“BRUMMAGEM JOE.”

Temuka Leader, Issue 1720, 5 April 1888, Page 4

“BRUMMAGEM JOE.”

The following, under the above beading, is taken from the Montreal Witness:—

“ Brummagem Joe’s idea of the American is like the old Trench idea of the Englishman—a sort of person endowed with an eccentric passion for some particular things. Thus the John Bull of the Erench stage was always demanding rosbef and plowpudon, with the flourish of a blue umbrella. In the same way the American reporter is to Chamberlain a Bohemian ready to do anything for liquor and cigars. The keen-witted, highly-educated, thoroughly experienced man of the world, who takes in human nature from a boot-black to an ambassador, and sketches all with a fidelity to truth and grace of language that would make the fortune and establish the eternal fame of any literary man a century ago, must have been a revelation to the British screwdriver. He spread a table with liquor and cigars for men who could waltz round him and take his moral and intellectual measurement in half the time a tailor would measure him for a coat. None of them drank, but they tried his cigars, not that they cared about cigars, but just to see what brand he thought good enough for reporters. Then he opened a corner of the curtain which hides what he doubtless considers his great mind. The reporters took a peep. They photographed it and gave it to the world. And what is it ? Oh, if we were Chamberlain how we should bestow our choicest anathemas on the men who invented psychological criticism and taught newspaper men the art of putting this and that together as a mental exercise conducive to the establishment of verities. Never did a gathering of biologists cluster round the Neander fragments with greater joy, never did pyschists observe an abnormal subject with more intense delight than did that room full of New York reporters observe Joseph Chamberlain, M.P. “Pitiable in the extreme is the affected caution of the parish politician turned ambassador. Sancho Panza in Barataria was a magnificent embodiment of wisdom compared to the transparently oracular Joseph. He gave himself away as completely as if he had made a bargain to do so. He betrayed his mission—unless, indeed, he is a knave of unparalleled calibre, and settled the whole matter off-band. Canadians have been astonished spectators of the scene. They and their interests are dismissed with lofty indifference. He, for the time, imagines himself the supreme arbiter, who lias no necessity for going through the formalities of diplomacy. Coming to deal with the smartest nation in all creation, and a dispute with one not less smart (we mean Canada), he cuts the knot in presence of the reporters, exactly as certain travelling showmen, who desire a puff, give a seance in private to the same class of gentlemen. The thing is too funny. “ Here is how the Evening Sun, of New York, speaks of lim after the interview, and it would be hard to excel the remarks as utterances of contempt‘The Brummagem Dodger is an evolution of the contemporary Janus Mugwump, one of whoso distinguished forerunners was Lord Halifax, who served all parties, and was faithful to none. As Lord Macaulay put it, “ He was the chief of those politicians whom the two great parties contemptuously called Trimmers.” The Brummagem Dodger is now with us upon a mission to adjust the Canadian fisheries dispute, or more hopelessly muddle it, as the case may be. The most pronounced and discredited Mugwump in British politics is the Hon. Joe Chamberlain. Not even the luridheaded Randolph Churchill, a tintype reproduction of the only Schurz, can hold a candle-light to him. The Brummagem Dodger has bestraddled contemporary politics in more different and grotesque attitudes than any other statesman of his time, If you have him on the hip to-day, rejoice and make lots of noise, for to-morrow you may not have him. Like the desert Arab, he will have sneaked away in the night-time. Treachery is the most obtrusive plank in the obfuscated platform of the Brummagem Dodger, which is equally true of the Janus Mugwump coterie.’ ”