THE POTATO PATCH.

Franklin Times, Volume 9, Issue 631, 10 May 1921, Page 5

THE POTATO PATCH.

Why not a Debating Society in Pukekohe? Surely now the time is ripe fo such. The election alone must have inspired many of onr budding legislators and orators. How many statesmen of to-day—Lloyd George for one—set out on the primrose path of politics from the door of some debating room. It only wants a sufficiently interested citizen to come along and make the move. I hope soon to have a crack in a Pukekohe Debating Society.

He has lain there for over a week now. Calm, serene, beautiful in all the quiet dignity of death. A dead rat! In front of .the Public Trust Office! He sleeps. His breathings are not heard by even the vigilant ear of the local manager. There is a contemplative placidity on his face which makes one think of an officer of the department ruminating over a file. Yet there is a muscular tension in his attitude suggestive of a cadet watching the clock. He sleeps. The life of the humming town goes buzzing around him. Traces of it even now may be found resting on his dormant frame. He sleeps, like a warrior taking his rest, with the busy (?) Trust behind him. Lay no rough hands on him, O borough workman! Lev him rest in peace, symbolical of the office in whose shade he laid him down to die. Let the slow processes of decomposition wipe out his remembrance. Let the slow processes of State administration mop up his deceased estate. He sleeps. The rude forefathers of this Hamlet do not sleep as sound as he. In a vacant section near by two of his brothers sleep. They all sleep. Not even the late Public Trustee in all his heavenly quiescence sleeps like one of these. He sleeps. A perfect form in perfect rest.

This is penned on the one hundredth anniversary of the death of the great Napoleon. The brilliant human meteor that from nothing Destiny hurled flaming across the northern sky, spent itself on the rocks of St Helena just a century ago to-day. But his influence neither time nor circumstance can spend. In the French capital and elsewhere millions of his countrymen at this hour bear testimony to it. The victor of conquerors, the subduer of Powers, the maker of Kings, the world lay, a gigantic football, at his feet. That the ball was kicked no further, that the onward rush was stopped, that the goal was never reached, was not due so much to lack of force or finesse on the part of the player as to the tenacity and staying power of the All-Red combination that at Waterloo met his team. The Prussians were there, it is true. For the part they played in the great captain’s downfall some meed of praise is due. But, like emergencies, they came on the field late in the day, when the glare of battle heat fierce into the eyes of Napoleon and his men, when the Frenchmen were demoralised by the ruthless barracking of the British artillery and exhausted with the futility of their efforts to break through “the thin Red line.” How the battle ended, how the French and their commander fled the field, how Napoleon surrendered and was segregated on the sea-stormed steps of St. Helena is known to all of us. But, for to-day, let ns forget these things. We lay on his grave not rosemary, but laurel. Ambitious, indomitable, megalmaniacal, he was, however, in an intense way only human. There is something of the Corsican in most of us, of whatever country or of whatever time. For human nature is not territorial. It is the same in the county of Franklin as it is in the county of London, the same in Pukekohe as in Paris, the same on the banks of the Waikato as on those of the Rhine. Cornelius.