CURRENT TOPICS.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LIII, Issue 221, 29 December 1910, Page 4

CURRENT TOPICS.

"BLACK CHRISTMAS." The intermixture of joy and sorrow at holiday time is apparently an inevitable result of the more or fess general release of the people from toil. The list of horrors saddening the Reason of "peace, goodwill to men," is so terrible that the heart aches at a recital of the worldwide catastrophes. Maiiy thoughts arise out of the black chad* of' death, the chief being that man, aided with the most elaborate appliances of modern science, is frequently impotent to prevent death and disorder. In a small community it is hard to grasp the import of news telling of wholesale destruction of human life, but at times the fact of man's impotence is poignantly presented, as in the Penguin disaster, when many people on holiday were swept to their deaths on the rocky coast jjf Terawhiti. Another thought that must occur is that the unalterable optimism of human nature prevents long grief over any catastrophe. People infrequently recognise, for instance, that hundreds of lives are in the hands oi one man—a sea captain, an engineman, a miner, anybody—and it is good that people are not deterred from taking risks by repeated catastrophes. If folk realised that what happened to' one crowded train might just as easily happen to every other train, the world would be in a constant state of expectant horror. But, happily enough, survivors of an earthquaked city immediately set about making plans for rebuilding. Human nature makes ■ few plans for dying, but many for living. Despair and cowardice are more uncommon than hope and heroism, and catastrophe has ever produced persons equal to most emergencies, and who did not suspect their capability for heroism. II it were possible to furnish a list of disasters for a period of years, it would be shown that the greatest crop of accidental and dreadful deaths took place at holiday seasons, that even on*- the days during which the people most commonly cease work—Saturdays and Sundays are most frequent, and that in the majority of cases the people have met death while pleasuring. The grim incineration of people in "fireproof" buildings, the drowning of folk in "unsinkable" ships, collisions on railways where the risks have been reduced to almost vanishing point, are all indicative of the frequent impotency of man's insurance against disaster.

NELSON'S "VICTORY." The Victory, which, the cables tell us, was in danger of being burned this Christmas, was forty years old when s% carried Nelson to the Battle of Trafalgaif. According to the present reckoning of a battleship's life, she would have beeil superseded, discarded, derelict. Forty months would be counted too old in these days. The Admiral who should hoist his flag on 'her and take her to fight a battle of the first magnitude would' be looked : upon as a madman. Yet the Victory was over forty years old when the greatest naval genius who ever lived took her as his flagship, and won the greatest sea j fight the world has ever seen. Opposite the Victory as she lies in Portsmouth Harbor to-day, a modern counterpart faces her. The Victory is a noble hulk, with "fine lines and a certain dignity of aspect. The modern counterpart is, it must be confessed, an evil-looking and ungainly mass of iron and steel. She sits on the water like a gigantic, fabulous, and hideous hen brooding upon 1 an unnatural progeny. Her aspect is intellectual, but it is soulless. There is no magnanimity in her lints; there is no pity in all the wonderful and diabolic contrivances wherewith she is fitted to slay and to destroy and to spare not. In the noble prayer which. Nelson wrote on the eve of Trafalgar in the cabin of the old Victory, he prayed that humanity towards his enemies might distinguish the British fleet in the hour of conquest. Can we imagine (writes Ella Macmahon in the Pall Mall Gazette) a modern successor of Nelson's sitting down in that modern successor of Nelson's flagship and beseeching heaven to stultify the innumerable devices whereby his fleet has perfected • the art of slaying? As we crossed the harbor to the Victory our way was barred, by yet another great modern monster of steel and iron, and in" her train trailed the destroyer and the submarine. They swept past the Victory, a veritable procession of Death—very wonderful, very impressive in a cold, capable, relentless way. They passed, and the hulk, with its woodeu walls and its superseded guns, and its glorious history, came into our view again. She looked small, though she, rises high now above the water-level—small beside the man-of-war of to-day; the man-of-war who has. never yet looked upon war, whose won- ' derful and diabolical perfections have yet to bear the only -true test, the test of j achievement.

A SCRAP OF HISTORY. When you get aboard the Victory, almost the first sight which your eye encounters is the small brass., plate let into

the deck, with tihe words on it, "Here Nelson fell." He was walking from the upper deck to the hatchway . He had all but reached the latter. Two seconds, and—lie would have been safe. One step, and the hatchway would have covered him. But he hesitated, turned, perhaps, to give an order, and the bullet of the sharp-shooter got home—only too well. You can follow the path step by step to where they carried him down, and down, and still down, till the cockpit was reached. It was pretty dark, the cockpit, even though it is lighted to-day by paraffin lamps. It was darker a good I deal when Nelson was carried down to ) it to die. The old' horn lanterns are still swinging there as they swung on that day. A scrap of tallow candle burning mistily inside a horn lantern is not a brilliant, illuminant. Yet it is all the light which the surgeon of that day had to aid him. And for his operating table he had tihe rough, long chest, which you can see there still, on which to do hi', worlc. It was, perhaps, on such a table as that that years before Nelson had had his arm amputated, and with such dim, uncertain ligiht to guide the surgeon's Imife. Admiral or able seaman, all alike were carried to the cockpit, for the cockpit was below the water-level, and the only—comparatively—safe refuge during an engagement. But they did not lay Nelson on the rude operating table in the | cockpit of the Victory. That would have been quite useless now. They laid him down on the planks—which you can still see—to die. It is written above the spot, "Here Nelson died." A few wreaths sent on each anniversary mark the place. One, the Icing's, lies just where Nelson's feet must have rested. As you approach the private of marines who leads the way lifts his cap and stands bareheaded and silent. Above, outside Nelson's cabin, there is a picture which tells the story of the dying moments. But who needs a picture to reconstruct the scene? Here in this bare, dark hole, where you can scarcely hold your head upright, cannot you picture it for yourself? If you cannot, then indeed imagination has neither part nor lot with you. There are few, however, who, standing opposite those three words, "Here Nelson died," but can see his face in the dim, smoky light, shadowy with the grey pallor of death, drawn with death's weakness, yet eager with the unquenchable splendor of the spirit. The 32-pounders were booming in Ms dying ears—those superseded 32pounders which are still there, mere picturesque lumber now—yet the echoes of all their fearful and wonderful modern counterparts wil'l never sound a victory more magnificent or salute a deathbed more heroic!