PASSING NOTES.

Otago Witness, Issue 2892, 11 August 1909, Page 5

PASSING NOTES.

(From Saturday's Daily Times.)

The apotheosis of Sir Joseph Ward seems to have touched its climax. The cables display him coruscating at a banquet where he site installed between those twin pillars of the State, the Premier and the Leader of the Opposition. There is a way in putting things, and this may be better put. Instead of saying that Sir Joseph Ward sat between Mr Asquith and Mr Balfour, let us say that Mr Asquith and Mr Balfour sat next Sir Joseph Ward, one on each side. Yes, that is it, — Sir Joseph in the centre of the lime-light, supported by the great officers of the Empire, the one on his right hand and the other on his left. After this, anything that the King might do by way of decorating him would be a bathos. Sir Joseph is to leave on the 23rd, and indeed the sooner he gets away the better. For — with bated breath be it spoken — at this end and just now the name Ward is not at all a name to conjure with. Wle have with us in Otago at this moment one of hie lieutenants, Mr Roderick M'Kenzie — a West Coast M'Kenzie, Minister of Public Works; and the mission of Mr Roderick M'Kenzie in Otago is to snub us superciliously for thinking that in the matter of railway construction a promise, even a SeddonWard promise, is a pledge that ought to be redeemed. We take the snubbing meekly, — in fact we take it lying down, and our necks are low for the West Coast M'Kenzie to wipe his boots upon. The assumption is that the more we are trampled the better we shall like it. But that remains to be seen ; and Sir Joseph will do well to quicken his homeward steps that he may see for himself.

When Sir Robert Stout, making the most of his holiday and seeking out celebrities, foregathered with Mr W. T. Stead, they discovered that in the year when the one was taking ship for New Zealand the other was lea.ving school to become an errand boy ; also that "in the interval much has happened." -Yes, indeed ! Each of them has won distinction, the one in journalism, the other in politics. The one has served a term in Holloway Jail, — with no damage to honour or reputation, as we all know. The oilier, if never himself in prison, has sent other men there. The one, as a tip-top journalist, is in confidential relations with Czars and Kaisers, advising them for their good and at their own request. The other is a belted knight and the Chief Justice of New Zealand. To complete the parallel, I add that at the present moment each of them seeme a trifle dotty. I affirm no more than the seeming, observe ; but I can certainly go as far as that. Mr Stead has just opened in London an Information Bureau for promoting intercourse -with the unaeen vi-orld ; the agent at this end, Mr Stead ; the agent at the other end, Mr Stead's diecarnate "Julia." Sir Robert Stout, to do him justice, would look upon these proceedings with mingleS horror and contempt ; but his own proceedings are queer. England, compared with New Zealand, lie finds plow and behind the times, London lacking in life and movement. The British farmer doeen't know how to farm, nor the British merchant how to do business. In politics, the education question, the liquor question, everybody is wrong all round ; only one man has seen to the heart of their alleged "problems," and he is a New Zealander. Summed up, what Mr Stead got from his visitor was that British home affairs were universally out of joint ; that it needed only a turn of the wrist to reduce this dislocation ; and that to put things rijrht ■would 'be no "cursed epile," but Stout's delight. As a supplement to this Stead interview may be read a paiagraph on Sir Robert at the annual Mansion Hou.-e dinner to His Majesty's Judges. The New Zealand Chief Justice proposed the toast of " The Profession of the Law." He said that lawyers, as a whole, were well equipped and educated for the discharge of their duties, but he was not sure that the standard in this resoect in New Zealand was not even higher than it was in England

But what most clearly argues our old friend a trifle beside himself and beyond himself is the singular way of escape he has found for us in the Day of Arma-

geddon. As long as Britain ie top-dog, we remain British, helping all we can to keep the other dog under. But the moment Germany gets to be top-dog we are to become Americans. Up will go the new flag ; and then, when the nearest German cruiser comes to claim us, we shall need merely to point to the Stars and Stripes and cry '" Hands off!" According to Sir Robert's law — and this must be wherein the law of New Zealand ie better than the law of anywhere else — the proceedings described would be quite within our option, and after becoming j prize of war we should still be at liberty ' to choose our flag and our owner. Never will New Zealanders submit to foreign domination. Our course is clear. If by any disaster any foreign Power were to dictate a peace in London which transferred New Zealand to the conqueror, the next day we should hoist the Stars and Stripes, the only other flag; save that of the Union Jack under which New Zealanders could live. And neither America nor Germany would have anything to say in it! How exceedingly useful these principles would have been to poor Roshdesvensky in his controversy with Togo. The day begins to go against him, but his soul is calm. He has ready a Union Jack bent on to the halliards, and- at the critical moment up it goes. "We began as Russians,. we j end as British ; — Respect the flag !" If the rule holds good of New Zeaand, a whole country, it would surely hold good of a fleet. I consider that Sir Robert I Stout, if his opinions are upheld — and there's the rub ! — has revolutionised the whole theory of belligerent rights. Still flits about, and in and out, the visionary airship. Unfortunately co far as I am concerned, its flittings are strictly within the columns of the newspapers. There ie a general wish, I notice, to strengthen existing evidence, and every new witness feels it his duty to go " one better." Last! week we had marked the bow and stern lights, and listened to the winnowing of the propellor. This week we have both counted the phantom crew ' and received from them a ghostly hail, hollow and uncanny. Another week, and we. shall be clasping hands with visitors , from Mars. Mr Wragge, I believe, is of this expectation : and with Mr Wragge are others, equally intelligent. A good few votes are still cast for German espionage ; also there are persons who continue to hanker after Halley's comet. The believers in Mr* Pickwick's dark" lantern are a silent crowd, ,and of them ; I am able to get no statistics.- Then ' there are the optical illusionists, — people . who say that" the moon looks no bigger jon the horizon than overhead. You i think it does, but it doesn't. Anent i which I interpose the remark that if the I horizontal moon does not look any bigger, though you "think . it does, the illusion is not optical but mental. Waiving that point, I have to mention other illusionists who are quoting an eighteenth ! century couplet about Pitt and Dundas. " I can't see the Speaker, Pitt, — can you?" "Can't see the Speaker, Dundas?— l see two!" Whils others, on the same general tack, are turning up Burns for "Willie brewed | a peck o' maut." We are na fou, we're nae that fou, But just a drappi© in our e'e; — taken with the psychological indication contained in a line that follows — It is the moon, I ken hex horn. Note that the identifying of the moon depends on the kenning of her horn. It Is a fair inference that the heavenly bodies sometimes present themselves disguised in drink, and have to be elucidated by a process of reasoning. These scattered observations of mine have, each and every one of them, a bearing on the airship problem, but at the moment I don't think it necessary to fray precisely what that bearing is. Let us await events. : Doctor James Watt, whose intermittent appearances in the medical melee have been a public joy for weeks past, informs the editor that he seldom reads Passing Notes,-— he sleeps well without. I cannot doubt it. People who don't read Passing Notes are naturally unawake half their time. '• But "—says he — " my attention has been drawn to the concluding paragraplw fn Saturday's iasue." Ah, — his attention has been drawn ! In Laputa, where nobody reads Passing Notes, where indeed there are no Passing Notes to read, every citizen who can afford it maintains a •' flapper," an attendant whose duty it is to keep him awake and draw lus attention to the obvious by slapping him softly on the organs of sense with a bladder containing dried peas. If somebody will kindly flap the attention of Dr Watt to this present paragraph, Dr Watt may avoid missing something that mio-ht interest liim. His vice is quotation: he will at least be interested in a quotation from himself: — j " Civis " speaks of ray squirting quotat ions at every pore. The human body i is so constituted that, with it* sweat j glands as they are, it is impossible to j squirt anything at any pore. Really! Is this the present state of medical knowledge? Then we are lower than I thought. Let me assure Dr Watt that a poros, or pore, as authoritatively denned from Aristotle downwards, us not a mere passage through the skin, but any duct or opening of the body. It follows that the human mouth is a ]>ore ; and we certainly know of Dr Watt that— For rhetoric, he cannot ope His mouth but out there flies a trope; —which trope is usually a quotation. When Dr Watt says that it is impossible ior him to squirt quotations from any pore he is thinking of his remaining poiopity, his lesser and his finer pores. But, even bo, he is wrong. Can he be ignorant of the technical terms employed by Galen, by Hippocrates, by Diosoorides Physicus, and other respectable practitioners, to denote "the discharge of peccant humours through the pores " V Does he fail to' recognise the words " meta-

syncrino" and " metasyncrisis"? Likewise their elegant equivalents " metapovopoieo " and " metaporopoiesis " ? This is very, sad, and a blow to our medical school. For my own part I abandon that much debated institution forthwith — to the wolves, I had nearly said ; anyhow I abandon it to the reformers. As to the original question. Dr Watt and his squirtations, the original diagnosis holds : — a literary indigestion and the discharge of peccant humours through the pores. Fxom the flippant to the sacrilegious, as from pitch-and-toss to manslaughter, is a ■wide range. Being the person inculpated, it behoves me to insert the following bill of indictment with all meekness. Dear " Civis," — I think your flippant criticism of th« Chapman-Alexander mission in Australia is rather out of place, if not sacreligious. How would you account for Peter's moeting on the day of Penticost? You have there- your main factors, the clever speaker and the crowd, as well as the critics accusing him of being drunk. Yet this meeting was the birth of the Christian Church. I do not know the permanent results of the Torrey-Alexander Mission in Dunedin, as I do not live there, but I have seen very many lives transformed as the result of revival meetings, large ana email, during the last 50 years President Edwards, of Cardiff, states that ♦here are 70,000 or 80.000 of the converts of the Welsh Revival still standing. That is the good that comes of them.— East Invercargill. Eevival excitements, like airship excitements, are matter for public comment; in neither case is it sacrilege to suggest natural causes that may explain the explainable. The unexpkmable I leave , to the theologians and Mr Wragge. Natural causes?—^ven a crowd, a speaker that can play upon its emotions, with a singer XZ teaches it to express them in voluptuous dance-rhythms, and you ha « for your revival excitement some \ei« obvious natural causes. The mail which was despatched from Wellington for London, via Naples, on Juno 25, reached its destination on the morning of th© 2nd inst. During the voyage of the .... Mam™ to Vancouver with the press dolefeat.s aboard, * collation made among : thejasreng«» -"resulted in ft sum of £10 being «ecuWd This was handed to the ship « officer who were asked ov the delega ea to- send it on to the Shipwreck Rebel , Society of New Zealand. A cheque for the amount Wduly received from the Uiuoa Steam Ship Company at last week s mcc .- h* of the society's Executive Committee., A Press Association telegram states i thas Mr W H. Triggs has joined the Boaic* of Directors of the Christchurch Press Lo. It is understood that Mr Triggs will continue the editorial control of the Fres,. \ Wellington telegram states that hi* third engineer of the Manuka was charged at the Police Court on the sth wjthbnnß.nj in a «et of furs without paying duty Aftei evidence for the prosecution had been tendered, the point was raised that the good. were not dutiable, and the case was dismteed without prejudice- It is understood that another information will be laid. A Press Association telegram from Halting, states that Mr G. P. Donnelly sent the following cablegram to the PrimeMinister (Sir J. G- Ward) on Monday:- •• Hearty congratulations on awakening the sleeping Lion. Now doubly earn the _ gratitude of the Empire by finding a market for our surplus mutton by remembering the poor and the Territorials " There appears to be some little friction between the Waikouaiti County Council and the West Harbour Borough Council regarding the maintenance of roads on the frontier. At last week's meeting? c! the latter body a letter was read from tlie clerk of the former stating that he was not aware that the boundary was near St. Leonards, but that the West Harbour Council was entitled to co the work as the Waikouaiti Council's employee ha* done three days' work since the. West Harbour man had don© anything.— Discussion showed that there was considerable di\orsity of opinion as to how Ihe two councils etood in "regard to labour owing. It \\a* finally decided to authorise the three day*' work, and to ask the Waikouaiti Council to give particulars of future work dons on boundary roads by its mea. A very touching incident took place in connection with the presentation of the gold stare for 25 years' service to Captain Sprigg©ns and Fireman Beauchamp, at the annual fire brigade function (reports the Wanganui Herald'). Fireman Beauchamp, who is an old and much-respected resident; of Wanganui, has been- for over a quarter of a century one of the brigade's most energetic members, and until quite recently has been always ready to respond to the call 1 of duty. Latterly, however, failing health bae laid the veteran (who must have passed! - the allotted span of life) aside, but hie comrades engaged a cab to drive him to and from the supper room in order that he might attend and be decorated with the star he had co well earned. After having the etar pinned on his breast, Fireman Beauchamp in a manly epeeeh returned his thanks, and then, with evident emotion* took occasion to farewell his old comrades.He said that the Spartans of old wera^.J famed for keeping their faces to the foe.ffll but he would retire with his face to his " friende. The veteran then slowly walked] backwards out of the room, amidst a silenca that was almost painful, and thus ended hi« connection with the brigade, of which he had' for co long been such an cnthusiastitf and honoured membei. All present wer« - deeply moved at the touching scea* "-

L^ I A very despondent sort of letter was re geived by the Levels County Council from X * correspondent, who complained that he bad more than crce been nearly capsized pn one of the council's roads owing to obHrnotions. The writer ended up by in Iprmvnjj the council that he would hold i responsible and claim compensation from i if any accident occurred, dismally addin Cȣ I'm alive I"

- The report of tli-e West Australian Government Labour Bureau for 1908-9 chows that there were 7709 applications for work, and 4704- engagements provided, 567 by Goverriment departments. The women's - brajich of the Perth^ register had 1075 apt phcants, and found situations for 783. Free t railway passes were provided for 1715 perg sons, at a cost of £1513, of which £739 had been refunded.