TOPICAL READING.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXIX, Issue 8186, 18 July 1906, Page 4

TOPICAL READING.

We are bound, says the Westminster Gazette, to accept both thev Yarmouth decision and the Maidstone decision as embodying good law though they give us interpretations of the Corrupt Practioes Act profoundly different from those which have been put on record by other judges, but we are not oorrpelled to agree with the tone of levity in which Mr Justice Grantham has dealt with "indiscretions." The judges are the guardians of electoral purity, and are excebted to act sternly in regard to irregularities. Parliament will now have to oonsider whether electoral law does not need strengthening, for broad, "man-of-the-world" views of electoral incidents are making the Corrupt Practioes Act an entirely different instrument from that which it had been supposed to be.

Iu contrast with tbe banging of the big drum and sounding of the loud timbrel by the London Daily Telegraph ou "Empire Day," the following from the new Liberal dailv, the Tribune, is interesting:— Yesterday was Empire Day. It appears Lord Meatb said it was so, and it was so. It is the new style of Empire that needs a "day" to oplebrate it—not the slow, natural growth of colonizing energy, but the hot-house product of a fervid sentiment too often adioitly directed and manipulated by the 000 l heads of finance. It was the day of that kind of Empire-making which marks its path in red, and leaves behind it ruin, desolation, and problems almost insoluble for the serious atatesmeu that follow after. It was the Empire-making .vhioh has transformed our Colonial system from the unquestioned, though uformal, unity of 1899 into the nervous, self-crifcioal relationships of the present day.

The Speaker welcomes Sir Edward Grey's declaration on military expenditure, because, among other tbinßS, it is pre-eminently a stimulus to democracy. It days:—The release uf Europe from the iron tyranny of its military burdens is more thau anything else the condition of the development and success of popular government. War is becoming more and mure the enemy of demooraoy. This is true of its waste, for it means not only that the hardships of poverty are made still more overwhelming, . but that all the finer ambitions cf reform are 'spoilt and defeated. The necessaries of self-government become steadily more expensive, and the diversion of revenues from these purposes to the purposes of military preparation means the loss of so much power to the ."energies of demooraoy. . . War, like other industries, organises itself on a soale which gives no acope to the men in the ranks. A few men govern, succeed, and beoome famous; the rest obey and surfer in silent and obscure crowds. Democracy in Europe has thus by a sound instinct fastened on a constructive policy of pence as its leading aim.

, In all such situations as that at Tabah the "turk, the Saturday Review remarks, does not play the Bam<* stake as his adversary:—"'When two Great Powers confront one another on a pieoe of disputed territory unless the matter be referred to , friendly arbitration, there is no alternative between a fight and a JJsurrrender, which must prove humiliating Jor one party or the

other. It is true that retreat before the Turk would be more humiliating for us than to retreat before a Power of our own standing, but no uuoh sentimeats conoern the Sultan; be suffers no loss of that impalpable "prestige" which is at once the bane and the glory of civilised States. He may therefore push resistance to its utmost limits and then surrender the point in dispute without any national sentiment indignantly avenging its wounded vanity upon the ruler who has sacrificed its pride. The Turk oan try on any number of audacious enterprises at the expense of the Power* who offend him and abandon them again without counting the coat beforehand- The measure of his audacity is not the possible loss of dignity to himself, tut the limit of endurance of his rival."

The Auokland correspondent of the Lyttelton Times writes:—Mr U. S. Clapham, a former resident of Ashhurst, returned by the last San Franuisoo steamer from a twoyears' visit to the United States. Mr Clapham took special interest in eduuational matters in America. In some lespeots he found the American schools behind those of New Zealand,, tie is convinced, however, that in matters of discipline New Zealand has a good deal to learn. He says:—-"In the best school the discipline is as near perfection as it is possible to attain, and corporal punishment or to expel unruly pupils is still possessed, but in many of the schools the power is never exercised. A good feeling is cultivated between teacher and scholar, and a system of marks is adopted all merit and demerit marks being carefully recorded, these counting towards the general pass. On the other hand there is not the same amount of pressure to children as exists in New Zealand, and a boy who has passed the sixth standard here is quite equal to many a boy in America who has spent two years in a High School, a matter in whioh we have nothing to be ashamed of here."