HODGE'S OBITER DICTUM.

Auckland Star, Volume XXXII, Issue 169, 30 July 1901, Page 2

HODGE'S OBITER DICTUM.

Most of the speakers at the Colonial Club's annual banquet last Tuesday could conscientiously have said with Mark Anthony, "I am no orator. . .

I only speak right on." They did speak right on with a vengeance, and only Mr Justice. Hodge's bombshell aroused us from the drowsiness begotten by dull discourses. During his three months in England, he told us, he lias been trying to see the Australian as John Hull sees him, and the "\rictorian jurist is dissatisfied with the vision. For, while the polished horde of society admitted that the Antipodean could fight, they declared that socially the colonial cousin was— well, not quite comme il faut, don't you know. "Perhaps," said the Colonial judge, "we have lost the faculty of capering nimbly in a lady's chamber to the lascivious playing of the lute, but we haven't forgotten how to charge home with fixed bayonet. If in the fierce combat with nature some of the softness which covers the highly civilized individual disappears and is replaced by something of hardness and roughness, the heart of the Colonial that forces the foe without fear is the warm heart, as broad as the British Empire, that gives a downright hearty British welcome to every British citizen."

Huddenily the pltucid atmospheres of mutual conventional compliments became charged with the electricity of controversy. Subsequent speakers protested that John Bull and his wife liad nowadays no social feeling against Colonials, but lavished hospitality and social distinction upon them.

The judge's sentence was the subject of discussion as we. filed out of the banquetting hall. Coming out an Anglo-Colonial summed up the position thus: "You Englishmen are all right when we know you, but you do take a bit of knowin'."