LITTLE SLIPS

Wairarapa Times-Age, 6 April 1939, Page 4

LITTLE SLIPS

MISTAKES BY GREAT MEN. Sir Stafford Cripps, is an educated man; but it made some politicians laugh unkindly not long ago to find that he did not know the difference between the words “factitious” and “fictitious.” Town-bred members are apt to amuse men from the counties with mild errors. Lloyd George is a farmer himself now, and presumably knows better; but for a long time he was not allowed to forget his pathetic picture of pheasants, preserved for sport, destroying the farmer’s rootcrops. He did not know that no pheasant would look at a root. A similar mistake was made by an urban .member who indignantly demanded why deer-forests should be kept for rich men's pleasure when they might be made productive, especially of much-needed timber. He was not aware that “forest” is merely a name for a wild and barren tract of rocky land without a tree on it. It is rather comforting to us lesser folk to find that the lordly ones can make such slips. If we had trouble with decimals at school, we like to think of Lord Randolph Churchill, after being made Chancellor of the Exchequer, gloomily contemplating a document full of decimal points and asking what all those “confounded dots” meant. If we are a little uncertain whether the Sanjak of Alexandretta is a ruler or the place he rules, we can feel for the great man -who committed himself in print to the opinion that a “wapentake” was an official of the law, whereas it is a division of land. It is due to, the colossal ignorance of a British Minister that the enormously rich island of Java, with an area of nearly sixty thousand square miles, now belongs to Queen Wilhelmina and not to King George VI. In 1816, when certain negotiations were going on between the Dutch, the French, and ourselves, Java was handed over, to Holland as being too small and insignificant to quarrel about! The Union flag might now fly over a much larger piece of the North American continent if the British commissioners arranging with President Polk's commissioners in 1845 had had a better idea of the extent and value of the territory which they were gen- ] erously handing over to the United i States. ‘“I am a child in such matters,” blandly remarked the late Earl Balfour, when his attention was called to a grievous error which he had made. During the South African War, he could call for more unmounted men. because he did not know that each Boer had a horse, which made the foe very mobile and difficult to come up with. Our toiling infantry could have told him! It was an English politician visiting the United States who said that he would like to meet Mr Henry Clay, as he enjoyed the cigars he made so much. He did not know that the American statesman had been dead for decades, and that the cigars had merely been named after him. At times there seems to come a blind spot into the acutest brain, which makes the owner of the said brain say the stupidest things. Napoleon HI had a very subtle mind; yet he could write this perfectly fatuous sentence: “The wealth of a nation depends upon its general prosperity.”