The Daily News. TUESDAY. SEPTEMBER 17, 1912. PARLIAMENTARY ORATORY.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LV, Issue 103, 17 September 1912, Page 4

The Daily News. TUESDAY. SEPTEMBER 17, 1912. PARLIAMENTARY ORATORY.

The subject of Parliamentary,' oratory forms the text for a rather illuminative criticism by our Wellington correspondent. He urges that the standard of ejieech has undergone a considerable* decline of late years, and that members for the -most part are now engaged in illustrating the legitimacy of the axiom that "speech was given to us to conceal our thoughts." There may be some truth in this, but such a proposition has to be approached with a certain amount of diffidence. The ''good old days" of the "once upon a time" story books arc apt to miss something in their perspective, because age always views its own youth through spectacles that are rose-colored with remembrance. Pope epitomised this eccentricity in tabloid form when he wrote: We think our fathers fools, so wise we grow; Our wiser sons 110 doubt will think us so. And so a generation which wears hobble skirts scoffs at crinolines and drinkers of long beers marvel at the plebeianism of Chianti. It is all a question of the point of view, and if politicians of to-day remove their boots in the House we can still recall the time when they used to throw pickle bottles at each other in public. It is a precocity of criticism which challenges the oratory of latterday Parliaments compared with that of some of its predecessors, that bright aggressiveness of youth which Gilbert do picted in his story of the precocious baby who was wont to chuck his aged parent under the chin with the remark, "Get along wis 'oo. fie; I'm sadly afraid youse a .shockin' old fox," and whose ultimate fete was to die "an enfeebled old dotard, at five." We have a whole lot of sympathy with the younger generation in

New Zealand, which is bravely sustaining.

the heritage left by its forebears. We have no doubt that "the good old times" ■were really "good old time 3," but we cannot see that they were any better than the "good present times." We can spell just as well as our grandfathers, we can be quite as virtuous and as modest as our grandmothers, even if we are less sedate, we can dress as ridiculously as our uncles and aunts, and we can earn

just as much money on co-operative works as Hodge earned under the feudal system. Perhaps we cannot drink as well and preserve a higher moderation in language, but these virtues are accounted to us as vices by worshippers of our dead past. In fact, the cult of modernism has quite as much to recommend it as the gospel of antiquity. This dissertation by the way, and returning strictly to "our muttons"—a very proper simile in these days of the frozen meat industry—we cannot see that the calibre

of tlid present fails in. comparison with that of previous Parliaments. The oratory of the early Parliaments of New Zealand has to be taken on trust by a generation wliicli knows not Joseph, and whatever its quality it is certain that little of it lias lived in local history. Nor has tlie last decade produced anything of moment in this nature. In fact, gazing "back over the last four Parliaments we should not be far astray in saying tliat the one orator Parliament

has produced was the late Mr. T. E. Taylor. There have been other good speakers—Sir James Carroll, Sir Joseph ] Ward, Mr. P. M. B. Fisher, and now the i Rev. L. M. Isitt—and it is singular to J note that these gentlemen are still members of the House flf Representatives. ] there .have, perhaps, been, more vigorous : men of the Fisher and Seddoij type, but 1 none more fluent or more picturesque in their oratory. Comparisons are necessarily odious, but it would be a difficult task for anybody to show in chapter and verse that, oraterically speaking, the present House is inferior to its predecessors. It ougUt no.t to be a difficult task in view of the glaring, disabilities of' Parliament, • but it nevertheless is. i . . ==