The Way We Go
Ins And Out Of Life
Told By Leo Fanning

One way and another politicians worry much, but perhaps they do not worry so much about the people as the people worry about the politicians. Now and then you see a Party worrying to get a magnetic plank into its platform, and soon worrying a great deal more to get it out, when it turns into a very uncomfortable springboard threatening to bounce its makers into dangerous waters.

* * *

A man has to be very wary lest his political platform should turn into his own political gallows. As soon as he begins nailing down the planks somebody secretly becomes busy underneath with a silent fret-saw, and a confederate is ready to slip a noose around the neck of the platformer when an opportune time comes for sliding the bolt of the trap-door. It is easy to stand on a political platform, but much easier to fall from one.

* * *

Mother Hubbard, the cupboard, the dog, and the bone, or no bone! Somebody will write a big book about the matter—perhaps it is already written—showing that it is an allegory of life, with Mother Hubbard as any kind of public benefactor, from a politician to an up-lifter, and the public as the dog, for circumstances sometimes oblige the world's politicians to make nothing seem to be a bone, and a bone to look like a hunk of undercut.

* * *

“Committees are the invention of the devil,” is a saying credited to the creator of a great religious and social organisation which is working to-day on a world-wide front. The leader's galvanic drive made him impatient of the vexatious hitches and delays usually inseparable from committee procedure. He was ever eager to take the shortest way between two points, and he knew that committees would involve him in a tortuous course. Therefore he rendered to the devil the thing that was allegedly the devil's—and did without committees, and did very well.

All over the world committees have been the cemeteries of enthusiasm. Many a good idea has died very young in the desert stretches of committees. That extreme of caution, which is often the first cousin of cowardice, may be wedded to inertia in committees, which are not usually the collective wisdom of their components but the consolidated and confounded reluctance to take definite action.

* * *

One sees wild crazes for changes in educational methods in the apparent belief that any kind of change is good, even if it is a change for the worse; but on that point the lines of Lowell hold good:

“Change, jes’ for change, is like them big hotels,
Where they shift plates, an’ make ye live on smells.”

* * *

Altogether, the world's educationists are much too apt to regard the school pupil as raw material for experiments—and the pedagogues “get away with it,” as our American cousins have taught us to say. The parents are toddling along in the background hoping for the best.

“Theirs not to make reply,
Theirs not to reason why.”

However, they are too apathetic to do either, even if they were invited to do so—which, of course, they are not.

The Age of Analysis set in long ago, but it is only a few years since its inquisitiveness and assertiveness became blatantly obtrusive. Reading as deeply as his wits will permit into the scientific mazes of words, the average man is left with an impression that whatever is is not, that matter does not matter; in fact that matter is not matter at all, but a mere swirl of ions and electrons, and that he himself is just a case of fussy electricity; and that the whole world is just a jumble of emanations, vibrations, and wave-lengths of ether and other things which do not really exist.

* * *

What is to be done with all the knowledge when the last and least of the ions has yielded the last of its secrets? When all movements of the heavenly bodies have been calculated and charted? When every comet's tail has been accurately measured? Some of that knowledge may help to reduce the cost of living, but much of it will not; some of it may increase human happiness, but much of it will not. There will be a big surplus of knowledge which will be merely an intellectual toy for new generations.

* * *

While some folk are yearning for the reaction from this restless noisy epoch—with the world and his wife shouting at each other from the ends of the earth, mostly about tragedies and miscellaneous messes, domestic, social, political, international—and watching for announcements of ships or buildings guaranteed to be free from wireless and gramophones, one may read of reactions against the opposite kind of living,

New Zealand Railway Locomotives.
Class A.B. 4-6-2 type locomotive built in the Department's workshops. Principal particulars: Boiler pressure 180 lbs. per sq. in.; cylinders 17in. × 26in.; diameter of drivers 4ft. 6in.; tractive effort 20,000 lbs.; total heating surface 1,700 sq. ft. The locomotive is fitted with Walschaert valve gear and its total weight in working trim is 84 tons 15 cwt.

when staidness and silence were sanctified, and solitude was regarded as a blessed state. “Hibernation is played out,” wrote a philosopher (name forgotten) many years ago. “I have chewed more or less on my own vitals this winter. Solitude may make a man a philosopher, but it puts too high a premium on the grave. There is such a thing as erecting meditations into a mausoleum.” A contemporary's comment on that philosopher includes these words:—“Here was a great soul lowering buckets into its own consciousness all his life. They came up brimming and sparkling, but the man never got away from the winch. You will hear its little squeak occasionally.”

* * *

The encouragement given by “Punch” (London) to jokes about the bagpipes indicates an opinion of the editor that Scotland's national instrument or weapon is one of the worst inventions. But is it an invention? It may be rather a discovery. Somebody may have trodden on something squidgy in the sea or in the swamp and got a notion from it. “Or trodden on a cat,” you interject. Well, there are lots of things I like less than the bagpipes—and the saxophone is one of them, and the bass-viol (played solo by an unsoulful philosopher) is another. One way or another the bagpipes will stir you—perhaps goad you or erode you—but the bass-viol will numb you and dumb you and make you feel like a vanished pomp or pump of yesterday.

The Pride Of The Southern Railway Of England.
“Atlantic Coast Express” leaving Waterloo Station, London.