NEWS, VIEWS, AND OPINIAN.

Auckland Star, Volume XL, Issue 205, 28 August 1909, Page 11

NEWS, VIEWS, AND OPINIAN.

■ , -•■• ftofeesor Starr, of the University of Chicago, who occasionally startles tho florid with unexpected and sensational eitidsms, has made another bitter atfcck on womankind, in which he says: — •It is impossible to civilise woman, for her fundamental nature is barbaric, and H,e continuance of the race depends on ' the rigid assertion of this difference between man and woman. I challenge any•ne to show a single first class achievement *y a woman in literature, science ■r art. Her religion is also notably that ef lower culture. She is always seeing •tens everywhere. She is the chief suptorter of spiritualistic mediums. She founds new sects in which the religious attitude of savagery is given new names. The twentieth century woman shows '-'herself no further advanced than her toele sister by her love of bright colours and by decorating herself with birds »nd 'the furs °* animals, also by 'her love Of iewels and perfumes. In the fundamental principles of her character and in her instincts woman has passed through the a"e9 unchanged. Her savage ingenujty ingahitog her ends through deception and treachery has become proverbial. When it would be equally easy for her to gaia her end by straightforward and direct methods, she delights to rosort to duplicity and sinuous means. Woman lives in the old, old world; she thinks old thoughts; she feels old emotions, is moved by the old impulses, dresses, in old oee-gaws, and is thrilled by world-old '; topes ana fears. Her fondness for evidence of Woodshed and slaughter shows In ihe most pronounced way her utter lavagery. Woman is an eternal savage, whose only salvation lies in the foot that i ghe always has been and always will be .' larbarian." U K Governor was sent lately from , - Pekin to Mukden who is a Manchu of the old school, detesting westerners and'all their ways," say 3 the " Times." "Shortly »fter Ms installation he called the members of tie civil service together, and addressed them as follows: —'As far as I can see there are too many of you onirials; you are too highly paid, and don't work hard enough. I mean to dismiss lalf of you, and reduce the pay of the rest. I observe that many of you wear • ■ eilk robes and ride in broughams or ether new-fangled conveyances, which you ought not to be able to do . on your salaries. Now, in future, be careful. Wear cotton, and ■ jide in sedans, or you will be dismissed. i If I should make a mistake in my policy you are enjoined by mc to speak up, »nd tell mc frankly how I have erred. I have nothing further to say on this occa- ; ilon, except that if I catch any of you tripping, by I'll have his head off. Now go home and think of what you lave heard, for I mean it." ' Lotteries, ■which M. Clemenceau proMied to suppress in France, bring a . i&ndsome revenue into the coffers of many Continental States. Italy, which 4«rlve3 from this source close on £3,000,- ---; 000 a year, is not likely to follow the example set by Prance, although many Ita- ; 8m» have- exposed the evils wrought by tfcbte gambling. Spain makes nearly - ■'H'jiSXtfKlO'fL year out of its" lotteries," and Bx»t other European countries, with the mcception of Great Britain, draw annual Wvenues from this, source. Even Germany does not disdain this form of injome.: The profits of tbe Prussian State ' lotteries last year amounted to nearly i£400,000. But if Britain is almost alone now among European nations in deriving no assistance to the Budget from lotteries,'j&e has a disreputable past of her mm to iorgefc. Prom the seventeenth century to the reign of George IV. the . Crown Tepeatedly drew considerable re- ; femes from such sources. Thus in 1710 " »d 1711 ; two."loans" of a million and ahalf were raised by the following ingenious system:-7-150,000 tickets at £10 each Were issued, and the whole of the capital was sunk for good. But 3750 of the tickets were to draw prizes of annual in- . comes, varying from £1000 to £5, for thirty-two years. The other tickets were ! blanks, and on each blank ticket only ;■ 14/ a year was paid during the same i . jßdrigr-two-years period. sJhe dty of burnished copper said to Java been discovered toy Arabs in the Sahara, reminds us of that other wonder- ; fol city, also known only to Arabs, which " the-eighteenth-century traveller Thomas Shaw mentions in his book about Bartery. The Arabs told him that a few ;. days' journey from Ras-Sen, in the direction of Egypt, they had come upon a •Bent city, beautiful; perfect, but petrifei. Its streets and shops, its groves of olives, and palms rose grey-blue against .tte sky. The city was silent but not •mpty. In the shops stood iwomen flnlering, petrified stuffs, in the other nouses -women kneaded petrified dough.31e men appeared to be mainly engaged in. reethig, and. one very magnificent per-ion-was lying on a splendid couch guarded by men holding spears. Petrified l money, too, they bad seen, a strange coinage, the size of an English shilling, , itamped with a horse's head. Shaw listened, and the Arabs piled up a wealth : of detail. He doubted a little from the first, but when they added that they had «ao found petrified cats chasing petrified nice Ins doubts settled into unbelief. 'A lEVencih magistrate ihas been taking a ton* from the decision of an Irish I I™,™ ,5 P* the Peace in Land League days to the 'Mdstreseful country." It is on record that a stipendia-ry magistrate in • Ireland once sentenced a Land Leaguer v> a couple of months in gaol for "a . humbugging kind of a smile" at a police- , man.; A-French judicial colleague, probably with this precedent in mind, has just ordered a man to gaol for one month for a similar offenoe against the dignity ~: W; j™-'P oKoe Commjesaire in one of the . ■■-. wrthern towns. The police officer com- ; plained that the emile had been contemptuous, and with intent to insult Mm «;ie-was passing. The lawyer for the •erased denied it, and alleged that his - event was talking with a friend, and ■ s.opened, io smile, quite accidentally, " S the P oli<le dignitary passed. He : jurther pointed out that no violent use aid been made of hands or feet on the \ Part: of his client, and that a emile, even '.-* most contemptuous one, can break •m? 01169, "P 1 * Oo *rt, however, sided TOa the Police Oommissaire, and nierci- , . dealt out one month's imprison- ; j»en*.to the disdainful smi-ler. Consider- . m i that at a Socialistic meeting in Paris ' * Ijw. days,earlier a police officer was I mailed, his; hat smashed in, and his eye- ; SWSKS broken, after which he .was sum™Wly expelled from the hall, and yet perpetrators of this assault on a . :^ ,an magistrate are still, at-large, t We severity of the provincial Court for

Tbe British Parliament has been called upon in its current session to regulate a. charity left-by the real IHck Whittington, and the .bill for the purpose nas been already issued. Richard Whittington,. a mercer of the Oity of London, became a sheriff in 1392, was Lord Mayor in 1397, 1398, 1406, and 1419; and in .1416 was elected M.P. for Liondon. He seems to have frequently lent King Henry V. money, and he supplied cloth of gold for the marriage of the King's daughter. Hβ died dn 1423, and among his many benefactions to London was a charity managed by the Mercers' Company, under trusts confirmed by King Henry VI., on petition to Parliament in 1431. The bill now introduced in the House of Commons is to apply the charity under a scheme "approved by the Charity Commissioners. The schedule gives the present gross yearly income as £21,551 16/10, derived from City property. The new scheme provides for the payment of not more than £40 a. year to twenty-eight almspeople, poor single women, or widows over the age of fifty-five. One-third of the Tesidue of the income of the charity goes dn .pensions to indigent members (and their families) of the Mercers' Company, and the remaining two-thirds in pensions to deserving and necessitous persons, half of whom must have resided for two years in the metropolitan police area. In all cases there is a condition that the recipient must not have received Poor Law relief. This is sad reading about Dorando in the London "Daily Chronicle." A hero of the athletes' arena should also be a hero in the gentler engagements of the heart; and the little man does not appear to be quite living up to the latter part of this ideal. According to our contemporary, he has for some time been en- '■ gaged to a girl at Carpi, and was to have returned and married her after the English Marathon race of last summer; but, ■heigho, ohime, and alas! she. is still a spinster; and so full is the famous run.ner of engagements of a different kind that he has postponed all idea of marriage for another two years. The whoie world seems to be calling Mm. In September he is to be in London; in November he goes to New York; early next year he ie due in California; March will find him in Buenos Ayres; and after that ihe will probably go to South Africa and Australia. Meanwhile, the "meek, unconscious dove" at Carpi will ihave to be as happy a3 she may on the reports of the triumphs of hej -hero on the cinder path. Well, she will have her reward ■when, blazing with medals, laden to a scarcely supportable degree with golden pots filled with drachmae, and -with a noble ■'balance at the bank, he cornea to lay them all at her feet in, we trust, the spring of 1911. If the 'little man Tetaina his present remarkaible popularity his kist of wedding-present should, in Mr. Micawber's .phrase, be slightly surprieirig. Neither doctors nor Christian Scientists will much relish Dr. William Osier's recent address to the Ontario Medical Association at Toronto. He denounced the practice of indiscriminate drugging, rather rejoicing in the fact that he had been branded as a "therapeutic nihilist." His theory is that students should be thoroughly grounded in the properties of ■»• dozen principal .drugs, and acquire practical knowledge of their use in .hospital training under skilled direction. The defects of the-present methods, .he insisted,; are s]iown in ttie, ineffectiveness at the mode of treating" pneumonia; but his own,method.he did not reveal; With faith-healing Dr. Osier has as little patfen'ce as he has with quack doctors. "As a. profession," , ; he said, "we took our origin in the cult of Aesculapius and the temple of sleep, and the interpretation., of its dreams was carried on into the Christian".'Church. The cures of Lourdes and of St. Anne de Baupre have their exact analogies in the mysteries of Epidauros. All these depend on mental receptiveness. But we must recognise their limitations. The prayer of faith nowadays neither sets an alarm nor stays the epidemic of typhoid fever. The less the clergy -have to do with hysterical patients the better for the patients and for the credit of the cloth." . Melilla, the Spanish Presidio, on the rock, on the north coast of Morocco, where the first military operations of King Alfonso's reign have been taking place, has been twice within the last 20 years the scene of hostilities. Just about this time 19 years' ago, the Spanish cavalry had a smart action with' the Moors in the neighbourhood of the fortress, and there was stamped out for the time a business that had its serious side. Not very, long after, however, some 7000 Riffs attacked another fort, Quariach. General Margallo, at Melilla, though his force amounted to no more than a couple of hundred all told, countered immediately, and with such effect that after a two days' flght the Riffs were cleared out. They were back again, though/) in a couple of weeks, in stronger force than ever. Margallo was killed. Melilla had to stand on the defensive, pending the arrival of Martinez Campos in person with reinforcements. The Marshal relieved Melilla, and then, while he fought the Riffs with one hand, proceeded to rebuild the fort at Quaraich with the other. He succeeded, too, in both operations. After which, and the surrender of two of the~ Riff chiefs, a Shereeflan force turned up, and inflicted condign punishment on the tribes, who thus got it both ways. This has sufficed to check their ardour until now. While it was being administered. Campos arrived as Spanish Ambassador at Fez, just as an ambassador from Mulai Hafid was re* ceived at Madrid during the present affair at Melilla. Mene, an Eskimo who was brought from Greenland to the United States 13 years ago, is returning home resolved, for his people's welfare and his own, to forget almost as much about the blessings of civilised life as he will try to remember. Mene, in fact, has weighed modern civilisation in the balance and found it wanting. Perhaps we may discount to some extent the general pessimism of his views about the sophisticated world, which include the familiar repudiation of Christianity by the child of nature because he does not find that Christians care enough about it to live up to it. A correspondent mentions that Mene has suffered from bronchitis during most of the 13 years, and that, together with the wearing contrast between the hustling din of New York and the silent spaces of Mene's own home, may quite well have prejudiced him unduly.- But one of his complaints will win general sympathy. Be says that they insist upon keeping ancestral possessions of his, including even his father's bones, in a New York museum; and.he is anxious to get back to a place where hie. can worship his father in. peace according to his creed, instead of having to submit to such continual profanation. Civilised man will never capture the heart and mind of the while he persists in showing him that civilisation can be more barbaric man savagery, when it likes. v ' ' ■■'■ ■ ' : :.j ;•■ ■':•' v * ■'■'.-': J