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Vol. 3 — No. 44 Thursd a By Jim Bell » ABOUT A LOT OF THINGS Someone asked me the other day if I knew when the old school was built. I looked it up in a 1865. Directory and found that it was built in 1860 ata cost of approximately $3500. Imagine that if you can, a six- room school and brick at that, built for $3500. Now just for comparison, just think for a moment what our new Public School has cost. The first cost was $120,000. With the new addi- tion another $80,000 was added, making the total cost $200,000. In the old school two upstairs rooms were given over to High School classes and one upstairs room with the three main floor rooms were used to accommo- date the Public School pupils. I am not writing this as a critiéism in any way but just as a matter of comparison. There is just as much difference in many other things. Fifty or sixty years ago, a pretty good house could be built for $1,500 to $2,000. To-day $10,000 is a reasonable price for a five-room bungalow. In 1900 a good carpenter earned $1.50 a day and worked ten hours. A rough carpenter made $1.25 per day and a common laborer $1.00. I have known numbers of men who have paid rent and kept a family on a labouref’s wages. Of course, living ¢osts were equally low. Rents were any- where from $5.00 to $15.00 per month. Meats were cheap, so were eggs and butter and the ~ majority of people had. gardens) and grew most of their own vegetables. Now again, just for compari- son, let us look at some of to- day’s prices. A good mechanic gets more for an hour’s work as the same class of mechanic got for a whole day’s work in 1900. A common labourer gets as much for a day’s work of eight hours now as most mechanics got for a week’s work | of sixty hours in 1900. Looking through an old church record of 1895) I found that the minister’s salary at that time was $600.00 a year. To-day the average salary for a minister in the same appoint- ment is $5,000 per year. The average salary paid a country school teacher was hot over $300 a year and he, or she, taught all grades from one to eight. Some of the pupils had to walk as. much as two and three miles to school. Now, they are doing away with all the small country schools, building large central- ized ones and furnishing bus service for all the pupils. If there was ever a time in the his- tory of the world when the phrase “Born with/a silver spoon in his mouth” was applicable to children, as a class, it is now. When we were youngsters, moth- er and dad were the governing body. Now, it seems in a big percentage of homes, the young- sters rule the roost. Is it any wonder that juvenile delin- quency is on the increase? To-| day, I saw a young chap, not bi oe. I REMEMBER over seventeen years old, walk- ing down the street smoking a pipe. My dad smoked a pipe but Ill bet if he had caught me smoking one when I was seven- teen, I wouldn’t have been able to sit down for a week. I think we, of the older gener- ation, have lived in the best and most wonderful period of man’s existence. The telephone was in its infancy when we were. Elec- tricity, motor vehicles, movies, record players or gramaphones as we used to call them, radio, television, have seen the birth of so many things. I often won- der if man will ever reach the peak of accomplishment or if some nut, saturated with power, will push a button some day and blow everything to smithereens, But why worry? So let’s take life with merry jest and song, And greet old age with cheerful heart and strong, From some great tree we planted long ago We'll cut a staff to help our feet along. :