ON THE WATCH TOWER.

Evening Star, Issue 14526, 30 November 1910, Page 2

ON THE WATCH TOWER.

V £■■'■• •-'*»■-• [By Amsl.l '" " Mr Edwaid Tregear has in bis time ( flayed many parts. He has been a soldier, - 'tt'anrveyor, a a prominent .--State official, an artist of some skill, a >•■' voluminous author, and now he has, in his /- old age, broken out into poetry. The . ■ London 'Spectator' quotes some of liis| ■verses with approval. The subject is the Yellow Peril and the Empty Cradle:— Peril is here! Where? Here in the childless land, Life 6its high in the Chair of Foote twisting her ropes of sand. Here the lisping of babies and the cooing of mothers cease; Here .the man and the woman fail, and only the flocks increase. This Kiplingesque tirade is all too true. The walls of a nation do riso only to the - music of children's voices. But one may aik "Is Saul among the prophets?" Does Mr Tregear now preach the faith which once he destroyed? Was he ever a disciple of Mrs Besant, who with her 'Fruits of Philosophy' has kept millions of cradles empty! What is the attitude of Socialism to population? Is not-every newcomer regarded as a competitor ? Have not children been regarded as mere future slaves I to the rich? Verily the chickens come ( home to roost! For lack of these encumbrances—the children—the whole State is la danger. How wise, after all, is that neglected old Book, which'says: As arrows are in the hands of a mightv man, so are children of the youth. Happy is the man that hath his quiver full ot them: they shall not be ashamed, but they shall speak wit)i the enemies in the gate. " Show me your jewels," said the Roman lady who was taking afternoon tea with the Mother of the Gracchi. " I will, prejentlv," said the hostess; "have another tup."" Bv-and-bye her two boys came in from school, and the proud mother said: "Here they are; these are my jewels." Those *ame boys lived to light for their Budget more fiercely than Lloyd George himself. They sought to fill cradles by distributing the land. They enacted that no man should hold more than 500 acres. Had they been able to make their reform good agamst the Lords the history of the world might have been different. If Italy had been tilled by millions of stalwart and patriotic citizens instead of by herds of slaves, many things would have beeu altered. But the Gracchi wero ultimately crushed, and luxury went on its way to Rottenness. To be childless was the ambiion of the Roman rich. Having no natural heirs, everybody flattered them, in hope of being remembered in the will. Every true purpose of life was less than vanity to these decadent people. In Fiance the land is divided, and the owners desire heirs, but not too many. A double poison works in them —the desire to be lien and the Fruits of Philosophy. Thus, by too much care, everything is jeopardised. A German writer has expressed with brutal directness tire thought that may now be silently taking form in Asiatic brains concerning us: '"The seven sons of a German home will easily overcome the one son of a French home, and possess his lands." ******* Mr Tregear, more suo, has a dig at the increase of the flocks. It has been the fashion, from the days of Cain down for the small farmer to hate tie sheepowner, and to suppose that more sheep implied fewer men. The Gracchi knew the argument well over two millenniums ago. Sir Thomas More, in his ' Utopia,' as early 1:3 1516, contends that "6hepe" eat men, pull down houses, pluck down towns, and leave nothing standing but the church, " to be made a shepehowse." He pictures the people driven out before the devouring sheep, forced to sell their bit of stuff in a glutted market, wandering from place to place till all is spent, and then becoming thieves. Meanwhile the " wol be almooste d comen into a fewe richo menne s handes, vbom no neade forceth to sell before they )Mte, and they luste not before they mayo tell as deare as thev luste." Thus he • would prove that an Increased supply does ' not cheapen wool. The immortal and , übiquitous " fat man" was busy then, I doing things quite-, contrary to common I sense and his own interests. In Gold- '. smith's 'Deserted Village,' 150 years ago. 1 we have a similar fallacy. The whole '"! burden of that charming poem is that the wealth of trade is covering the land and ; driving the people to joyless homes across the sea. HI faxes the land, to hastening ills a prey, Where wealth accumulates and men decay. Princes and lords may flourish or may fade, A breath can) make theui as a breath has made; But a bold peasantry, their country's pride. When qnce destroy'd, can never be supplied. A Time there was, ere England's griefs began, When every rood of ground maintained its man; For him light labor spread the wholesome store, Just gave what life required, and gave no more: His best companions innocence and health, And his best wishes ignorance of wealth. But times are altered; trade's unfeeling tTain Usurped the land and dispossessed the swain. Any Socialistic theory that imagines that wealth has some interest in keeping down the population and driving men afield is absurd and 6elf-contradictory. ******* Speaking of princes and lords being ; made by a breath reminds me of Lloyd George on the pedigree of the peers. Their ancestors were either French filibusters or plunderers of the monasteries, whose lands were a trust for the poor. I believe that very few of the present landlords can truly claim to have "come over with the Conqueror." If the majority had_such a pedigree it would be the best of titles, as 'this world goes, in which there is not a yard of soil that is not held as tho result of battle at some time or another. It does not occur to everybody that Nelson's battles gave us Australia and New Zealand. As to the monastic lands being a trust for the p.JT, there were other claim- : r ; ante of largo capacity who had the first ■ '*, cut. A much stronger point against the old families is that they received their lands on feudal tenure. That is, they were obliged, in return, to supply the king with so many horses and men equipped for war. In other words, tho landowners maintained the army. They have managed to evade this substantial rent to the State, and still hold on to the estates. This, and not their pedigree, is the weak spot in their armor. One of Mr Lloyd George's colleagues, by the way, is a Churchill. The great Marlborough was the founder of that family. He began his fortune with a thank-offering of £5,000, which he received from a lady. He '■"■ gallantly saved her reputation —not that jhe had any—by jumpmg out of an upstair window when it was announced that the Merry Monarch was coming up the back stairs. You will find it at large in Macaulay. How he continued to build up hia fortune you may learn from the history of Queen Annes time. The story is more lecent and not much better than the two counts in the Chancellor's indictment; but perhaps Mr Winston ChuTchill is not sensitive, having none of the spoil.

There is a vulgar and brutal lone about tho Chancellor which may servo to split g? tho earn of tho groundlings, but cannot ft but make the judicious grievo. Thero is nonfr of the jteen rapier thrust about him. F 5 He «mm» in slogging with a battle axe. < H« waA savage a* that crooked little wasp, » Pope: Go I if your ancient but ignoble blood Haa crept thro' scoundrels ever since the- Mood, Go J and protend your family is young; Hot own your fathers have been foole so long. What can ennoble pots, or elavee, or cowards? • AIM? not all ..the blood of all the Howards, {

' That is a fair sample of the battle axe style. To my thinking, tho rapier stylo is much more effective. I take an illustration from the twelitb letter of Junius. It is addressed to the Prime Minister of the day, His Grace the Duke of Grafton. i His family originated, I may add, about the time when the first Churchill saved , the lady’s reputation : The character of tho reputed ancestors of some men has made it possible 1 for their descendants to be vicious m the ( extreme without being degenerate. ( Those of your Grace, for instance, le,t i no distressing examples of virtue, even > to their legitimate posterity, and jon 1 may look back with pleasure to an illustrious pedigree, in which heraldry has not left a single good quality upon record to .insult or upbraid you. aon have better proofs of your descent, my Lord, than the register of a marriage or J any troublesome inheritance of reputa- , J tion. There arc some hereditary strokes ; J of character by which a family may be i , os clearly distinguished as by the black- > esl features of the human face. Charles the First lived and died a hypocrite. Charles the Second was a hypocrite of another sort, and should have died upon ( the same scaffold. At the distance of aj ( century we see their different characters ( happily revived and blended in your ’ Grace. Sullen and severe without re- - ligioir. profligate without gaiety, you r live like Charles the Second, without - being an amiable companion, and, for aught 1 know, may die as his fathers did. without the reputation ot a martyr. - ■ j The claims of long descent arc often , amusing. Headers of Spenser’s ‘Faerie c Qiieene ' will remember how tho poet traces ! 1 Queen Elizabeth back to the heroes of I Trov. A French family, however, went ' one' better. Their coat-of-arms repre- 1 sented a man carrying their family papers 1 into the Arid This is not quite so good. . however, as the Irish family who were under no obligation to Noah, having had , a boat of their own! Mr Lloyd George seems to think it a liner thing to found a family himself than to bo a mere descendant of a family that someone else founded. At Ills last election some heckler asked: "Isn't it a fact that your grandfather, drove a donkey-cart ?” “ This is tile Hist I have heard of the donkey.” he replied. " I thought he pulled the cart himself.” .Mr George wants to score off Ins own bat. Alone I did it I The self-made man generally contains some very rough workmanship, but honors are easy when the son or the daughter of a hundred earls is so foolish as to reflect on his lack of ancestry. “If you had begun as a cobbler you would have ended as a cabbler." said one. It was rude—battle axe. not rapin'—but effective and probably true. In an ancient Greek story a degenerate of long time uvits a new man with : "Hr, let me see: your family begins with yon. doesn’t it?” '"Yes, and yours ends with yon.” came the battle axe retort. Always the battle axe with that kind of people. With it they cut their way to their place, and they have not had time to cultivate any other weapon. I like self-made men who are not ashamed of their origin -Dick .Sodden, for instance, wlio was not ashamed of his West Coast days -inn 1 can't endure the people who share their rise uTihont having done anything. Napoleon I admire and almost love, but his family make me sick. They wore the incarnation of all that is ridiculous and i contemptible. Before these give me lim ■ people of |s.-digiee every time. * * * * * * » The example of Brazil fanned the revolution in Portugal, and now the example of ■ Portugal ivacts on Brazil. Violence and i revolution aie contagious. The Brazilian , Navy have struck, killed a few officers, and tired' a few shots across the bows of the I capital by way of inviting tho authorities , to surrender. Of course they capitulated . at once, ami made haste to inform the ’ world that the trouble was suppressed. , and that it was not a revolution, nor yet ■ an insurrection, non even a mutiny—it \ was only a strike. But it was a mutiny. . though, in the same sense as the word ! was used a century ago during the " Mutiny , at the Nore." The Rio mutiny, however, I , did not last so lyng. The rebels asked by I wireless: "Will you give us wind we [ want, and then forgive us for asking for it? If you don’t we’ll blow yog into king- | dom come." The authorities were not pig-headed English, so they replied: “We give and forgive.” This little civil war [ does not differ in principle from any other ) sirike. .Strikers are monopolists of some I trade, as these men were of the fleet. T hey have special opportunities for organising * and acting together, just like the Rio sailors, and they enforce their requests , with suggestions of dire consequences to follow refusal. This iitile episode will ' cause TTTazil and tlie Argentine to reflect whether they really need Dreadnoughts i after all. It will also make Australia hurry up her inland capital. Her fleet, , maimed by men trained by Mr Peter * Bowling, would argue their joint much more effectually than the big landownci.s i have been able to do. Would it not bo well, before speudifrg any more money on ; Houses of Parliament in Wellington, to consider the jircpriety of shifting the capi- . lul of New Zealand to Cromwell or to Featherstone? , ******* God speed the brave fellows on the [ Terra Nova! May they,all come hack, bringing their ears and noses with them, likewise all their lingers and toes. May . they also bring the Pole, or at least some ’ specimens of it. and may every one of , them he immortalised by achievement- and discovery. New Zealand has behaved well to the ' adventurers, and ten thousand ' hearts will beat- quicker when we hear of 1 them again. The squat and deeply-laden * little ship seems not- the ideal for contending with the mountainous seas that roll Let ween us and the Ice Barrier, but ; doubtless she is staunch as the heroes sin- ’ carries to the great lone land. May she ■ keeji on toji !