TOPICS OF THE DAY.

Gisborne Times, Volume XXVII, Issue 2628, 9 October 1909, Page 4

TOPICS OF THE DAY.

Tinned foods have had to put up with an intermittent fusillade of Tinned disparaging home-truths, Terrors, slanders, and terrors of the imagination over since their invention, and more especially since the publication of Upton Sinclair’s “Jungle”—a book that hit the public so hard in the region of the belt that it partly missed its mark as a work on social reform. Since “The Jungle” was ■written, however, there lias been a well-advertised improvement in the preparation and inspection of canned meats and fruit, but in spite of that one occasionally bears of serious and sudden illnesses arising from eating tinned delicacies. Hitherto one has generally classed the torturing twists of little Mary that occur in such cases under the head of “ptomaine poisoning,” but at an inquest held the other day in Auckland, Dr. Sweet explained that these ailments “were often in reality bacterial poisoning,' and came not so much from the tin as from the millions of bacteria in the food itself. This sounds very disconcerting at first, but when one reflects that goodness-knows-how-many bacteria can cake-walk on a pin point at the same time, it doesn’t seom to matter much bow many one consumes per mouthful. In any case, just as “a rose by any other name would smell as sweet,” so are acute pains in the digestive apparatus as upsetting if they arise from ptomaines as if they arise from bacteria. And in spite of Dr. Sweet’s assertion people will probably go on consuming canned dainties as before, and take the risks. Anyway, it is not always in the eating that the drawback to tinned goods lies. A certain street-corner orator used to have a strong antipathy to fruit that had gone through the canning factory. The speaker’s flashing eye had turned a purplish hue From violent concussion with a peach that someone threw. We wondered how so soft a fruit could give so hard a blow; The orator explained the cause in accents sad and slow: “The peach itself was soft enough,” he said with rueful grin; “But there were twenty-four of them, and they were in a tin!”

“He understood that a session of Par-

A Political Barmecide";

liament would start next Thursday-—(laughter) and he would like to say to those who held that

l AJ UIIUBU W 11VJ IR'IU Llia U the session should not have been postponed that if they will only make themselves believe that the House has in point of fact really been sitting all the time they will find how soothing would be the effect.” (Remarks by Sir Joseph Ward prior to the opening of Parliament.) Sir Joseph was doing something strikingly novel when he held up the business of New Zealand until he should return from England and get his finger well under the political piecrust again. There is, however, nothing original in his suggestion that the people who have had to wait his pleasure should ‘'make-believe” that Parliament has been sitting all the time. The Arabian Nights supplies a precedent in the case of the Barmecide who invited a poor man into his house, and, setting him at a table, bade him partake of a non-existent feast, pretending himself to eat food which existed only in imagination. The poor guest was more patient than the New Zealand electors have been with Sir Joseph Ward’s vagaries, and was subsequently richly rewarded by the facetious Barmecide for his good-humored complaisance. Sir Joseph now has an opportunity of supplying the anti-climax to his political feast, and it is up to. him to provide some astonishing and meritoroms acts of statesmanship to make up for the period of legislative famine, the thought of which seems to put him in such excellent humor. '