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The New Zealand Railways Magazine, Volume 8, Issue 6 (October 2, 1933)

A Tilt at Trousers

A Tilt at Trousers.

If clothes make the man, trousers make the mug; for of all the miasmas of the moribund mind these twin shin-shafts called trousers are the prize leg-pullers. Trousers are as unnatural to normal man as plug-hats to penguins. Nobody with a sense of humour ever wore them. The Greeks and the Romans scorned them as a badge of barbarity. The Scot never pushed foot through them until he learnt the value of pockets, and he discards them now when the occasion calls for pleasure rather than business.

Driving A Poor Bargain.

Driving A Poor Bargain.

The enlightened savage values his legacy of leg-easy too deeply to exchange loin cloth for long-cloth. If civilisation has risen in leaps and bounds its fall will be in “strides,” for while the luck's in we can progress in pants, but for flight you can't beat freedom of action. To sum up in song:

Pants or trousers or breeks,
Whichever the name you prefer,
Are only sartorial freaks,
Invented methink to deter
The natural instincts of man,
For gaining some innocent fun,
By fighting to win—if he can—
Or, losing the verdict, to run.
For legs to be fleet must be freed,
And thus he is beat by a mile,
By having to wear tubes of tweed,
Which put a half-hitch in his style.
No wonder he's got sort of tame,
And thinks once or twice ere he speaks,
It's only thus since he became
The innocent victim of breeks.
He's built on the lines of a peg,
For hanging up clothes in a row,
But he would and he could shake a leg,
If the poor blighter got a fair go.
But prithee, I'll bet that it's true,
Though to prove it I'll not get the chance
That a Woollamaloo kangaroo,
Couldn't jump if he had to wear pants.