AN INTERPRETER OF THE SUBTLE.

Dominion, Volume 1, Issue 32, 1 November 1907, Page 6

AN INTERPRETER OF THE SUBTLE.

. .: •■■■■.-. The Attorney-General's announcement that lje is a Socialist, and glories in the fact, seems to be causing serious trouble to the journalistic friends of the Government. At first sight Dr. Findlay might appear to have been wanting in tact in placing the Ministerial Press in the position, of "having to support the Socialism which _ they just iiuished denouncing, in faithful discharge of their duty of proclaiming .tho infallibility'of the Premier. Yet I)r. Findlay has this, excuse: that he was setting his friends no harder task than they have been set by Mr. M'Nab during the past , yeair. After their long and arduous practice of the art of somersaulting on tli6 land question, 'he might well urge that they should have found it, easy to show that the Premier's testimony to the absence of Socialistic ideas from his policy: was merely corroborated by a ; colleague's proud confession that that policy is Socialism pure and simple. ,'No doubt Dr. Findlay is surprised and disappointed to discover that! he expected tbo : much, of'his acrobatic ; disciples. We are told that he meant ■something else when he gloried in his Socialism. He had a subtler than the; obvious one. ■ But that is not very helpful of the interpreter. What is that subtle meaning? Seemingly,- it is too subtle for apprehension by ..the'.'Boeotians; who have ;iiot the entree to the dim arcana of the Ministerial niimL It is too subtle, indeed, to lend itself to explanation even by the delicate intellects oi' those who have passed into that inner circle of mysteries in which, words take on new and strange meanings, and nothing is , any,, more, the. same as in the outer world; of, mere human beings. This may be satisfactory to the "friends," who>grasp at once the full nobility of the AttorneyGeneral's meaning .when, like Huinpty Dumpty, he- says " impenetrability." But what arc the other people to say? "Ha ha!" laughs;the Cockney spectator of a French play, "awfully good! Ha! ha!' , "Y\ r hat wns\ the joke?" his friend asks. "Oh, a very good one, but it is rather hard to translate. It's—it's more the spirit, 'tlie suggestion, than anything. You lose the meaning in English." And the disappointed friend gloomily suspects that his friend is as much in the dark as himself. The; interpreter of the At-torney-General' ' reminds us very strongly of this Cockney connoisseur of French. '> And ■■until the , joke is translated, until, that is to say, wo are told what -{he Attorney-General did mean, we shall have the same disturbing suspicious'•• as the connoisseur's friend. ; \ ■'.■••