Dunedin Doings

Bruce Herald, Volume XXXX, Issue 98, 20 December 1904, Page 5

Dunedin Doings

[by fritz. J Monday. Most of our spare time this week has been tcken up in'accepting ihe invitations of rectors of schools to attend breaking-up ceremonies, and those that could not be crowded into last week must be hurried through during the one iwe have just entered. Being a family man, it has been my duty to attend a good many of these ceremonies, and I must confess the task gets no lighter as the years flit by. It is an abiding mystery to me why the fag-end of the childrens' year should not be allowed to drop into oblivion without weighing < their little souls with theshij. loads of good advice ami platitudes which are hurled at them by wellmeaning grown-ups. With their feet on the threshold of the holidays and with every imstraining in the direction of freedom from the cramming mill, they are held in leash while all sorts of self-jmportant nobodies are allowed to talk at them till they are tired. At the Boys' High School the other day the unkind fates allowed ihe Hon. Tom Fergus to orate for the edification of the boys and their parents. With his rehearsed manuscript ; in his pocket (neatly typewritten for the newspapers), he proses on, wending a weary way from one inapt quotation to another, till the audience is reduced to despair. He also has a capacity for delivering his soul of the veriest commonplaces with the fierce emphasis of one announcing a profound epoch-making fact in , the face of a hostile world. Following him came Mr R. M. dark, who represents the Benevolent Trustees and incidentally the Chamber of Commerce at pub ie functions. Beyond the shadow of a doubt, Mr Clark is the worst speaker outside the domain of , borough councils and district road boards. There were only two bright spots in the speaking during the whole afternoon. One of them was when Mr Johnston explained the why and the wherefore of the Navy League prizes, and the other was when Mr Herbert Webb, who is gifted with a sense of the humour usually called dry, moved a vote of thanks to the staff. At the Girls' High School the trail of the h-less M.H.R. crawled over the proceedings at too late a stage to have the depressing effect in might have produced earlier in the evening, and on the whole this function was decidedly agreeable. ] • I think I had something to say about the new Licensing Act last week. Ever since it came into operation the gentlemen whose chief purpose in life is to stand behind a bar and work a beer pump have been anxiously awaiting an interpretation of certain portions ' of it, and praying that they will not be the i subject of any " test " litigation that was go ing. 'Our benevolent beak, MrC. C. Graham, managed to give both the trade and the police a shock in dealing with a prosecution " for being on the premises. "«, Both sides had come to a tacit agreement that the bona fide traveller, about whom nothing was bona fide except his thirst, had been legislated out of existence. But the Legislature, having been forced to the conclusion that Sunday trade would go on serenely in spits of the abolition of the bona fide traveller fraud, unless they -went further, provided that it was unlawful to be found on " pub " premises after closing hours. Bitter experience has taught the police that the Sunday trader is an astute man, albeit much given to philanthropy, and incidentally to sympathy with people to whom the Sabbath is but a beerless interlude between the end of one drunk and the beginning of another. Should the sentinel at the door be surprised by a flank attack, there are usually sufficient witnesses to prove that any unconsumed liquor lying about was a free gift on the part oi the proprietor, or that the purchaser thereof had walked the statutory number of miles to entitle him to legal beer. Consequently, when Inspector O'Brien brought a case against a couple of men for being in the Waitati Hotel on a Sunday " without lawful excuse ;" he got a bit of a set-back from the elastic view his Worship took of the law. To his mind there was no reason why a man should not go into an hotel out of the wet, or to bit down if he was Mred, or to ask the proprietor if he wanted to buy a*dog. Should the tired and wet dog vendor fall over a glass of anything in the course of his rambles round the premises, then in the absence of the requisite number of police witnesses he would not run much risk in consuming it. If C. C. Graham is right then Parliament will have to begin again, and set its collective wits together to rope in the Sunday trader afresh. Public debates are now of rather rare occurrence, except at election times, when champions on either side of the liquor question can usually be found to try and talk each other down. But we have just been regaled with a talking match between Mr Bedford and the Yankee socialist to. whom you have been introduced. Judging by the number of people who turned out to listen there is a good market for this sort of thing, and an entertainment manager with an eye to business might engage a couple of champion debaters and make money out of them. The bone of contention in the contest which took place here on Friday night concerned the relationship of Christianity to Socialism and the development of man. The subject was as wide as the seven seas, and the literature relating to it would keep a young man with a life sentence busy to the day of his liberation. As might have been expected, the two hours' talk convinced nobody, and left things pretty much where they were, except that the audience seemed to be satisfied that they had had their moneys worth. Briefly, Mr Bedford, with his back to the Rock of

Ages, stood for Christianity, while his position was assailetl by the grandiloquent Wilson, whose mind is filled to the brim with the teachings of Paine, Ingersoll, Huxley, and most pther notable writers, who have made it their business to lead a forlorn hope against the Church and all it stands for. It was a j foregone conclusion that the debate could 40 ' nothing but frill round the edge of a lot of big - subjects, for the debaters had no common starting ground. They were precisely in the J position of two men debating the facts of the physical world— while one assumed it was flat the other assumed that it was round. The discussion began nowhere, had no fixed direction, and it wa« hardly Surprising that it should end just about where it began. Christmas 1904 is at hand, and it would be ungracious of me not to pass along a festal greeting, despite the brevity ol pur acquaintance. Already the town is in the scurry and the bustle of the Christmas trade. Shops whose business it is to sell tin plates or readymade clothing during the major portion of the year have suddenly blossomed into toy reposi-* tories, whose magnetic attraction for the little people results in juvenile noses being glued to the windows for the best part of the day. Wonderful creations from the toy designers' brain look out enticingly from behind the plate glass. All the animals that Noah risked uninsured in his Ark are waiting buyers, and unless you have a heart of flint your offspring will land you in more unexpected purchases than a woman at a bargain sale. Marvellous mechanical contrivances, calculated to make a boy an engineer before he has to pay full fare on the trains, are now sold for as many shillings as they would have cost pounds a generation ago, and one cannot help wondering where the toy business will end. The desire to get away for Xmas is a ! so a growing quantity, and all the seaside accommodation has been booked for months. The broken weather we have had unceasingly since August make the prospect of fine holiday weather rather doubtful, but this does not deter anyone from planning all serts of trips on land and water. Let us hope for King's weather, and a bright Christmas for New Zealand and her children.