WITHOUT PREJUDICE

Dominion, Volume 21, Issue 10, 6 October 1927, Page 8

WITHOUT PREJUDICE

NOTES AT RANDOM

(By

T.D.H.)

It is proposed that tire British Labour Baxty should adopt the slogan “Socialism in Our Time.” —An excellent idea if anybody knew just what Socialism is.. Turkey and Persia arc now talking of having a war—just to regularise what has been going on on the border for some time past. It will be forty years on Saturday since Sir Robert Stout resigned the Premiership of New Zealand. Forty years is a long time, and as Premiers are usually well-matured in years, one might think that for an ex-Premier to be living forty years after handing over the reins was a record. However, Sir Robert Stout has a year or two to go still before he achieves a New Zealand record in this direction. For instance, Mr. J. E. Fitzgerald, who was Premier in_New Zealand’s first Parliament in 1854—before full responsible government was granted—lived until 1896, and thus survived his brief term of office by fortytwo years. The late Sir Francis Dillon Bell, who, with Mr. Sewell, was joint head of New Zealand’s first fullfledged Ministry in 1856_, ran a close second to this before his decease in the ’nineties.

A Norwegian visitor to New Zealand with a taste for genealogy informed T.D.11. recently that th • Stouts of the Shetlands, from which remote isles, as is well known, Sir Robert Stout hails, are of Viking descent, so perhaps it is his Norse blood that has kept Sir Robert Stout going so manv vears. The first Stout of Shetland aud the Orknevs is said to have been Sigurd the Stout, one of the early Norse Jarls of the Orkneys, and an elder brother of the famous Norseman who became Rollo, Duke of Normandy. As William the Conqueror was Rollo s great-great-great-grandson, it will be seen that the Orkney and Shetland branch of the family, in the matter of genealogy, comes m ahead of all the Norman blood ot Normandy. Somehow it never seems fullv to have dawned on the good folk of Shetland that if Norman blood is the bluest of the blue, Shetland blood must be ultramarine to say the least. It seems to be remarkably virile blood anyway.

This seems a new contribution to ah cld form of international pleasantry: Tn Germany everything is forbidden that is not permitted . ~ In England everything is permitted that is not forbidden. . In. Austria everything is permitted that is forbidden.

Because every child has two parents, and the resultant of the mixing of two personalities cannot be determined in advance, eugenic measures offer little hope for improving the human race. Such is the sad conclusion reached by ’Dr. H. S. Jennings, Professor of Zoology at the John Hopkins University, who, in a new book, remarks that “whatever eugenic measures are attempted, .so long as bparental inheritance is kept up, tiie variety, the surprises, the perplexities, the melodrama, that now present themselves among the fruits of. tie human viue, will continue. Capitalists will continue to produce artists, poets Socialists, and labourers; fools will produce wise men and wise men wi 1 produce fools; who mounts will fad, who falls will mount; and all the kinds of problems presented tosoc ietv by the turns of the invisible wheel will remain.”—When humanity is content to have one parent onh, the outlook will naturally be a lot better.

A new-style lullaby is printed in the Boston “Transcript”: Hush-a-by, baby, pretty one, sleep, Daddy’s gone golfing to win the club If heydays nicely—l hope that he will— Mother will show him her dressmaker

Hush-a-by, baby, safe in your cot. Daddy’s come home and his temper i»

Cuddle down closer, baby of mine. Daddy went round in a hundred an nine.

They do their stag-hunting by telephone 7 in Britain now. A stag which provided a thrilling chase recently for ?he Devon and Somerset Stag Hounds escaped by taking a desperate leap and swimming out to sea. After waiting in vain for him to land again most the huntsmen went home. One, ever, went to an Automobile Association roadside telephone box and rang fo a boat, and on this arriving he chased the stag up the Bristol Channel, lassoed it with S a P rope, hauled it aboard, and killed it.

The sergeant sang out parade: “All those fond of music step two paces forward! ’ .. [< ;™ r S thf Officers' new quarters on the seventh floor!”

An old tenant farmer, in .ffy£g rent to a close-fisted landlord, r 1 Li Up- wanted some timber the gl j “Well then, sir,” the farmer went on, “will you give me enough to build a barn?” “To"make a gate, then?" “That’s all I wanted,” said the farmer, “and more than I expected. An Italian caricaturist pictures * ortH nurse-proud American pompous “Say, % Uk? to b„, >«« keJS 6 aziJ f .• tbo tor our Zoological Garden. hymn to the night. I heard the trailing garments of the celestial walls I ! heard the sounds of sorrow and deThe manifold, soft chimes, That fill the haunted chambers of the fike N some old poet's rhymes. . . From the■ cool cisterns of the midnight air OFS 0 F S "S.» Andrey _Henry Wedswcirth L-cagfeUo*-