other creatures are trespassers, intruders, nuisances. We know what the farmer thinks of the rabbit, but what does the rabbit think of the farmer? What is the rabbit's view of the world? To the rabbit it is a region where some places are better for burrows and herbage than others; a region which would be much more pleasant for rabbits if foxes, ferrets, hawks, human beings, and other undesirables could be excluded?

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New Zealand's kiwi is threatened now with extinction because ages ago this bird's ancestry—by a queer oversight of Nature—lacked an enemy. If dogs, stoats, weasels, and other enemies had been here in the dim past, the birds would not have lost their power of flight. The kiwi, nocturnal, hidden away in the dense depths of the forest, felt safe. How was it to know that dogs and other intruders would come and make it pay the penalty for the ancestral disuse of wings?

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With cables, wireless, and other inventions, the world has much equipment to-day for the making of better understanding and goodwill among the nations, but, alas, the same machinery can be used as actively for evil as for good. The highly-specialised and thoroughly-organised arts and crafts of propaganda can quickly make much mischief, which is only slowly undone—and may not be wholly undone in the course of a generation. The maintenance of the world's peace will not be nearly so dependent on the present League of Nations or on a much page 50 page 51 strengthened League as on propaganda—and who will prophesy to-day about the propaganda of the future and expect his words to be taken seriously?

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Looking back over the past eight or nine years, with their occasional booms and slumps, some thoughtful New Zealanders with a fair knowledge of their country's resources—a wonderful dower of natural wealth for a small population—must be surely amazed by the increasing disposition in this Dominion to sink into sloughs of pessimism. Here we are with a country capable of maintaining ten millions of people in comfort (if the people will do the right measure of work), but let butter slide back for a season, or tallow tell a tale of decline, or wool have less pull, and “God's Own Country” is alleged to be going to the dogs or the devil. Out comes somebody's periodic pitiless pill for the body politic, and the brows of bank managers are clouded with dark care. Such things are spectacles to make angels weep and devils grin.

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New Zealand has an enthusiasm for health, education, and material comfort. The colleges are turning out engineers for the world at large,

Samples Of New Zealand Railways Permanent Way.
Some recent points and crossings work carried out at East Town Workshops, North Island, for Palmerston North Yards.

and enough lawyers to make or mar the statute business of several countries. The dominant material view of things—the materialism which is so easily buoyed up or depressed by fluctuations of prices of “staple products”—is no new thing in a new country. It is an ordinary stage of development—nothing to worry about.

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Fragrance of ferny earth in New Zealand's forests amid the murmurs of rills and the wild melody of the tui! It makes the tired mind forget telephones, wireless, motors, speeches, lectures, and other oppressions of civilisation. In the verdant woods things sort themselves into their proper perspective. If councils, leagues, federations, and other bodies would only hold their sessions in freedom, how thankful the public would be!

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A Tin Day should be proclaimed against the picnicker who is known to have desecrated a place of beauty with a litter of tins, bottles, paper and fruit skins. On Tin Day the burgesses of the vandal's neighbourhood would be privileged to heave into his premises old or new tins, bottles (whole or broken), scrap iron, and other useless hardware. Not many Tin Days would be needed to check the vandalism.