PASSING NOTES.

Otago Witness, Issue 2362, 1 June 1899, Page 3

PASSING NOTES.

(From Saturday's Daily Times.) The Queen—^God bless her ! — seems to me, bs I listen to the big guns firing for her eightieth birthday, a very paradoxical sort of personage. A woman, unapt therefore for lethal weapons, she is mistress of fleets and armies ; peace and war abide her nod. Buch is the theory of the British Constitution, anyway. Aged and feeble, past all the natural uses of life, she reigns over an Empire too big for description except in a j geography, yet • carries her Atlas-load so

ightly that, although an able-bodied hei] tands waiting, motive for its transfer then s none. She reigns, but does not govern,— lannot levy a ha'penny of taxation nor senc ,he most Undeserving citizen to prison ; md yet she is a political force of the firsi nagnitude. A word from the Queen wouk ;end Lord Salisbury to the right-about [issolve Parliament, set every British electo •ate buzzing like an alarmed beehive, am transmit electric quivers to the ends of th< jarth. The Queen' has never done air risible act of greater importance than tlia if presiding at a State drawing room o aying a foundation stone — dear old lady ihe laid one last week ! — yet the " Victoria) ige " will bulk larger in history than " th spacious times of great Elizabeth " ; th (ilitary prestige of Britain stands highe )-day than at anr moment since Waterloo [though the captain-general of Britifi] rmaments has never looked on a strickei eld nor heard firing of worse omen thai Royal salute. When the Queen's reigi egan Revolution was in the air ; Re üblicanism was marching on with seven »agued boots. Where is British Re üblicanism now? The Queen's eightiet: irthday sets Britishers everywhere mcdi iting on the achievements of the reig: nd their present high estate. They don' ay " alone she did it '" ; but they have [ear conviction that neither could the; nave done it without her. And so, Go save the Queen ! — and send her many happ; returns of the day. The Perthshire, let us hope, is by thi .ime in charge of competent tugs and neax ing Sydney. It would only be a suitabl ignominy if they dragged^ her in tail fore most. The schooner Whangaroa, tha found her drifting like a dead whale, skim into port like a bird. The Whangaro carrying away a spar or splitting a sa: would promptly send up another, and b little the worse. The Perthshire, a triump of marine engineering, snaps a single piec of metal, and thenceforth has as littl chance of arriving anywhere as the Flyin Dutchman or a Harbour Board mud punl And this is the art we still call " navigt tion " ! The case of the single-shafted ocea steamer in these lonely southern waters : neatly put — neatly and accurately — by Rue yard Kipling's Scotch engineer : We'll tak' one stretch — three weeks and odd I any road ye steer — Fra' Cape Town east to 'Wellington — ye net an engineer! Fail there — ye've time to weld your shaft — a; eat it, ere ye're spoke ; Or make lierguelen under sail — three jigge; I burned wi 1 smoke! An' home again, the Rio run: it's no child play to go Steamin' to bell for fourteen days o' snow a: I floe an' blow — Che bergs like kelpies overside that girn a' turn an' shift CVhaur, grindin' like the Mills o' God, go by the big South drift. Elu.il, snow, and ice, that praise the Lore I've met them at their work, kn' wished we had anither route or thi anither kirk. A. more attainable wish, one would thin' would be that the ship had another sha and another propeller. There are sui things — are there not? — as parallel shaf md twin-screws. Then if one of the breaks, in some desolate ocean tract whe you miglit " eat it ere ye're spoke," it still possible — is it not? — for the other get the ship along, if only at half speed.

There are dangers of the deep against which the wit of man avails not. There are ! Ships that have gone down at sea I When Heaven was all tranquillity. — having sprung a leak, in short. And sometimes a deserving skipper comes to grief irreparably -where he has least reason to expect it. "in March la&t the steam collier Westoe with 1400 tons of coal was paddling comfortably up the Thames, when she ran into a fog. The captain, being a sensible man, immediately anchored. By some vagary of the' tide the Westoe suddenly swung round and slapped her stern into the steamer Newhaven, carrying away the Newhaven's bowsprit and knocking a hole in her own side abaft the funnel. . Struggling clear of the Newhaven, she plumped into a ketch and received more damage ; repeated the operation on a second ketch, and began to fill. The captain, recognising by this time that the stars were against him, judiciously resolved to beach her. Which thing he did. The fore part stuck fast ; the hind part broke off with the fall of the tide ; simultaneously i 1 a fire burst out in the engine room : £

crowd of 1500 people assembled for salvage operations succeeded in saving nothing beyond a few lumps of coal. All this in London river ; ship and cargo -totally lost, and nobody to blame. Hjim not sure that public opinion will bring in a similar verdict in the lamentable Ohau case. A steam ship of 700 tons ought not to founder by mere force of wind and weather. If founder _she does, there is a presumption , that somebody is to blame. A court of j inquiry will peihaps throw some light on j the catastrophe of the Ohau. As for the ■ absurd performances of the Perthshire, we j have light enough on that matter already ; I at anyrate I have. If steam navigation has : come to this, that a new 6000-ton liner, I having damaged her machinery, must drift | as helpless as Nansen's Fram when frozen j in a hundred leagues of ice, the sooner we get back to sailing ships the better. i I don't build much on the fact that Mr | Seddon had " a lively time "at Pahiatua — j wherever Pahiatua may be. When a j speaker goes in for a discourse of- three j and a-half consecutive hours, his audience, i if it endure to the end, is bound to in- ] demnify itself somehow. If the speaker is Mr Seddon, and the throe and a-half hours' speech a rehash of speeches spoken before, to neglect to give him a lively time would be a sin against decency. The . Times correspondent's account of the ' Pahiatua meeting should be read ; it will be found to read well. For my own part 1 I doubt no word of it. I can well imagine that when, at the third hour, Mr Seddon began with " tears and tremor " to whip up that poor old dead horse his old-age pensions some exhausted sympathiser might cry out " For God's sake, Dick, give us the benediction." Also that when the leading Seddonite selected to move the stock vote of "thanks and confidence", forgo'i. the " confidence " Mr Seddon should shout to the chairman "Who is that man? Do you think I have come up here to get a vote of thanks ! Make it thanks and confidence." And again that when the chairman hesitated or haggled in some way over the amended motion Mr Seddon should cry out "Put it, man; put it!" All this is natural enough, Mr Seddon being Mr Seddon. And yet I don't build much upon it. If Mr Seddon in the course of his election stumpings had a lively time oftener than not ; if he were not infreq uently bantered, baited, refused a hearj ing, I should begin to think that his mana ! was departing and the country rising | against him. But an occasional uproar at a Seddon meeting may mean only that j "Dick" has wearied his own following of ' Toms and Harries beyond endurance, and j that respect of Tom and Harry for " Dick," j personally, is too insignificant to keep ! them quiet. There must be a very large , number of electors to whom a " Dick " of ! coarse fibre, loud voice, and scant scrupu- , losity must seem the man above all others ; to be desired as the dispenser of Govern- ' ment patronage and Government pay. The 1 only hope of the country, as it seems to me, is that over this same patronage and pay Dick, Tom, and Hany will some day fall out ; and so leave to honest men a chance of coming by their own. 1 As the newer civilisation in the form of railways and telegraphs pushes its way into the dark places of the earth, across savage wildernesses and through hostile j populations, its story becomes naturally a 1 story of adventure and romance. The navvies and platelayers of Mr Rhodes's Cape to Cairo line, its stokers, enginedrivers, clerks, stationmasters, will nave j many a moving tale to tell. It is difficult { to see how in China, where the massacre of missionaries is a national amusement, the lives of railway and telegraph operators are going to be protected. How romantic a business engineering is in India Mr Kipling has given us a notion in his " Bridgebuilders." With these few leadingarticle sentences I introduce the extract ■ given below, for the sole sake of which I have written them. It is a copy of telegrams sent by two Baboo — i.e., Eng-lish-speaking Hindoo — signalmen on the Great Indian Peninsular railway to the ■ next station : — At 23.10 on 8-6-98. Both awfully frightened tigers roaring and ; | coming front to cabin arrange more assistance . if not loss of lives. | At * 15 on 9-G-98. Tigers awfully roaring and walking no assistance arrange for lost of lives by shotting. At 5.50 on 9-6-98. ' Larger tiger bited my assistant by pow* in- '• side cabin window no assistance yet depend- ' I ing only the praying arrange sharp. -. 'Hmiu for "foot."

It seems to me that in this dire exigency electricity ought to have been of some service besides that of calling to the next station to " arrange assistance sharp." The prayerful and incoherent Baboos had a battery inside their hut ; why dint they stick a live wire out through the window and leave the tiger to complete the circuit? Crvis.