WITHOUT PREJUDICE

Dominion, Volume 21, Issue 287, 4 September 1928, Page 10

WITHOUT PREJUDICE

NOTES AT RANDOM (By T.D.H.) Dean Inge at Geneva has been preaching on the . three reasons why nations go to war.—We always thought one reason’ was as good as another. The rate war between the Canadian National Steamship Line and the New Zealand Shipping Company in the Can-adian-Australian trade is the first such price-cutting competition in shipping tariffs in a New Zealand service for many years. It is a long way back now to the famous war between the Hudda rt-Parker and Union Companies in the passenger trade between New Zealand ports and Sydney, but this was a willing go while it lasted. So far as the writer can trace it, the final cut came when the Union Company reduced the saloon fare to Sydney down to £2 and the steerage fare to £l.

There is a good story told of a railway rate war in the United States half a century back between the Vanderbilt and Gould interests. The tight centred on the freight for railway cattle on the hoof to the. Atlantic seaboard for shipment to Britain. After many cuts and counter-cuts, the Gould line brought the figure down, to some ridiculous level, and the Vanderbilt counter was not a cut below this, but the purchase by Vanderbilt of all the cattle he could get bis hands on and their shipment by the Gould railway to its very great financial embarrassment.

With a wheel of the aeroplane in which Princess Lowenstein-Wertheim and her companions set out in August last year washed up on the coast of Iceland, and a float from the machine in which Captain Amundsen was lost found on Vann Island, the sea has given up some of its secrets about missing aviators. Recently a message was washed up in a bottle on the coast of Wales purporting to come, from the Hou. Eisie Mackay and Captain Hinchcliffe, and reading: “Down in-fog and storm. Good-bye all.” When the mail left it did not appear that the handwriting of the message had been identified and it thus remained uncertain whether the message was a genuine clue as to the fate of this trans-At ntic venture, or one of those curious hoaxes that are perpetrated about the missing. There were few words in the message and no hint of lamentation. But they conjured up the entire tragic scene of a lonely, lingering death.

Apropos of messages from the sea, a Wajrarapa reader wrote the other day in reference to the mysterious loss of the Marlborough, which left Lyttelton for Britain in 1890, and which was years later reported to have been seen stranded in Desolate Cove near Cape Horn. Our correspondent states that when a schoolboy he and his brother about 1891 picked up a bottle near Portobello, Dunedin, with a paper inside on which was written “Ship Marlborough, struck ice, sinking,” with a number of figures added, apparently indicating a position. Boy-like they took the message out and did nothing with it, thinking it only a hoax, but the recent menton of the loss of the Marlborough caused him to wonder if it could have been genuine. As there is a westward drift between New Zealand and Cape Horn it does'not. seem likely that the message was more than a hoax.

Even though it is not to have any more war, Europe, it seems, can still find a use for its cannon by turning it on the sky. Recent papers to hand record that a bombardment with highexplosive rockets is claimed to have averted hailstorms from the vineyards between Lausanne and Montreux. Even now and then somebody tries his hand at this method of weather control, but the cost appears to be excessive for the result—if there is a result Years ago a German, Helvetius Otto, erectech-a high platform from which huge bellows discharged steam at such a pressure that, he claimed, the clouds were blown away. He contended that a sufficient number of these “pluvifuges” would guarantee fine weather indefinitely. A Leeds scientist once said that it was “within the scope of human possibility to prevent disastrous cyclones, hurricanes, and storms, and even to improve permanently the weather of the British Isles,” his idea being to make an instrument which would enable the operator to collect or dissemblfe the molecules which form the atmosphere. A few years ago aeroplanes attacked clouds over Washington with streams of electrified sand which quickly dissolved them.

The pole-sitting contests lately in vogue in America, seem to have their uses after all. When Mr. Ben Fox climbed to the top of a flagpole in Chicago on May 19 and announced that he was going to remain aloft a month, or at least until he had passed the previous limit of human accomplishment in that pursuit, his creditors thought there was no burry about presenting their bills. Three weeks later, however, Mr. Fox employed a retired pugilist to keep the path clear and left his perch, and, as far as is known. Chicago. He did not even pause long enough to pay his bodyguard, which is a low trick that, as the “Argonaut remarks, may complicate the system for others that may think of using it.

A resolution adopted by the Executive Committee of the Boy Scout Council in Cleveland urges their 60,000 scouts “td step up to any woman seen smoking in public and ask her to cease, on the ground that smoking coarsens them and detracts from the ideal of fine motherhood.” .. . There is nothing like training children from their tenderest years in the proper way to bring up their parents.

Even examiners arc human —sometimes. A case is recorded of a student wlio £ot his examination papeis back, and found written against one question : “Do not use slang.” Against the next was the comment: “Tripe.’

Wife: Oh, John, I’ve discovered that the woman next door has a hat like mine. . Hub: Now, I suppose, you 11 want me to pay for a new one. Wife: Well, dear, that would b« cheaper than moving. LOVES OF THE SPIDER. Lady Spider, how is this? Death the toll of every kiss* Aud your stomach satiated W .i the very heart you mated? But your sentimental Jack rids Other gentleman anacrids, Surelv. of the wish to win you? No? Th llantries continue? Tell me—from a seemly distance— Is that grim piece de resistance One who lately weed too well ? Kissed, but never lived to tell? —Olive Ward, in the “New York .Times,’’