TOPICS OF THE TIMES

Southland Times, Issue 18849, 15 June 1920, Page 4

TOPICS OF THE TIMES

Referring to the recent Hawera profiteering case the Auckland Star recalls an American cartoon in the South African war depicting the War Office in ecstasies over a new button. “All the mighty machinery of the Profiteering Act of last year of thcBoard of Trade and local tribunals, is set going to punish a chemist for selling for one and threepence an article which before the war sold for one shilling, and very naturally under the circumstances it fails,” says the Star. “It is like the scene that occasionally occurs in an English assize town when a judge comes down from London in stale to try a tramp for stealing a loaf of bread from a shop. Most people will ask two questions about this, Hawera comedywhy was such a hopeless case taken up by the Crown, and are there no large fish in the Board of Trade’s sea (hat it must go angling for sprats?. . . . The Government stands in the foolish position of having set the law in motion about a trifle and put a tradesman to worry and perhaps loss of an action in Court on evidence that could have impressed nobody except those responsible for the prosecution. If Mr Massey is in any position to know what people arc saying and thinking, he must know that a prosecution like, this tends to bring the whole anti-profiteering machinery into disrepute.”

Dr Norman Macleod, chaplain to Queen Victoria, and the editor of “Good Words l ” from 1860 to 1572, visited Constantinople in 1866 and writes of hits visit in that magazine. Ho says of the church of St. Sophia that he saw nothin," imposing in its massive exterior which gives the impression simply of vast size, hut its interior, in spile of the decay of its minute details and the absence of all furniture, in accordance with the simplicity of the Moslem worship, is one of tile grandest and most stately in the world. The jdllar“ of porphyry and marble, some of which once belonged in all probability to the temple of Diana at Ephesus, the ronf of mosaic, greatly defaced, it is true, hut yet as a whole retaining much of its ancient splendour, the vast galleries formerly occupied by women only, impressed him deeply. He mentions the noble space afforded for worshippers on the floor, and says that ,60,009 people could lie accommodated within th; 1 wall's. "It would be a grand church to re-each in. ’ he adds. His Moslem guide pointed out what he called a large portrait of Constantine in mosaics, but whitewashed over so as to be but dimly perceived. “It is not unlike the picture by Oimahuo in St. Mark's in Venice; it seems to keep possession of the church through all changes.”