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LIFE & LETTERS.
WASTE.
By Elzevir.
FEW of us realise how recklessly
extravagant we are with little
things, such as—to take an example
staring at you from this printed
page—the letters of the alphabet.
Has it ever struck you that the "u"
in such a word as "quack" is per-
fectly superfluous? When we talk
about Qantas planes we pronounce
the name exactly as if it were spelt
"Quantas" the absence of the "u"
makes not a particle of difference.
Except in words like "grotesque," the
letter "q" is always pronounced
"kw." Adding a "u" is sheer waste,
of time, of space, of paper and of
ink.
In the present paper shortage, it
would be interesting to reckon up
how many square miles of newsprint
the Americans saved in a century
when they led the way back to the
Latin spelling of "humour" and
"honour," throwing overboard the
Norman-French "u." How much
precious paper would be saved in
Australia tomorrow if we cut the
same superfluous letter out wherever
it occurs—if we wrote, for example,
"the qarrelsome and qerulous Qaker
went qickly to god for stealing a
qid"! Make a simple calculation.
Take the newspaper you are now
reading, go over it from start to
finish, count the words with a "qu"
in them, measure carefully the space
occupied by the "u" in each of these
words, find out by ringing up the
office how many copies of the paper
were printed today, ascertain the
number of daily papers published in
Australia, and the size and circula-
tion of each; and you will get the
astounding result that in 1 year the
combined newspapers of Australia
could by this simple reform save
approximately 270 square miles of
paper, and that in 100 years we
should save enough paper to cover
the whole of Tasmania and one or
two adjoining islands. I make this
statement with complete confidence,
having learnt the great secret of
the statisticians, that if you reel off
some figures confidently, no one is
going to bother making the calcula-
tions necessary to refute you. (No-
tice with what assurance the statis-
tician tells you the exact population
of China. Of course nobody knows,
really, what the exact population of
China is.)
If I pursued this line farther—if
by careful experiment I found out
exactly what fraction of a second
is required for the writing of the
letter "u," and went on to calculate
how much of the nation's time might
be set free for worthier activities in
the course of a week if we all prac-
tised this economy—you would be-
gin to wonder about my intellectual
condition. To nip such suspicions
in the bud, I hasten to assure you
that I have no desire to start a
crusade against the letter "u." I
have no passionate conviction that
a world denuded of its "u's" would
be a better and a happier place. I
merely mentioned the matter as an
example of our unconscious waste-
fulness in small things. I might just
as well have mentioned the buttons
on the sleeves of men's coats.
Mr Robert Lynd in a recent ar-
ticle tells us that "though 'waste
not, want not' is one of the first
proverbs to be dinned into the ears
of children, the English people have
for years continued to be the most
wasteful nation on earth." The Eng-
lish are not only wasteful, but proud
of their wastefulness. They make a
virtue of extravagance. Their hearts
always go out to the spendthrift;
anybody who takes reasonable
thought for the future they call a
skinflint
John Gilpin was a typical Eng-
lishman; the only frugality he ad-
mired was his wife's—well pleased
was he to find that, though on plea-
sure she was bent, she had a frugal
mind. Everybody, of whatever na-
tionality, likes his wife to have a
frugal mind. When the Government
has appealed to us from time to
time to economise a little more,
your immediate reaction has been
as you will admit if you are honest
—to ask your wife what else she can
do without. To be thrifty oneself
goes against the grain, especially if
you have English blood in your
veins.
Mr Lynd finds an example of the
national wastefulness in the custom
of peeling potatoes before boiling
them; a pernicious practice which
according to him, spoils a potato's
flavour and diminishes its food
value. Most people know this; but
they go on peeling potatoes just the
same; this can only be due to a
sheer love of waste for waste's sake.
It is well known that the English
housewife daily throws away scraps
which a French housewife would
contrive to turn into a palatable
dish.
Mr Lynd has never, so far as I
know, visited Australia. If he had,
and had kept his eyes open, he
might possibly have come to the
conclusion that, compared with the
Australians, the English are a race
of niggards and cheese-parers. We
are, we really are, a shockingly ex-
travagant people; and if the war
(stern schoblmaster) forces us to
learn the unpleasing art of hus-
banding our resources, it will have
taught us a lesson we badly needed.
Our wastefulness pervades the na-
tional life. Our bad habit, if bad
habit it is, of peeling potatoes is a
minor vice; let food experts tell us
all about the vitamins we throw
away with our potato skins, and we
can easily mend our ways. It will
not be so easy to drop our habit of
wasting human lives, of wasting
brain-power, of wasting energies
desperately needed in this life-and
death struggle which has suddenly
come upon us.
Examples flock to the mind; it is
hard to choose. Take, for a start,
the case of the alien in our midst.
There are thousands of so-called
"enemy aliens" in Australia who are
not only ready to be friendly aliens
if we would let them, but who are
even eager to risk their lives for our
cause. If there is anyone in this
world who has reason to loathe Hit-
ler and all that Hitler stands for,
it is the German Jew who has es-
caped from those foul clutches and
found sanctuary here. They have
been persecuted and tortured and
driven from their homes. They, and
other aliens, have learnt by bit-
ter experience to see more clearly
and to feel more passionately the
vileness of Nazism and the necessity
of putting an end to it. If it is im-
practicable—though I fail to see why
it should be—to form a foreign le-
gion as part of the Australian army,
there are other ways of enlisting in
our service these implacable enemies
of our enemy. Here is a great re-
serve of spiritual energy crying out
to be used in our cause; are we so
strong that we can afford to waste
it?
The other day a young man who
had lately finished his training as
an engineer was anxious to get work
in one of our munition factories. He
was rejected, not because we do not
need skilled engineers—not because
he is not fully qualified for the work
—but because, if you please, he is
technically an alien, being a Greek
subject (though he has lived in
Australia since his infancy). Have
the authorities not heard of the
part Greece has played in the war?
Is a Greek, of all people, to be re-
garded as an enemy alien, and pre-
vented from helping us in the way
for which his training has fitted
him? This story is told merely as
an illustration of the silly way we
are wasting our resources. Illustra-
tions could be multiplied.
I say we waste brain-power. The
Australian child has, I firmly be-
lieve, as much native intelligence as
the child of any country in the
world. We cannot, by taking thought,
increase the intelligence with which
he was born; but we can train it,
we can make it effective, we can
give him the chance of developing
it; that is all that education can do,
but it can do that—if we like. I
see red when I think of all the
latent talent we waste; and the
paradox of it is that this wasteful-
ness wears the mask of economy.
We starve our kindergartens, we
starve our schools, we starve our
universities, we starve our adult edu-
cation movement; we starve our
libraries; and we do it all in the
name of economy, not seeing that
this form of economy is the worst
form of national waste—the waste
of the natlon's brains. I know a
country town where, till the war
came, practically the only occupa-
tions Australia provided for a young
man's leisure were drink and
gambling. . .
But it is time to make an end,
for this article is degenerating into
a diatribe. We have wandered far
from the letter "u" with which we
started. That, as you will have
gathered, was merely a somewhat
frivolous way of approaching a sub-
ject which deserves a treatment less
flippant. Now that we are acquir-
ing an enforced frugality in the
matter of tea and petrol and clothes,
now that I have to smoke fewer
pipes per day and you to be more
austere with yourself in the way of
cosmetics, now that we are fore-
going the luxury of having 6 milk-
men driving along 1 short street, we
might as well make a clean sweep of
it and ask ourselves whether the
civilisation which is crumbling was
not a fundamentally wasteful civili-
sation, and what we are going to do
about it.
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