WHY SHOULDN'T WE?

Taihape Daily Times, Volume 7, Issue 146, 23 February 1915, Page 6

WHY SHOULDN'T WE?

SOMEBODY HAS LIKENED THE KAISER TO NERO. This war is apparently going to have the effect of making us revise many of our standards. In cur school days, for example, we were instructed that Nero fiddling while Rome was burning was the acme of brutal callousness. But why should it be so? Why should not Nero have fiddled under such circumstances? It was better than twiddling his fingers, or tearing his hair, beating his breast, and gesticulating to high Heaven. I have known of a man who composed a fine sonnet while waiting to be called on for his public examination in bankruptcy. Why shouldn't he?

Imperial "Britain's existence is at stake, they tell us—and yet some of cur people fiddle! The beating of the wings of the Angel of Death is heard over our heads, and we go on with son. nets, and brickmaking and bootmaking and brewing and baking as if there was nothing special doing. The armourers laugh at each ether's jests as they fill the moulds of pig-iron that are to go to the making of more engines cf destruction. And why shouldn't they? The Nero fetish obsesseth

We must have "been very fame and unimaginative—some of us in our ideas as to the human capacity for callousness. Nero has easily been om> stripped. Wilhelm 11. ean give him points. It may be very unseemly, of course, to bandy quips and jests in the presence of a world-wide tragedy. But our Tommies are irrepressible, even incorrigible. For them the war is "all in the day's work." There may be few Neros amongst them, but they are mostly invincible optimists, and they have no use for the solemnities of German "kultur." We see the distinction between them and the enemy in the contrast between "Die Wacht am Rhein" and "It's a long, long way to Tipperary." And, after all, can any of us deny that the strains of the latter would have sounded very well com. ing even from Nero's fiddle?

Nero was not so black ae he was painted; but it would be difficult to paint the Kaiser blacker than he is. With poor Nero it has been a case of "Give a dog a bad name, and he will hang for it." But Kaiser Bill wasn't given his execrated name. He chose it for himself. His insane ambition for domination has involved the whole world in war. He has marched through murder and rapine to achieve his fiendish ends, claiming all through the sanction, approval, help, and even the co-operation of Almighty God. He has flung millions of his own people into the pit of death..He has ravaged and desolated the homes of unoffending non-combatants, and then declared to the world that his heart bled for Louvain. Nero! Nero was a lamb compared with the bully with the mailed fist who, It may safely be averred, cannot fiddle for nuts. The brute is never a humourist. Nero had some humour—that saving grace—about him. Why should we insult him by classing him with such a pervert?