NOTES OF THE DAY.

Dominion, Volume 4, Issue 1206, 15 August 1911, Page 4

NOTES OF THE DAY.

Grand Juries do not often make general recommendations through the Supreme Court, so that even on the score of novelty the two suggestions formally presented to Mr. Justice Chapman yesterday by the Grand Jury of the current criminal sessionof the Court would be worth notice. We are sure that in expressing alarm at the frequency of sexual offences, especially against young children, and in recommending greater severity in the punishment of them, with corporal punishment if necessary, the Jury expressed the general sense of the community. As Mr. Justice Chapjian pointed out, however, the offender is frequently 'unfit to receive corporal punishment. The Jury's second recommendation is not so easy to understand.. The suggestion that the Lands Department should make it known as widely as possible that it is illegal to acccpt a bribe to abstain from bidding at a Crown land auction is only a suggestion that a little-known section of the law should be made known. Why should this particular ignorance of one law on the part of the average man be sfecially dispelled, and his> ignorance of equally important provisions of other laws left unlightedl Let ignorance be dispelled wherever possible, by all means. But would it not be far better to have the law so based on reason that the presumption of knowledge on the layman's part would be reasonable ? What layman could be blamed for ignorance of the law, that kaleidoscope of shifting intentions and rapid reversals of form and colour ?

The London Times of June 30 printed a letter with which it is easy to sympathise. The writer was a member of Parliament, and he complained of the action of the Chapter of St. Paul's in printing a "revised" version of the National Anthem for the King's Thanksgiving Servicc. For the second part of the second stanza there was substituted the late Dean Hole's amendment: — * .Keep us from plague and dearth, Turn thou our woes to mirth And over all the earth, Lcjt there bo peace. It is typical of the age that indelicacy or absurdity should be fancied in the old lines, amplifying the prayer for the scattering of enemies:—' Confound their politics Frustrate their knavish tricks. And it is typical also that at the same time the new squeamishness had not the logic or courage to omit (the Hole version retains it) the first quatrain in which is the line: Scatter his [her] enemies. The objection seems to have , lain against the plain blunt English in which this line is amplified, despite the fact that that language embodies the practical aspiration of all patriotic Englishmen. This is just of a! piece with all the sloppinesses and glosses and tortuous palaverings and refusals to look facts in the face that are the peculiar glories of this age of Socialism and Little Englandism, of Pecksniffs and quack legislators,, of Right to work Bills and anti-mili-tarists, and all the other things. It is consoling to reflect, however, that in time of stress all this rubbish will blow away in the clean gale of human and national feeling.

The decision, of the Mayor of Auckland not to contest one of the city seats afc the general election, on the ground that his duty to his city is "paramount," raises some interesting questions. The question whether one's first duty, as a public man, is to one's district rather than to one's country when circumstances require a choice to be made can. hardly he answered otherwise than by emphatic affirmation of the superiority of the wider call, it is just exactly because local interests have bulked larger than national interests in the eyes of a majority of members, of Parliament that this country hay been cursed with "roads and bridges'" members for so many years, Tliero are two kinds of local patriotism, two kinds of "provincialism," one very admirable and valuable and one quite contemptible and even noxious. It is tho first kind which, based upon enthusiasm and a scorn for depend;

cnco upon the central power, that has done so much lor the building-up of tlio Empire. It is tiie second kind which lias been operating in New Zealand, as, in a lesser degree, it has operated in Franco and America. The question whether, the conditions in New Zealand being: what they are, the Mayor of a city should abandon his Mayoralty for a seat in Parliament is one the answer to which depends upon the Mayor concerned. Our own opinion is that not only is no Mayor indispensable, but thait he should bo dispensed with after a couple of years of ofiice. There is a third question, namely, whether a Mayor should combine Parliamentary with Mayoral duties. Ordinarily, this would not be desirable. But at the present time, when the Government, is bent upon invading municipal rights at every point, there is much to be said on the other side, provided that any Mayor concerned displays proper watchfulness and vigour on behalf of municipal rights wherever t-hsy arc threatened by a patronagehunting oligarchy.

The New York State Senate has passed a Bill introduced by Senator Grady under which all editorial articles printed in the New York newspapers shall be signed. . There is in every country a small and thoughtless section that feels sore at the anonymity of the leading article, but most people understand and approve the almost universal practice of the press in this respect. The Grady Bill is not taken very seriously by the New York press, but some of them have been moved to tell the Senators a few "facts that they obviously do not know. The New York Post, for example, points out that most editorials are "the result of collaboration, often of extensive changes and rewriting," and says, on the broader general question: "The question is not of individual opin'ion, but of collective- policy, of standards and judgments which have been long,in the making, and which come to stand by themselves impersonally." The editor of the New York Times pointed out further, in an address at P.ochcster on July 6 last to the New York Press Association, that "it is not the nian that counts, but the newspaper, and the public cares everything for the opinion of the newspaper and nothing for the opinion of the writer." A few people may still exist who fancy that only signed articles are of any account, or who profess to fancy _ so. But nearly every editorial article really is signed, and signed large. The articles in The- Dominion, for example—which the Ministry and our Ministerialist contemporaries seem unable to read in silence for two days together—arc signed by the known character of the paper itself. A newspaper with a fixed policy and character and honest motives quickly acquires an identity as sharp as any individual's could be, and of course a far more powerful one. And the converse is also true. It is the shallowest of views, and a view even manifestly opposed to observable facts, to .suppose that individuality and responsibility in an editorial require that somebody's signature shall appear.