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v crowds stand outside the League of Nations office every morning "he is thrilled by tales of heroism, from going to war, Pr GHAR AT te oF -n ee $1.50 per yea ear in' adva nee iF i Tole 5 cents single copy 3 Watch your label; it tells when your of _ 'subscription expires. h Y STAR * PORT PERRY, ONTARIO, THURSDAY, MARCH 1st, 1984 i SAMUEL FARMER, Editor and Publisher v "FOR PEACE Je 'By St. John Ervine iy A EH Good Housekeeping, London, December, 1933) (Condensed from Sie (Magazine Digest) How stirring is the sight of uniformed soldiers, led by a brass band! How depressing is a lecture on the League of Nations, delivered by a dull gentleman with a monontonous voice to serious ladies dressed in solemn black! We are stirred by the tramping of armed men and we, too, want to march, A bugle blowing the 'Last Post profoundly moves us. The whole pageantry of war is extraordinarily effective, moving men against their reason. ~ In John Galsworthy's play, The Mab, the effect of martial 'music and pageantry is skilfully depicted. Stephen More, a pacifist Member of Parliament, is protesting against war to a Ysputation when the skirling sound of bagpipes is heard in the distance. 1 rushes on to the balcony leaving More alone. The effect on him is immenge, and is only removed by the blood-thirsty ejaculations of the civilians in the crowd which watches the soldiers. The propagandists of peace have no such pageantry. They 'depend too much on the appeal to reason which would be all right in a reasonable world,but then in a reasonable world there wouldn't - be any need to protest against war, for war would not be possible. Qur astonishing technical progress, and the general spread - of education among the masses has not yet resulted in the estab- lishment of the reason as the arbiter in all our disputes. We still are swayed by our emotions. Intellect is under a cloud and the popular scientists and philosophers are those who advocate trust in our instincts, which are as likely to be right as our intellect. In the confusion of our time when expert flatly contradicts expert after expert, intellect takes a toss and rises ina very muddy state, . #0 that the common man exclaims, "What's the good of brains?" ~~ Our:economists cannot agree om a single point. For every ~ expert who denies the usefulness of the gold standard, there is one / ready to swear by it. In every department of our lives, similar flat contraditions are expressed. What, in'such circumstances, is ~ the common man to do or think? Naturally he is inclined to think 'that he had better not think at all. =~ : - RA REE ; : It is; therefore, useless to go to him with 'reasonable argu- ments against war. His heart has reasons of its own, and a beating drum or a fanfare of trumpets or the sight of marching men. will tear him from the triumph of the intellect and set him * # ;appealmade by Viscount Cecil to the eye as As dhe effective as 'that made by 8 junior'subaltern in a cavalry regiment? Do to see the staff enter as they stand outside Buckingham Palace "An ecstatic crowd will watch the guardsmen at drill, but I have never seen anyone gazing on the staff of the League of Nations Union in the act of drawing up appeals to reason against war, ~ although the activities of 'the peacemakers are more desirable . than those of the peacebreakers. ; y There isn't enough. color in peace. The advocates of disarma- ment too often look like undertaker's mutes. - They have a cheer- less look and young people are likely to consider them dull: = A boy who cannot easily be persuaded to listen to a speech on disarma- ment, will listen with sparkling eyes £6 an-address on war, because It is useless to suppose, as so many propaganists of peace do, that a mere recital of the horrors of war will discourage the young The very fact of danger is enough to stir them to the performance of dangerous deeds. Every man who won the Victoria Cross in.the war was a fool, but it is by such]. folly as theirs thatthe rest of us were saved. Men have always volunteered to.do jobs although they knew that they would die 'in doing them, 'What makes people suppose that stories of such acts will have a discouraging effect on the young? And if they had, would the young be worth while? : - ~_._ The:advdcates of peace must somehow introduce romance into ~ their propaganda. And the romance is there for the taking. It ' is absurb to allow the advocacy of peace and disarmament to be- come identified in the minds of men with dullness and timidity and unsociable people, Si : : : To my mind, war will end; not because of the propaganda for peace, but because it is becoming increasingly drab, mechanic and unromantic. The very word khaki proves the monotony of modern war. It is a Persian word which means dasty, dust- colored, mud-colored. It is intended to make men look like mud 'and makes many of them feel like mud. Moreover, the personal element is a declining factor in warfare. War will be ended by boredom and we can accelerate its end by making it more and 'more monotonous and mechanical, a If the advocates of peace will, at the same time, seize the bright colors and parades, and make the cause of disarmament as colorful as war once was, its triumph will not long be delayed. But they will hamper their movements terribly if their meetings continue to look like inquests at which the audience seems to o the unwilling jury, dragged from their jobs to view a disreputable corpse.. na fas i | University Extension Lecture A Trip Through Italy, Illustrated The third of the University: Extension Lectures will be held in the basement of the United Church, on Monday evening, March 6th, when Prof. Goggio, of the University of Toronto, will give an illustrated lecture--'*A Trip Through Italy."" These lectures are delightfully entertaining and informative, and they provide an unusually fine opportunity to obtain the ~ most authentic information concerning the subjects ~ presented. Prof. Goggio was here last year, and he gave a most enlightening lecture outlining the facts 'regarding Fascism, The admission is Jow--26¢c, ; Everybody is invited to thege lectures. pr As the Highlanders approach, everybody in the room| to see the changing of the Guard? Do nursemaids walk out with) ad | Plays Havoc with the + Water System . Water Main Burst. Cellars Flooded Saturday and Sunday were very uncomfortable days for a number of people in steps to repair the damage done by things were righted. He and his committee did a good piece of work. In the meantime there were hurry calls for the plumber from various parts of Port Perry, for the water main burst in front of George Hall's restaurant, and a number of cellars were flooded. This meant a very unpleasant time for occupants of the flooded properties, and a very busy time for the Waterworks Department 'and the plumbers. Incidentally the break provided some work for the unemployed. Mr. Harold Archer, Chairman of the Waterworks Committee, took effective the frost, and stayed right on the job until | the town--*'Our water pipes are frozen: come and fix them,"" But, as one plumber cannot be in six places at once, most people had to be patient and wait their turn. - In the old days, if all these freeze-ups had been thawed out in the usual style, . Port Perry would have looked like the front line trenches; but science has changed all this, Nowadays four transformers and a copper wire do the trick, The wire is the connecting link between the hydro and the frozen pipe. The power is turned on, and electricity expands the pipe, allowing the water to flow past the ice, and eventually wear it down, so that the obstruction is removed. Of course Port Perry is not the only place that is suffering from frozen water _in the pipes of the system; but the Waterworks Committee are to be complimented for the efficiency with which they have met the emergency. The Red-Headed Stepchild A Presentation by "Community Players" to be held in the Town Hall, Port Perry, Wednesday and Thursday, March 7th and 8th Of course the "Stepchild" isn't actually, red-headed: she just acts that way. "More than that, she does the job most effectively. - There's "something doing" all.- the time when the "stepchild" arrives. Great and expressive is the distress of the ~ aristocratic relations during the process of taming (?) this child of the desert. point. ~ Incidentally the "aristocrats" receive a liberal education from a totally new view- Don't miss the fun, and the costumes, and the "style."' ; And don't miss seeing the improvements that are being made to the stage. That ig what the whole thing is about anyway. to have the stage put into good shape, and, as soon as possible, to secure a new curtain---without any advertising, or parrots, or boquets of roses. The play will be good, for there is an excellent Cast of Characters. The price of admission is low--26c.--and, if you care to spend 10¢c more, you can secure a reserved seat--plan at Lawrence's drugstore. Tickets now on sale. early. There should be a bumper crowd both nights. The committee have undertaken Get yours Some Hightlights .in Evidence. That the Ontario" minimum wage law is more or less of a farce was disclosed before the special committee of the Com- mons investigating wages and working conditions. The com- mittee had before it for several hours Richard A. Stapells, the chairman of the Ontario Mini- mum Wage Board. He was obliged to admit that while 'the law nominally fixes $12.60 as the minimum wage a girl may be paid, for a week's work, the proivsion is being de- It was revealed that, while the board fixes a minimum for a week's work, it has not inter- vened when large -employers of labor have resorted to the prac- tice of bringing employees in for peak hours paying them for only two-thirds of a week. Mr. Stapells was closely ques- tioned on this point, both by man Somerville, K.C. counsel for the committee. When he admitted to Mr. Stevens that girls may work part of each da tand be paid less than the mini- mum weekly 'wage provided by law, the Minister of Trade and Commerce asked: "Does not -|that negative all the trouble you have gone to in arriving at what Probe re "Massed B No subject touches the small town more nearly than massed buying and very low wages. Competition made- possible by these means has ruined thousands of small merchants, and has drained the small towns of capital that should rightfully be spent at home. The following extracts re the probe are taken from the Globe: feated, evaded or circumvented.| Hon. H. H. Stevens and by Nor-|u is a minimum wage that a girl requires to live decently?" "It would seem 80," admitted Mr. Stapells, "but now you are getting into unemployment in- surance, and there is no law un- der God's heaven that will make any one pay a girl for time she does not work," Mr. Sommerville:-then quizzed witness about complaints that Ontario factory girls have been "speeded up" to make them do 20 pér cent. more work than formerly under pain of being sent home for failure. When it was suggested that an employer might speed up production, pay only a portion of the $12.60 minimum wage and still get the same amount -of work done as for a full week, Mr. Stapells replied that "if you have a lazy girl who can only make seven garments while others are making twelve gar- ments she should be speeded Factory girls getting $12.50 a week were fired and married men with families were given their jobs at $9 a week. : 'Hundreds of men, some of them with wives and four or five children * dependent on them, work from 48 to 72 hours a week for wages ranging from $6.60 to $10.60 a week. uying" ' [id . These include employees in chain stores, factories, gasoline service stations, . wholsesale houses, bakeries and packing houses. There are 4381 more families 'on relief now than a year ago. The total number of families on relief is 28,000 in Toronto. The minimum wage law is vio- lated in Toronto. He cited forty-one cases of in- dividuals on relief employed by thirty-eight different firms in Toronto. The cases were men- tioned at random, The first was a man working in a restaurant 72 hours for $9. Chain grocery and meat store paying $10 to $12.60 for un- stated hours. The next case was a man ruhning a machine in a textile mill for $8.80 a week. 75 employees .in this plant all getting the same. A foatwear company paying $9.44 for full time men. Gasoline station pay- ing $10 a week. Wholesale grocery paying $9.10 for 50 hours, $6 for 46 hours, Electric supply company, $7 for 48 hours. Coop- erage 36 a week. Brewery, $8.82 a week, Bakery $8 for 48 hours. Hairdressing establishment $7. a week, Packing house $10.60 a week, Theatre $9.50 a week. 6c and 10c. store $8.60 a week. Paper company paying| - PARADISE OF THE COMMON MAN : By Robert Bernays, M.P. (Condensed from Pearson's, London, November, 1983) (Magazine Digest) In the last two years I have been around the world, and at every stopping-place I was haunted and pursued by a problem, In Quebec, it was the French-Canadian, magnificantly maintaining his cultural indeperidence; in the Rockies, it was the Red Idian, growing soft and corrupt on his reservation; in the steaming heat of the South Seas I had to listen to hair-raising stories of Japanese penetration; in Australia, it was the plight of the settlers, lured out by pictorial posters and finding themselves mocked by a mirage; in India, I ate and drank color problems from morning till night; in Venice, it was the menace of Jugo-Slavia; in Ger- many, it was the peril of Polish airplanes, swooping on defenceless inhabitants; and in Poland, it was frightening stories of German rearmament, Then I went to Denmark, and at last I found peace. Fdr Denmark is a country without a problem. Denmark has no national ambitions. She was positively frightened when it was proposed to restore to her the provinces of Schleswig-Holstein, stolen by Germany in 1864. She was determined to have no minority problem, and the result is that the decision which was gettled by plebescite,. where the part that voted to remain with Germany did remain, and that which voted for restoration to Denmark was restored, is perhaps the most durable part of the whole Versailles settlement. The Danish attitude on international affairs is summed up in the phrase: "We are only a small nation." It is at once deprecat- ing, humorous, disarming and appealing. Not that Denmark is not proud of its Viking legends, but the animosities have been buried under centuries of friendly association. The traveller gets a sense of peace the moment that he lands at Esbjerg. There are no posters at the railway stations. The journey to Copenhagen is so smooth and unhurried, that even in crossing two wide stretches of water, I was halfway across before I realized that I had left firm earth. The landscape itself is like the illustrated cover of a book on model farming--white-washed cottages and fields so green they scarcely looked real, and cows that seem to have stepped out of an advertisement for canned milk. Copenhagen has the appear- - anace of a toy town. «Its harbor is full of tall ships that have the smack of fabulous adventure about them. The docks are clean, and bright, and cobbled. The laborers are Vikings--fair- haired, with massive chests and eyes that have the appearance of having gazed on each of the seven seas. ~The streets themselves have lost something of the drabness of the twentieth century. The postmen wear red tunics, and the Royal Bodyguard are incredibly smart in all the glory of the Napoleonic uniforms. The most popular mode of transport is the push-bicycle. All day long they sweep down the main streets in- great droves, as gay and irresponsible as a cycling. club on a holi- day. There is romance even on the motor-roads. On the trees lining one of the main arteries out of Copenhagen I saw bunbles of corn in the bare branches. They were the householders' Christmas gift to the birds. ; : Nor is all this appearance of kindness and simplicity bogus. Denmark is the best-run country I have seen. The organization of its agriculture alone is worth study. The revolution came about fifty years ago, and it was simply the substitution of co- operation for competition. It has been so successful that out of 220,000 farmers and smallholders all. but a very few sell their produce through the agency of 80 bacon factories. So far as milk is concerned, there is no independent sale at all. ) The! organization is both knave-proof and foolproof. =~ The - farmer enters into a contract that has the force of law with the co-operative factory. If the farmer is tempted to break it he can be sued in the courts. Besides, each farmer is.required to supply a portion of the capital, and, having a financial stake in the busi- ness, he can claim a voice in its management. He also receives a share of the profits in the form: of bonuses at the end of each year, i : The enormous advantage of the whole system is the stable market that it provides for the farmer. The co-operative factory, through its experts, can gauge almost exactly the demand in six months' time. Calculations are made on their reports, and each farmer is notified how many pigs or gallons of milk they will want in a given month. They breed their pigs or arrange calvings accordingly. : No wonder the face of the Danish countryside has been changed. Smallholding has become a prosperous profession. The simplest of the small-scale farms consist of two buildings facing one another, cottage on one side, piggery and cowshed on the - other, the larger ones being filled in on three or four sides accord- ing to their measure of prosperity. - The great estates are nearly all broken up now, and many of the laborers who worked upon them are now owners themselves. All that is required is a capital of $1500, The state then steps in with a loan of any sum up to $3600. Hard work and a high standard of efficiency are expected. The travelling cinema has not reached the Danish village. For all its up-to-date methods of agriculture, the life of the Danish peasant is simple, not to say primitive. He will still milk the cows and feed the pigs, and in addition keep accounts as elaborate as in the retail trade. And the position: of the peasant is typical - of Denmark as a whole. There actually are no class distinctions. The idea that one man is as good as another is not.an aggressive pose. It is a real article of belief. Denmark is the best example I know of the social benefits that come from everybody going to the same school. : This atmosphere of -good-fellowship is admirably reflected in the Royal Family. They actually have their telephone numbers in the Directory. King Christian must be the most democratic monarch in Europe. He can be seen any day walking in the park, looking in at the shop windows over the heads of his subjects, for he is 6 ft. 6 inches in height, skating on the lakes that are the playgrounds of Copenhagen in the winter. There are no guards about him. Recently he was seen listening at the street corner to a Socialist meeting, The crowd was not in the least embar- rassed. They just took off their hats and carried on. Poverty, of course, exists to some extent, but the social measures to deal with it are the most advanced in Europe. There are no slums in Copenhagen. Old age has lost many of its terrors for the poor. Instead of the cold, forbidding walls of the poor house, there is what is called the old people's village. It consists of hundreds of flats where the old couples below a certain level of income can live free of charge. There are recreation rooms and (Continued on Page 8) ' A APE ES a nan Gp SO cls, SoA en Sn W A ~. ». 1 FSI a Ny wy PRE 7, ™; Cm ea RE aA PL EK a APE nT Lo te NR LIN Ee IR RRL HT ARIAS XR e in, A NN wo: PRAT Piha " I NE - gle RA 4 a te Se Aa ma mp fr ar Sage - wr gt or a jee pa pd Soe ee, in A - ed PLL 5 ~ A Se EN = pg wv TR ra f] a 5 er 2 ny, a ' BL a