WELLINGTON TOPICS.

Auckland Star, Volume XLVI, Issue 307, 27 December 1915, Page 7

WELLINGTON TOPICS.

POIJTICS AND PEOPLE. (From Our Special Correspondent.) WELLINGTON, Friday. THE SEASON. Christmas has found the people of the capital city, as Wellington likes to call herseL at all seasons of the year, in good heart, worrying over neither the war nor the lesser affairs of life. The customary greetings arc on every lip, if, perhaps. a little subdued; the steamers and trains and trains are filled to overflowing, and shopping, which means mainly the exchange of presents, goes on as merrily as ever. The post and telegraph office is literally blocked this afternoon with letters and parcels and messages that it would seem can reach their intended destination only by the kind intervention of Providence. Scores of folk who have wished to reach their friends with a message telling something of their own intimate feelings have been compelled to endorse the soulless telegram the officials offer for general consumption or run the risk of their Christmas words being delivered after the New \ear. And so our little world moves on i through this great festival in spite of the war in Europe. CONSCRIPTION. I The ardent conscriptipnists here are so obsessed with their own solution of the problems of recruiting that they have little patience for Mr. Mnssey's activities on less drastic lines, or even for the Governor's stirring appeal to the manhood of the country. They fhrust the 109,000 waiting volunteers aside and hold up to the public gaze the gaps (which, by the -way. no longer exist) in the ranks of the* Eleventh Reinforcements. "If we are to win this war," they say. speaking apparently for the Empire at large as well as for Zew Zealand, "we must have every available man, and have him quickly." But the Minister of Defence, though a conscriptionist himself, is keeping his head in spite of all the wild talk of the extremists and doing his best with the means the Cabinet has placed at his disposal. A pamphlet he has just issued, an easy guide to enlistment and to the moral and material advantages to follow, which the local conscriptionist organ treats with something like contempt, is quite the most stimulating publication of the kind yet put in print, and it ought to be in the hands of every young man who is in doubt about his duty in the present crisis. THE NATIONAL CABINET. It was Mr Massey's boast when the Reform Government made way for the ! National Cabinet that not once during its three years of office had it been necessary to take a vote to decide a difference of opinion among Ministers. It was a record which filled the Prime Minister . with pardonable pride, and even the scoffers admitted it revealed a spirit of , sweet reasonableness which did infinite j credit to Mr Massey and his colleagues. But other men, other manners, and now i it is known even to the man in the street | that the National Ministers do not all say "Aye" together, nor "No" in the same breath, and that on rare occasions they actually express and contest differences of opinion. Conscription, so rumour hath it, has been the most frequent bone of contention, but now it is certain this has been definitely put away for a season that will extend at least to the meeting of Parliament at the usual time. It is safe to c.ay that by no other course could the solidarity of the Cabinet have been ■ maintained or even its continued exist- : ence assured. THAT TRIP HO-ME. The Ministerial trip Home has dropped out of the list of questions with which the reporters on their daily rounds ply members of the Cabinet in general and the party leaders in particular, and it is now taken for granted by the man-in-tbe-street that the jaunt to London has been indefinitely postponed. Probably the slow progress of the war had something to do with the change in Mr Massey's programme. When the trip was first discussed —six or seven months ago —it seemed quite on the oards that the worst of the fighting would be over before the arrival of the northern winter: but to-day the way to Tipperary looks as long as ever it did, and even the most cheerful of the optimists are not expectiii2 the end till the concluding months of next year. In these circumstances there is no need for Mr Massey and Sir Joseph Ward to hurry Home to assist in the consideration of the peace proposals, and it is tolerably safe to predict they both will be here for the opening of Parliament at the usual time—unless, of course, the bottom falls out of the German bluff before the summer campaign begins. A remarkable record for attendance came to light at the break-up of the i MoTiliiigton (Dunedin) Public School lust week. Included among three pupils I who received medals for eight years of I unbroken attendance were two brothere, 1 Leonard and Maurice Stan way. The i headmaster of the school explained that I the only other child in the family, a I sister, liad also left the school with a I similar record. The children had not I been free from childish ailments and I epidemics such as measles, but somehow they haxl "always made arrangements to have them in the holidays." The highest possible point or purity in alcoholic beverages—Wolfe's Schnapps. , (Ad..