The Halifax Comet. — 1902-12-27 (Halifax, West Yorkshire, England)

HALIFAX.  Turret, Church and House Clocks Wound and kep in Repair by Yearly Contract.  Estimates Free.  AGENT FOR SINGERS' SEWING MACHINES  ,  need for strenuous common sense more urgent.  * *  The benefits of combination are so well advertised nowadays that the beauties  of competition scarcely get a mention.  Milkmen are the newest Converts to the bulling of prices, encouraged, perhaps, by the successful movement among barbers. Whether milk is to be put up d. or id. per quart rerna'ns to be seen. Whether it can be raised in price at all is another question that coming time alone can solve. In Pudsey, the wiles of the milk dealer  were vain. The populace discovered that combination was as good for itself  as for the milk merchant-s. For some  days no produce of the cow was sold at all. The fashion went off milk as the drapers say, and within a week the infants' joy was done at old rates over the doorstep.  The hard-headed public have nothing but sympathy for the trials of the farmer and vendor of milk. Nothing else; not a cent. Efforts to raise quality, to improve the breed of cattle, to reduce railway rates, and to clothe the officers of the society in rhetoric as with a horse-blanket, have the fullest, heartiest—and the freest —best wishes of milk buyers. With all these improvements made, milk should be cheap and4plentiful. To endeavour to reap the profit from both enis could only lead to a use of improper words and the throwing about of non-fatty solids. In that last remark I expressly dissociate  milkmen from the class of solids named. When the retailer can come round with a smiling face to say that milk has been reduced to 20. per quart we shall round upon him and with one voice demand to know how long he has robbed us. That is business.  * * *  The law is full of surprises. The late Commissioner Kerr held that in law every foreigner was assumed to know the whole English code immediately upon arrival at Dover. "A thing no man ever did," he added sententiously. The law is negative rather than positive, and until you have been tried you may be pardoned for being ignorant of your own innocence. Off-license holders have been gaining experience and information lately; one local firm buying its guidance rather dearly. There are still many points for the courts to elucidate, not only in licensing law, but in common or unlicensed life, and a pronouncement upon some of them would be as interesting as the Hartopp case.  * *  The right to live is one, and perhaps the most important, item of doubt. Death—by suicide—is known to be unlawful if not completed before a rescue arrives. I know of nothing in the statutes to interfere with death by natural dissolution, possibly on account of the difficulty  of correction. The right to be born remains in more uncertainty. But what I earnestly wish to know is whether our law conveys a definite, absolute and inexpugnable right to be alive, and to walk the face of the globe. Ask a lawyer, and he wriggles all over the house in an effort to shew that inferentially the law does. But that is not good enough. It seems to me that before troubling any further about the Education Bill, it is Mr. Whitley, M.P.,'s business to put a statute on the books declaring in no uncertain words our positive and inalienable right to keep alive.  The Talbot Assembly Rooms provide a sight each Monday evening for those interested in the craze called, for short, Physiculture. Long lean men, short fat ones, robust athletes and amateur Apollos of varying ages cut antics and capers designed for their bodily improvement. Bare-shanked enthusiasts hop round the room and perform feats upon the stomach and the back with a demoniac energy. Exercises are pushed to develop a man's muscles from the eyebrow lifters down to the small toe hookers, and to expand his chest until he has to buy new waistcoats. More can be taken from the paunch and added to the working parts by the method followed by Sergeant Watts than by any patent home-torture system in the world. Smartness is the watchword, and earnest, slogging work, well-applied, is the means. Appetites are restored and impaired thirsts revived by merely looking on.  Something tantalising in the way of torture is wanted for fiendish parents. Six months hard labour is very inadequate justice for the brute who can wound his offs r ring with a belt, and add the Satanic cruelty of rubbing salt into the sores. One sound whipping of twenty lashes scarcely meets the case. The chairman regretted his inability to apply that form of correction to the unnatural Healey. A series of floggings is better. Lashes to begin with, lashes during the imprisonment, and lashes on coming out are more likely to tame the promptings of savagery. I would not further brutalise a brute by bringing him to death's door or leaving him to an intensified resentment. Measures to hurt and to cowe the unfeeling are wanted.  At this not too gay and middling festive season, warnings appear in the local Press  on the danger of alcoholic gifts to postmen and cabbies. A little impertinent, perhaps, but well-meant, the work of good busybodied souls who only await a chance to metamorphose the globe. Meantime the Public and their servants will persist in their injudicious ways. Postmen don't like stale cake or more than thirty meals of beef tea per diem. Cabmen take anything but water, which they save for _  I the- poor-horse—but even they -are tiring of the fine old shilling port, which figures so prominently nowadays.