June 9.
CORRESPONDENCE on motor-car manners takes the customary violent tone. Years ago in that delightful book, ''Three Men in a Boat,'' Jerome K. Jerome described with much humour the feelings of rowing-boats for the insufferable arrogance of steam-launches, and of steam launches for the incurable stupidity of rowing-boats. It is just the same to-day as between pedestrians and motor-cars. One of the former class wishes that his adversary's car may be wrecked and the insurance money be withheld; while another advises his fellows to. carry ''guns'' and use them. And motorists have been heard to say that the traffic problem will never be solved until cars are fitted with a sort of boxing glove on a telescopic arm worked by a pedal from the footboard, with which to slap the wandering pedestrian smartly back on to the sidewalk.
But for all this and at the risk of alienating the affections of many readers, we venture to put in a word for the motorist. Let the writer confess at once that he one. But to anticipate charges of bias, let him add that he almost daily uses trams and ricshas, that kind friends frequently give him a ride in a pony-trap and that he used to do a good deal of riding until boots in the nursery became a more pressing affair than shoes in the stable. And so he pleads that he can take a catholic view of traffic controversies. The first contention he would venture upon is that the bad-mannered motorists, the road-hogs, ure a minority and that as they are the sort of people who always have been and probably always will be ill-mannered, it is hardly just to blame their grossness on the car. The majority of
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.