OBITER DICTA.

Press, Volume LXIII, Issue 18918, 5 February 1927, Page 14

OBITER DICTA.

(By K.) Even-one ought to be thinking about the situation in China, like the Legion of Frontiersmen, who are already packing up their pemmiean and bowie knives and promising Billy and Topsy that they will bring back lots of idols and pigtails. Hut the frontiersman spirit is dying out. because nearly everyone seems to be thinking of other things—all except the politicians, who arc not merely not thinking, but not even talking. Most of us, of course, arc thinking of (he visit of the Duke and Duchess, but the Scots are thinking of the base fellow who said in The Press last Saturday that Burns was not 100 per cent, in every way. This, the Rev. N. 1,. D. Webster says, is " a gratuitous insult to all Scotsmen and their descendants." But Burns was not a Pope or a King. Ono can •understand a New Zealnnder's feeling hurt, and even furiously angry, by any disparagement of his Majesty, or a Catholic's resentment of any calumnious criticism of his HV ness, but the Scot's resentment is not so easily understandable. Burns is haggis to the general, as it were, but my own experience has been that Englishmen admire his great merits as a poet and a satirist better than the Scots do. The Scots, if I may say so—and I love the race —do not discriminate. Many of them, perhaps most of them, prefer " The Cottar's Saturday Night" to "Ye Banks and Braes." Mr Webster does. For, he says, the former " deals with a subject sacred to every Scottish heart." So do many inferior poems, as the waste paper baskets of the newspaper offices could attest if they had voices.

. Another clergyman, however, feels that Burns is just as unimportant as China, and that the best tiling you can do is to reflect upon, and broadcast, the wickedness of the world. " In Christchurch," he said, "there are mothers who go out night after night drinking cocktails and dancing whilst their children remain neglected at home." The dancing, cocktail-drinking mothers will wish that this were true, for they know that the children are out dancing somewhere else. Unless, of course, the preacher was referring to the wives of the unemployed. " Yet I," he added, "as a Christian minister, am expected to so to the graveside and say, 'The Lord gave and the Lord taketh away.' It's a lie." Life is hard for the Christian minister who has learned how seriously tho Charleston and the gin-fizz have altered theology. He realises this at the altar as well as at the graveside: "Again he was called upon in the marriage ceremony to say, •Whom God hath joined together let no man put asunder.' Bnj; God had no hand in joining together many couples. God did not job them together. That is another lie!" What makes it still worse is that "there are nations all over the worjd at the present moment making chemicals with which to kill Christians." On o tho other hand, preparations are being made to balance the account by killing Chinese, which will make the Confucian worse confounded.

The most popular topie, all the same, has been "the bringing up of women," a duty which man has hitherto neglected. The discussion began with a letter from a man-it could

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