RANDOM NOTES

Dominion, Volume 23, Issue 33, 2 November 1929, Page 10

RANDOM NOTES

SIDELIGHTS ON CURRENT EVENTS LOCAL AND GENERAL (By Cosmos.) “Dark blue,” states a psychologist, “produces fear and apprehension in some people.” Particularly if .the traffic inspector is a big one. » » • An American is claiming a divorce because he has discovered that his apparently fair bride is really a brunette. He seems justified in claiming that this has put a new complexion on the matter. • * * “For the first time in twenty centuries there has not been a really great poet, philosopher, or genius.” With this statement, Dr. Butler, one of America’s leading educational authorities, recently startled London. If what Dr. Butler says is true, it remarkably bears out a prophecy Victor Hugo made in 1864. “We declare to you,” the great Frenchman said in his work on William Shakespeare, “that the earth has exhausted its contingent of master spirits. Now for decadence and general closing. We must make up our minds to it. We shall have no more men of genius.” That is a lugubrious prophecy, but can it be proved that in the sixty-three years which have elapsed since then no more men of genius have risen?

That can not be proved save by the test of time, but at least the last six decades have produced some interesting- nominees—Edison, for example, Einstein, Mussolini, Bismarck, Ibsen, Sargent, Whistler, Sarah Bernhardt, the Curies, the Wright brothers, Marconi, Caruso, Foch, Ysaye, Gilbert and Sullivan, Kipling, Paderewski, Pasteur and Lister, and heaven alone knows how many others. Many of these were living at the time Hugo wrote, but their greatest fame has been achieved since the year in which he penned his pessimistic lines.

Wall Street seems to have been having a rough time just lately. Millions have been lost in a fraction of a second, and the best financial brains of America have been wondering how to prevent a catastrophe. One wonders where all the money comes from on these occasions. A glance round the incomes of the United States alone may, perhaps, give an inkling. In 1815 there were precisely four American millionaires. In 1855 the total had risen to 27, whilst to-day it is estimated that there are well over 12,800. In 1926 the number of men in America with incomes of a million pounds a year doubled itself in a matter of months.

At the present moment there are at least fourteen men with incomes of at least a million pounds a year, 5000 with £12,000 a year, and as many as 142 with a comfortable £200,000 a year. Altogether, nearly 400 Americans enjoy incomes that vary from a mere £lOO,000 a year to a million pounds, or over. But the so-called small investor mounts up on a par, in spending power, with: even the combined efforts of these kings of the money world. For instance, out of the four or five million taxable incomes in the United States the average works out at the very respectable figure of £lOOO a year. Down below that it is significant that whereas only 119,000 persons are worried with £2OO-a-year incomes, no less than 490,000 are getting along with incomes that vary from seven hundred a year to nine hundred. There would thus appear to be plenty of Americans with a spare pound or two ready to have a flutter on Wall Street.

The formation of a French Cabinet appears to have been a more difficult task than M. Daladier at first expected and despite the undertaking he gave to’the President (M. Doumergue). a few days ago to do so, an announcement in this morning’s cable news states that he has now declined to form one. M. Edouard Daladier was bom in June, 18S4, at Carpentras, Vaucluse, of which he afterwards became Mayor. Eventually he left to take a post at the Sourbonne in Paris, and in 1919 entered. the Chamber of Deputiees as a RadicalSocialist. It was M. Daladier who brought in the Bill for the resumption of commercial relations with Russia when Colonial Minister in M. Herriot s Cabinet in 1924. He was not a member of the Painleve Government which followed in April, 1925, but he held the portfolio of War in the latter’s reconstructed Cabinet of November, 1925. Its life was brief, and in the same month M. Briand again took office, transferring the War Office to M. Painleve on the ground that his army reorganisation scheme was preferable to that of M. Daladier.

Finally M. Daladier accepted the Ministry of Education, but when the Cabinet posts were reshuffled in March, 1926, he was not retained, for during the financial debates in February .he had on occasions refrained from voting with the Government for fear of displeasing the Cartel des Gauches. At the Radical-Social Party’s Congress in October, 1927, he secured the passing of resolutions directed against any working with the parties of the Right, and was chosen president of the party. This represented a move to the Left by the party, as M. Daladier had voted consistently against the Poincare Government, and M. Poincare regarded the choice as a personal affront. In January, 1928, there was a split between M. Daladier’s group and those who did not wish to embarrass M. Poincare. In February M. Daladier pronounced in favour of the union of the Left. Following the Government’s decision to permit the re-establishment in France of certain missionary monastic orders, the Radical-Socialists’ Congress at Augers, in November, 1925, brought about the resignation of their four Ministers bv a snap vote, the sequel being the fall of the Cabinet, which M. Poincare, however, reconstructed.

A life on the films often has the air of a sort of looking-glass existence where everything goes the wrong way round, and apparently that contrariness is liable to spread into the real existence of those- who spend much time in studios. Thus Miss Pola Negri is now reported to have assured an interviewer that “she parted from her husband as the result of a mutual understanding.” The usage is legitimate but unusual—it seems curious that a marriage should come to grief because of a mutual understanding. However, if Miss Negri and her spouse ever decide to kiss and be friends again they can always adjust matters by explaining that they must have misunderstood their earlier understanding on this subject.