PASSING NOTES.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 19475, 9 May 1925, Page 6

PASSING NOTES.

For the Roman Catholic hierarchy visiting Dunedin to celebrate Jubilee" of their training college at Mosgicl everybody has had a kindly feeling. Hopelessly Protestant though we be, no ungracious word has escaped our bps. We have been on our, good behaviour, press and public alike. A venerable archbishop and a lengthy retinue of bishops and priests, quaint representatives of the largest communion in Christendom, were impressive. Even the Rev. Howard Elliott, had he been there, would have lapsed into politeness. Hierarchy," meaning government by priests, is not to our Protestant liking, name or thing. But the hierarchs themselves were rot shy of the word, as their speeches show ; and if the people they govern prefer government in that form, who shall say them nay? The Roman Catholics in New Zealand, though the Presbyterians >utnnmiber them by more than two to one, and the Anglicans by perhaps three to one, are not a feeble folk. Look at their schools! They pay taxes like the rest of us, and, in paying taxes, they, like the rest of us, maintain the public schools. Yet in addition they provide and maintain schools of their own. Continuing in this spirit, they may certainly count c-n a future. Macaulay’s New Zealander sketching the ruins of St. Paul’s from a broken arch of London Bridge will not see the last of them. Dean Inge puts the case in a way less trite. He quotes a “ pre-war saiying ” that the Roman Catholic Church was “ one of the three invincibles,” the other two being the German Army and the Standard Oil Trust. The “ invincible " German Army lost the war and is now in eclipse. But does any one suppose that wc have seen the last of it?

Dean Inge, by the way, is reported from America, —lecturing at Yale to more congenial audiences than the nomadic English lecturer usually expects. Yale and Harvard are the American Cambridge and Oxford. “I am not a Prohibitionist,” said the Dean at New York; “ but that doesn’t matter; I shall be here only three weeks.’’ He could hold out for that time; not to mention the chance of ‘’bootleggers” at academic Yale itself. During his three weeks Dean Inge may study at close hand what at this distance looks like Pussyfoot in convulsions. Over sixty vessels, mostly motor craft, and capable of great speed, equipped as for battle, are mobilised at the Staten Island base for a new war of extermination against the rum fleet, which is lying off the coast from Now Jersey to Connecticut. They are expected to put to sea on Tuesday. They will operate under orders which are to shoot first and investigate afterwards in the case of suspected rum-runners. — New York cable, May 5. A colossal figure of Liberty greets the refugee from Old World slavery at the entrance of New York Harbour. “ Yes,’ said the immigrant Frenchman, mindful of the free .country he had left, its vines and its wines,—“ they set up statues to their mighty dead.”

It is not unusual for American citizens to skip across the frontier line dividing the Land of Liberty from Canada that they may satisfy a legitimate thirst, though it be under the oppressive British flag. Or, better still, they make a holiday trip to the British West Indies. “ The crowded boats continue to arrive,” writes a Jamaica correspondent to a London newspaper; ‘‘they are all under the Union Jack, but they take up their passengers at New York. Water, I hear, is unknown on board.” Before the collective 'R.C. hierarchy separated I should have liked to hear what they thought of the affront put upon religion by the Dublin authorities in making St. Patrick’s Day a “ dry ” day. A bar tender thrown idle is reported lamenting the good old times when sacrilege in this form was unknown and impossible. “ Why, in f him days,” he exclaimed, ‘‘ there wasn’t a publichouse in Dublin bnt’d give a sandwich as big as your two hands and a pint of porther on the head of it foi fourpince. Begob, it was the Millennium, only we didn’t know it! ”

Coming back for a moment to Dean Inge, who, for an ecclesiastic and a dignitary to boot, has a rather dangerous newspaper notoriety, T observe that in dissipation of the legend, that he is the high priest of gloom he contributes every week a page of amusing gossip to a London evening paper and a more or less humorous column to the Morning Post. Gloom is not his vice; say rather, a reckless optimism. Read these sentences from the preface to one of his books, date 1921: In France there are signs of Conservative reaction, as if the war had put doctrinaire socialism out of date. The communist tyranny in Russia, after murdering in four years more innocent people than all the Czars from Ivan the Terrible, and reducing that vast country to the last extremity of misery, is apparently tottering. Another two years will probably see the end of the most ghastly episode in modern history, and with it will fall the whole crazy edifice of doctrinaire economics erected by Marx, Our own working men arc said to bo learning in the school of adversity, and to be no longer restricting output as they did two years ago. All rose-colour! Nothing of this lias proved true. Dean Inge’s outlook on life in 1921 was that of a music-hall optimist :

There’s a good time coming, boys, Wait a little longer.

“Our working men no longer restrict output.” Does anybody believe it? Ask the working man himself whether he does or does not restrict output. He laughs and winks the other eye. In New Zealand what is the story of the waterside? Slowness. slackness, the stop-work meeting, th strike. Don’t ask the story of the Australian waterside. In the southern hemisphere we haven't arrived at the “standard of living” represented by the dole, the pictures, and the football fixture, nor may we ever! But here and all over the British industrial world the prayer is "apt that Kipling wrote more than twenty years ago— From forgo and farm and mine and bench, Peck, altar, outpost lone— Mill, school, battalion, counter, trench, Hail, senate, slieeplold, throne— Creation’s cry goes up on high From age to cheated age: “Send us the men who do the work For which they draw the wage.” Dear “Givis,” —A Labour item from England is the declaration of a workman that ho stood for four hours a day and “was prepared to starve on the dole till he got it.” What this “workman” so called really stands for, it seems to me, is the dole, and leave and license with the dole to “do nothing for ever and ever.” Isn’t there a verse with this refrain? There is a tombstone inscription, if that is what you mean : Here lies a poor woman who always was tired, For she lived in a world where ton much was required. Her last words on earth were, “ Dear friends, I am going_ To where there’s no cooking i.or washing nor sewing. Don’t mourn for me now, don't mourn for me never, For I’m going to do nothing for e v or and ever. “ A poor woman ” whose portion had not been four hours’ work a day: more likely fourteen. The British workman, whose dream is more pay for less work, is enabling Germany, ruined by the war, to repay 5 ruin with ruin, and to thrive upon it. Germany is ruining our shipbuilding yards with all the industries thereon depending. The Blue Star Line, has received tenders for eight 12.000-tou refrigerated meat ships from British. Dutch, and German shipbuilding. The Shipbuilding and Shipping Record understands that the lowest Continental price was £IB,OOO to £20,000 per steamer below the British '■ tender, hut efforts are being made to retain the contracts in Great Britain. This is the second case of the kind within a month ; in the first, the work went to Oevmanv. It is to be noted that ihese four-hou’rs-a-day idealists would strip the country of its defences and stave off sar hv pacifist resolutions and refusing to thdit. But, as someone has remarked, “ It is useless for the sheep to pass resolutions in favour of vegetarianism, while the wolf remains of a different opinion.”

Dear “Civis,” —You have sometimes allowed to me as an old sailor man a corner in vour column. I should like to put in a word about a queer discussion in the House of Commons on Navy affairs as reported in the Daily Times this week. A Labour member objected to the Navy rule of compulsory attendance at Divine service as ‘‘contrary to the spirit of the age, but claimed that the crew should have “full political rights.” Divine service at one end of the ship and a political meeting at the other (liscusscg the affairs of the nation or grievances against the officers. Fancy it! I never served on a King’s ship,—a Queen’s ship it was in my time though I might have done so. The foc’sle theory was that if you wanted to “go aboard" of Andrew”—that is to join the Navy—you had only to hoist a shirt at the fore-yard arm in sight of any man-of-war in port or at sea, and an armed boat would be sent to fetch you off. If I had gone “aboard of Andrew,” I shpuld have expected strict discipline and the articles of war. What else? and what better? There was much discussion in the House oyer the Navy man’s rum ration, which Lady Astor said “was not at all necessary.” What does Lady Astor know about it? I should like to give her a taste of ordinary sea experience as it came my way. For instance — Chops of the Channel, mid-winter, outward bound and muzzled by a souwester storming up in squalls of hail and sleet; night as black as Erebus; when “All hands!” and “Reef topsails !” A long job aloft; then on deck clearing up the raffle in the scuppers, sheets and braces stiff with frost. But—“ Grog ho!” and the steward under the break of the poop with a keg of rum, watered belike, but not too much, —and to every man and hoy his measured tot. “Not at all necessary,” says Lady Astor. Let mo tell you it was life from the dead. Sailor men wouldn’t sign on in a “teetotal ship” if they knew it. And right they were. On emigrant ship experience described in another column of the same paper 1 could say something. But that may be for another day.— Shellback. Why should joining the Navy from a merchant ship be called “ going aboard of Andrew”? The phrase needs explaining’ Civis.