IRREPRESSIBLES.

Evening Star, Issue 3971, 16 November 1875, Page 2

IRREPRESSIBLES.

To the Editor. Sir, —Have you any well-defined opinion re* garding irrepressible men !If not, I have; and it is quite withiu the limits of possibility that you may like to hear it—in any case you may keep your mind easy, it won’t detain you long. Y> ur irrepressible man, then, is one who is as hard to keep down os was that skipper who, when racing his steamer on the Mississipi, loaded the valves with all the weights he could lay his hands on, and finding that his antagonist gained on him, at last jumped on it himself. Now, it would have been no easy task to keep that man down, 1 can tell you, had anybody been mad enough to make the attempt. Irrepressible men have a power working within them far exceeding ninety pounds to the square inch; and as well may you try to keep down Vesuvius, when Vulcan begins to blow bis bellows, as to attempt to keep down these gentlemen when once this dread force begins to wake up.

The meeting of the Otago Bible Society, held last night, furnished an occasion for one of these irrepressibles, exhibiting theidiosnycraoiea by which the race is afflicted. I refer to our old and deservedly respected townsman, Mr E. B. Cargill, who, sad to say, belongs in some measure to the fraternity referred to. It would appear that because some of the statements made were not much to his liking, he took up the cudgels on behalf of mercantile morality aud the religious character of certain Emperors, and the dovelike and peaceable aspect of affairs all over the world generally, hj for one, not intend to quarrel with Mr Cargill. '1 his is a free country, and if it pleases him to have an opinion wide as the poles from every^other body, why should he not ? If De Quinoey is at liberty to justify Judas Iscariot, and if others are free to maintain that a certain old man is not so black as he is painted, why may not our friend use all his undoubted eloquence to show that althoilth mercantile morality has now and again lain among the pots, it is yet as white as enew, a mi

ts feathers tipped with “ yellow gold f' Why should he not demonstrate that the crowned heads ef Russia, Prussia, Austria, &c., are the identical coming bear, wolf, and lion, which, when they come, are to lie down with the cow, the lamb, and the ox ‘ and that vhe milleniutn has fully and fairly set in ? I ana not sure that the remedy at all lies in the direction indicated by some of the speakers last night; indeed, ,1 more than doutt it. I fear that some of the greatest mercantile rascals unhung have biblea already, and that the saintly rulers to whom our friend referred have biblea and hymn books too, and are not averse from chanting a “Te Deum” when ruthlessly prosecuting schemes of aggrandisement on which it is hard to suppose that heaven can look with a favorable eye. The astonishing thing, however, is the fact that Mr Cargill should attempt to wash such notoriously dirty linen. It is impossible to read the proceedings of Bankruptcy Courts in this Colony and elsewhere and not see enough to satisfy u» that an unfathomable abyss exists in the midst of society, covered over only with a few rotten planks supplied by our credit system. This latter is seen of itself to be a very hot bed of immorality. It is not my purpose to specify cases, but we all know too well the gambling propensities of trade and its accompanying abominations. No doubt Mr Cargill was fired last night with a laudable esprit de corps , both mercantile and (by descent) military, which, taken alone with the irrepressibleness referred to, quite accounts for the spontaneous combustion witnessed ; for my part, however, I felt somewhat scandalised. In conclusion, I would recommend the society to publish it well next time they are to take up as a subject of debatepious emperors, peace-making armies, and honest merchants. The very novelty of the thing would awaken unbounded interest in their operations.—l am, &0., Philoquef.r. Dunedin, November 15.