CURRENT TOPICS

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LII, Issue 367, 19 April 1910, Page 4

CURRENT TOPICS

OBSCENE PRINTS. The manager of New Zealand Truth has gone to gaol, and has been lined lor allowing obscene matter to be printed in the paper named. New Zealand has some reason to be proud of its journals. It may be taken for granted that New Zealanders are the best reading public in the world. The patronage given to prints thai, are a crying disgrace to the •craft and to the country which allows them to exist shows that there is a large section of .people who delight in unnecessary and indecent detail. In respect of the style of journalism of which the paper named gives the most pernicious examples, it is a matter of congratulation that the growth is not indigenous; that it was not only impossible to get newspaper proprietors in New Zealand who were sufficiently degraded to lay the foundation of such properties, but it was even necessary to import people from Australia to sow the evil seed. Such papers do incalculable harm. They attack evil or good with equal impartiality; they revel in salacious detail, innuendo, or downright filth, pretending public service. And the disgrace is that there is a good market for such garbage. New Zealand is not more moral or more pure than any other country, and it has its Stiggiiises, but if it permits an addition to Fts cankers it is doing bad business. Before an attempt was made to suppress indecent and obscene newspapers the police had a spasm of righteousness, and some cases affecting sellers of art reproductions were heard. The real evil cried out from every newspaper-shop and every bookstall. Then came the prosecution of sv stray bookseller here and there, followed by various other prosecutions. In fact, the powers that be bosan to wake up to the fact that a. iamoiis and modest picture like "Psyche at the Bath" was not an evil, and that indecent literature sown broadcast was. Unlike other cycles of energy on the part of the authorities, this one has become continuous. There is nothing like hammering at a subject. One may be sorry for tlie man on whom the heavy burden is laid, for he probably was not responsible, but if the sentence .encourages other men to refrain from {poisoning public morals, the public is well served. THOSE POOR PEERS. Surely the people of the whole Dominion are sorry for the poor, persecuted peers of Britain! One of them recently stopped his guinea subscription to the cricket club which rented an infinitesimal section of his estate, on the grounds that if the Budget was passed be would be ruined. The fact that bis rent roll totalled only .€75,000 a year may have influenced him in his economy. The really crusted peer in Britain is in no way to blame. He has been worshipped for centuries. He is still worshipped. It may be believed that if he were deposed from his s'eat as an hereditary legislator, that he would be elected by popular vote to a seat among the mighty. The creation of peers in the days of old lacked the commercial significance that justifies a coronet nowadays. The ancient peer was >i. person who by force of character and dominating personality persuaded all to flock to his banner. He was a knightly person, whose physical deeds and derring-do won for him the esteem of his 1 .fellows. Thus he became lord — land-lord. Because of his deeds he was granted territory, because of territory his son was made lord. Because ot his soil's lordship his son became legislator. Because of his son's overlordship the son became a territorial monarch, capable, 1 through no personal qualities, of deciding matters for a whole nation. Hereditary legislators are quite unable to •understand why their will should not become law. They have been used to the fealty of retainers and tenants. Therefore the whole of the people should be feal'. An example of the domination desired by the peers is sulVicient. Eighteen months ago a woman gathered sticks from the demesne 01 an earl. The sticks were valued at Is. The woman was sent to gaol for three months. And at last the people have objected to this domination. The "woodre ve" (ancient for keeper of the woods) of the Duke of Rutland recently proceeded against two men for ''damaging the turf" of the duke by walking on it. The damage was estimated at sixpence, aid the magistrate dismissed the case ! In ancient time the duke would have bad the magistrate flogged and the men cither hanged or sent to penal servitude on his own sentence. There is a chance in Britain now—and Britons are glad. MAORI FAIRY LORE. Writing in the Sydney Telegraph with regard to Mr Clement discoveries in the Bay of islands, "(J" says •that when the Maoris of the Great Migration stepped from their canoes they found other inhabitants already here, "the people of the land," as thev are called in Maori lore. The Maori traditions are rich in reference to fairies Avith white skins and fair hair. Thesj fairies, legend says, were living in NewZealand when the Maoris came am wc«* divided into three tribes, "Descendants of the Red One," "Descendants of the' ■Albino," and "Descendants of the Dimly Seen," the last-named of which is a title of unique fitness as the designation of a fairy race. The Maoris claim to have; learned tihe art of net-making from these fairies, who, being makers of nets and eaters of fish, must have had a distinct corporeality. Besides the fairies there were elves and ogres and tree-sprites that haunted the bush in their sands. It is agreed that the fairies and

such wood-dwelling peoples wen: really remnants of a conquered race, .surviving thus in the midst of the conquerors, upon whom, from mountain cavern or gloomy forest, the dispossessed "people of the land" struck in retaliation and revenge, until they came to be feared as beings something less or more tlian human. Possibly in this way, it lias been | suggested, the original inhabitants of New Zealand still survive in the Maori fairy tales. In the very forests which Mr. Wragge has been exploring legend locates a yellow-haired tribe of cavedwelling fairies called the Karitehe, who often seized Maori girls when out flowergathering, the girls so captured never more returning to their people. It may he urged that the Maoris brought their •fairy lore with them from Ilawaiki, as •they brought the sweet potatoes and their dogs when they set forth to voyage to a new land in their great canoes. Indeed, one Maori legend actually relates that they carried the fairies with them in a special canoe. But there is other evidence to show that New Zealand was a populated country when the Maoris descended upon it. The people of the country are described in the folk lore, which has passed on from toncnie to tongue, as 'a small-bodied race who were easily conquered. White-skinned and yellow-haired, they had no affinities with the Malays and seem to have been some far-wandered branch of the fair races. who reached the Dominion, in the course-j of a forgotten migration, now hidden in the mists of time. Their storv may be

written in stone in Mr. Wragge's sculptures, and if it is it will add a chapter of vivid interest to the history of the country.