WITHOUT PREJUDICE

Dominion, Volume 15, Issue 135, 3 March 1922, Page 4

WITHOUT PREJUDICE

NOTES AT RANDOM

(By

T.D.H.)

The Prince of Wales’s tour in India i is being curtailed for reasons of economy.—Quite right, too; the Empire , has only got one Prince of Wales. What the British Conservatives; wbuld give a good deal to find is a way of getting rid of Mr. - Lloyd George ' and still remaining in. office. Mr- Hughes, of Australia, was accused the other day of being too busy ' to do anything; now Mr. Theodore says ; he does-.nothing but dawdle.—-The situ-; ation seems to be all Hughes. • A woman’s face used to be her for- • tune; now it’s the chemist’s. Mr. Asquith considers the Geddes Economy report an excellent document' in so far as it indicates that the Lloyd George Government has made a mess of things. What the classes need is not consciousness, but conscientiousness. The climate is not changing; it is only that the weather is getting worse. Summers now never seem so good as they'• used to be when the heart was ■ young and every barmaid was a fairy, as the poet has it. Nevertheless, Mr. J. Starr, meteorologist of the United States Weather Bureau, declares that there is absolutely no evidence in the short period of recorded human observation, to warrant the belief that climate is perceptibly changing. There is just a “small margin of difference” between one season and the same season in other years. I suppose, also, when you come to look at it in the. scientific, philosophical way, there is only a small margin of difference between the criminal in the dock and the Judge bn the bench—and in some' parts of America no margin at all. However, Mr. Starr points to the General Sherman giant sequoia tree in California, supposed io be 4000 years old, and frequently called “the oldest living thing,” as evidence no greatchange has occurred in that region for thousands of years. Around the Mediterranean the area devoted to the culture of the wine grape reached its present limits more than 4000 years ago, and continues the same with no tendency to enlarge or diminish. In Egypt the evidence points to the Nile having flowed with exactly the same seasonal variations as now for at least 1 six or seven thousand years. Mr. Starr l does not see any hope either of improving the weather by changing the course of the Gulf Stream or other artificial device. It is just a case of putting up with it. ,

“Sufferer” writes to know why medi- , cal science worries about cancer and ' such things when it has never found a cure for cold in tho head. —Dr. Bum- . pus states that an inflallible cure for 1 cold in the head is surgical treatment in the early stages by removal of the head. No recurrence of the complaint has been known in any such case, unless the operation has been incompetently performed. »

The Master of Balliol, in a recent address in Britain, said children ' should not be taught as part of their ' history lessons “that King Alfred was ' the person who showed- that you cannot burn a cake at both ends and eat it too.” This has reminded someone of Barry Pain’s waiter who vowed; to give his employer “beans in the neck.”

There are 1000 ways |pf getting into trouble, and 999 of them are women.

Use of the revised Marriage Service at Princess Mary’s wedding recalls that it is over fifteen years since the King sent a Letter of Business to the Church of England telling it to revise the Book of Common Prayer. A year or so ago the Church set up a committee to answer the letter. It seems that the revised version has been completed, but publication has been deferred as the Prince of Wales may marry shortly, and this would mean an immediate alteration in the new issue. The Bishop of Ripon at Westminster la-st year said that if ‘ there were a Princess of Wales an order would have to be made stopping the sale of the Prayer Book until alteration had been made in the prayers for the Royal Family. This would cost several thousand pounds, and the loss would be much heavier if it came with large stocks of a revised Prayer Book on hand. No substantial alteration has been made in the Prayer Book since 1662, though minor changes have been made from time to time. In 1859, for instance, the Guy Fawkes Day; prayers were taken out, as were also the special prayers in commemora-i tion of the execution of Charles 1;. and the restoration of Charles ll—the latter scapegrace monarch must have seemed an incongruous figure in thePrayer Book., especially to niid-Vic-torian minds in the days when respectability was respectability, and no mistake about it.

“The Railway Department’s idea of what constitutes a service sufficient for the needs of those who desire to maintain) mail communication between Southland and Wellington is our excuse (remarks the “Southland Times” editorially) for publishing at this late date a report of the legal argument in the case brought against the ‘Dfaoriland Worker’ last week, on the ground that it had published a blasphemous libel.” —This will no doubt be regarded by loyal supporters of the. paper as a piece of deliberate pinpricking by the Department.

India is in the fashion with a deficit of 34 crores of rupees. This is quite a considerable sum when you come to figure it out, as a crore of rupees means ten million of them. It is not a phrase with which wc are very familiar. but how many of us know even how big an English billion is? In these days of reparations and depreciated paper currencies it is becoming a necessary piece of knowledge. I sea someone has calculated out that at midnight last New Year’s Eve only 186,976.512,000 seconds had elapsed since the Creation, according to the Hebrew chronology. It will take another 24,000 years to bring the number up to an English billion I A Continental billion, on the other hand,, is only one-thousandth part of an English billion. Before a man could call himself an English billionaire he would need to possess forty nuggets of gold each the size of the dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral. America is the land of graphic phrases. A business man from the Droughty Land who was visiting London asked for a guide to show him' about, to save time. He wanted a temperance man, “but not bigoted.” Next aftfernoon he telephoned that bv the following week he would be readv for another guide. “But,” he said, “play a bit lighter. Don’t send that guy with hollow legs and blotting paper in his boots.” THE HEART OF LIFE. You were not beautiful —and yet, Such level brows —such quiet eyes— It was as when a sun-ray dies And leaves us breathless with regret. Not beautiful, I said . . . And then 1 looked again . . . And lo I I knew ■ That all the beauty in the world Began, and lived, and died with you—Ethel Ashton Edwards.