NOTES OF THE DAY.

Dominion, Volume 6, Issue 1698, 14 March 1913, Page 4

NOTES OF THE DAY.

A • pretty constant feature of the London Spectator is the publication of letters in which correspondents record what appear to them to be cases of thought-transferrence or apparitions. One such letter in its issue of January 25 has a special interest for New Zealanders apart from its general interest. The anonymous writer is vouched for by the Editor, who says there can be 110 question as to his good faith and accuracy of statement. His letter, Which he heads "A Coincidence !" is as' follows, and is dated January 18: .

The case mentioned below may have many, previously recorded is, all the same, apparently of a sufficientlj special kind liuvg some interest. Last night, during a wakeful hour, I thought that I saw the New Zealand Minister, the Hon. John Bryce, whom I lmd not met since 1884 in that Dominion. His appearance was perfectly clear to me, though I was not intimate with him, and, I believe, spoke to him only once. His lawsuit with the historian of NewZealand cume into my mind. I came up to town this afternoon, took up a newspaper in the club morning-room, and in it saw the announcement of Mr. Bryce's death. Coincidence?

The one point in the letter which makes it interesting is the fact that the writer only spoke oncc to Mr. Buyce in the flesh. But little importance can be attached to any such experiences. This writer must frequently have'seen in dreams and waking visions people who did not die, and of whom he never heard or thought any more. If one dreams of a friend or acquaintance, and soon after hears that the subject of the dream was dying at the time, ono remembers the dream, and is impressed. But unless one never dreams, one always dreams of somebody. It must, in the nature of things, happen now and then that a person chances to come into somebody's dream just at death. The hundred thousand eases in which there is no death are forgotten: the one case of the other kind is remembered.

One of the Press Association messages from Christchurch yesterday reported some observations by Mr. Massey upon the comparative cost of recent loans. Quoting official figures, he mentioned that the Wakd Government's £5,000,000 loan had actually cost £4 12s. B|d. per cent., and that the £4,500,000 loan floated by the Mackenzie Government (and forced upon that Government by AVardist methods) had cost £5 2s. 9d. per cent. Then Mn. Massey showed that the latest £3,000,000 loan, arranged by Mn. Allen, having cost £4 ss. 6d., represented a saving of Ks. :kl. per cent., as compared with the prr.cetlion: chip, or about £25,000' in tho total. It was

really not vitally necessary for Mil. Massev to stress the universally admitted fact that, considering the change for the bad in the uiiirket, Mr. Allen did marvellously well. One must regret that these comparisons arc however: everyone must wish that our loans shall bo well raiseJ, 110 matter who raises them. ]3ut these comparisons would never 'vave been necessary if Sill 'Wauii had'not been so va 'J,'i, and) indeed, so unwise, as to hbast of his great succcss as a financier when the facts were plainly against /him. We said years ago, when Wardist finance began to be Unsuccessful, that nobody would have said anything if Sir Joseph Ward, when one of his loans went off rather badly, had frankly, admitted the fact. But no matter what happened, he flooded the telegraph wires alld filled the papers with boastings. So it became necessary to state the facts. A little frankness and there would never have been any of that controversy in which the old "Liberal" t party has fared so badly, and which' has left Mr. Massev in possession of figures as sharply condemnatory of "Liberal" finance as of Sir Joseph Ward's courteous statement that Mr. Allen knew as much of finance "as my boot" and that he would "make a holy mess of it."

Mr.-' Asquith has made a very remarkable reference to the House of Lords, and a very indiscreet one. Speaking on an amendment to the Address-in-Rcply, he said that "everything since" 1009 had been "the inevitable result" of the "arbitrary and revolutionary" rejection of the Budget of that year. (We may be sure v that somebody, thinking of the Government's fooling of the Suffragists and of the arson, and anarchy that have followed, will say, "What! Everything?" And Me. Asquith will have to reply like poor Captain @orcoran.) He went on to say, that "the House of Lords at present was a. serious and formidable obstacle to Liberal legislation," and that "the Parliament Act had left them too much power, which they ought not to possess." This looks very like a threat (made under Welsh and Labour pressure), to amend the Parliament' Act by still further reducing the already moderate check, upon the temporary majority in the Commons. That the Prime Minister went on to talk of some vague "plan" for making the _ Second Chamber an 'impartial judicial authority" means nothing. The "lying preamble" of the Parliament Act is' still a lying preamble: the pledge to reform the constitution of the Second Chamber is still unredeemed. The Unionists will have good reason to complain of Mil. Asquitii's obvious readiness to break his other solemn undertaking—rthe undertaking which persuaded the Lords to accept the Parliament Bill, and which gave the Ba'dical press its best excuse for backing that' Bill: the implied undertaking that there' would be ,no further interference with the Second Chamber until its constitution was reformed.. The threat is there, anyway.