By the Way

Evening Star, Issue 23503, 17 February 1940, Page 3

By the Way

(By X.Y.)

“ BRICKS WITHOUT STRAW.” This is the. doleful story of Ebenezer Glue, . Who manufactured mousetraps in the town of Pakaru, With simple apparatus, consisting or a fire, , , A little pair of pincers, and a large . amount of wire. He had his notion patented, and adver- ■ tised it well, In order that his densest fellow-country-man could tell That Ebenezer’s mousetrap was the fruitiest device For ridding troubled households of a plethora of mice. No doubt it was effective — no doubt it -was Unique In luring little rodents to their final, fatal squeak.. No hot and harassed housewife need endure a pantry raid Where Ebonezor’s mousetrap was alluringly displayed. But, ah! the very people whom he sought to benefit W*ra hopelessly conservative they never purchased it. Tha shops were. overcrowded with imported foreign lines, With mass-produced contraptions of inferior designs. So Fortune fled the enterprising manuv facturer, And Ebenezer’s future was a dark and > dismal blur. His wife began to nag him, and in order to avoid Her- ceaseless objurgations, he became an Unemployed. But hope at last enlightened with a rare, effulgent gleam The tedium of bis labours on the Number Thirteen scheme. At last the door was opened and the crooked path was straight; He dreamt of fame and fortune and a portion with the great. The rulers of his country had imposed a stringent ban Qn mousetrap importations from Aus- • tralia and Japan, From England, Madagascar, Yugoslavia, Paraguay, . Spitsbergen and Morocco, and (of course) the U.S.A. They told him that this measure would accelerate the sale Of local-fashioned mousetraps on a monumental scale. They bellowed “ Kia Ora ” and they shouted “ Haeremai "Wife in, good Ebenezer, and the folk . .. will, have to buy.” He opened up his little back-yard factory once more, ■And manufactured mousetraps by the ' dozen and the score. H» put them bn. the market at a reasonable price, Till everything was ready for a massacre of mice. Then Ebenezer flourished and his heart began to glow. Ho bought a little motor and he built * bungalow. , , , Ho hired a man to work for him ana ■ought for extra room To double his production and maintain ’ tiie mousetrap boom. Ala* for ' hopeful Governments who seek to banish slumps By blowing up depressions with inflationary pumps! 'Alas for gay financiers, serenely prodi- ■> - gal, Who live by robbing Peter in the hope of paying Paul ! Alas for Ebenezer when at last it came to hand - That wire was on the list of importations strictly banned. He raked the whole Dominion from , Te Reinga to the Bluff, But wire was unprocurable one ■ couldn’t get the stuff I So -now the mousetrap factory is a melancholy wreck, And housewives trust in pussy cats to : ?. -keep their mice in check, While Ebenezer," working on unlucky ;• Scheme Thirteen, Is meditating sadly- oh the glories that ■ have, been.

“ In 1915 the National Register was taken. - All men of military age were required to' state whether they were willing to undertake military service. The ‘ men • ■ registered ■ in ■ • this category numbered, roughly, 196,000, Of these 33,700 said they would-not undertake service at .home or abroad, and 44,300 declared- their willingness t 6 undertake home service, but refused service abroad. T I would undertake no service in the army, either at home or abroad, and in a brief note gave .my reasons. The National Register was, of course, a prelude to conscription, which -was introduced the following year, and brought into force at. the close of 1916. . ._ . Under the in-the- Conscription Act, popularly known as the Family Shirkers’ Clause, - .’ men -.belonging ■to families, ho .member-of which, had gone to the war, could he - called-up without having appeared in the ballot.”

Many seniors in this community ■will remember the Baxters. There were four brothers, whose headquarters were on a farm 12 miles from Dunedin, ■where their parents also resided. They ntyqr made a secret of their pacifist convictions —and three of them were arrested by the police—Archibald first, late in February, 1917, andl two others faiur ' months later. The preceding pairagaaph is an extract from Archibald Baxter’s book ‘We Will not Cease,’ published last year, and lent to “X.Y.” this week by a returned soldier, of the Great War, who has been ■pending a few weeks’ vacation testing sea temperatures and ganging wind velocities in this usually mild and sheltered neighbourhood. Curiously, neither he nor any of several other returned soldiers whom “ X.Y.” questioned had ever heard of the Baxters, being then too fully occupied in Flanders or Palestine to keep au fait with the operations of the Defence Act in far away New Zealand.

But there were men, as well as officers, of the New Zealand Expeditionary Force who came in contact with Archibald Baxter in , France and Flanders and (in hospitals) in England. Some of them cheered him for the endurance he showed under the treatment appliedi by, the authorities to subdue an. iron will and constitution and to' vindicate a principle underlying the system of service found imperative to maintain in being the forces of which the nucleus had been volunteers. The details of that treatment it is needless to quote. Let there suffice a passage or two dealing with Baxter’s siqoum in a Boulogne hospital prior

“The time has come,** the Walrus said, “To talk of many things.”

to his being invalided to England and finally repatriated after his experiences at Ypres and the Somme: “It seemed hard to understand, he - (the hospital doctor) said, that the New Zealand authorities should have gone to such lengths with me. He hardly thought the British Government would lave acted in that way. ... He told me I would soon be leaving the hospital. I was being sent to England, to a place where I could rest in pleasant surroundings. They had tried, he said, to keep me out of the hand's of the New Zealand authorities, but, sooner or later, I would have to go back into their hands.”

It is perhaps a mere coincidence that perusal of Baxter’s book was adjourned for a brief space to allow scrutiny of that day’s paper of this current week which, under the heading ‘ National Register,’ contained a news article announcing the Government’s proposals to investigate the man power of the Dominion, enunciated by the Minister in charge of that branch of war-time administration. How circumstances alter cases 1 Baxter records an episode in the treatment of Briggs, a resister like himself. Briggs had been dragged over duckwalks, pulled through flooded shell-holes, and finally thrown back into one and pelted with muck as he got his mouth above water. “ Drown yourself, you said the chief disciplinarian. You’ve not got youir Paddy Webbs and your Bob Semples to look after you now.” The circumstances leading to Britain being drawn into war both in 1914 and 1939 are broadly the, same—Germany’s set purpose to disrupt and, immobilise _ the British Empire as a naval and military and economic factor of any real consequence. Both Grey and Chamberlain strove to divert Germany from her preliminary steps towardis that ultimate end; both failed. The alteration in circumstances is local and domestic. The burden of responsibility due to accession to power is a powerful solvent of scales over the eyes. Baxter’s revelations, however, are not calculated to simplify the issue—for such it is evidently becoming. Meantime, the pacifists in New Zealand today are faring no better than they deserve.

The painful process of protecting our foreign funds continues. It resembles the hothouse culture of coy exotic flowers of delicate constitution to the neglect of hardy and useful flora. It also involves the Government in the practice of hoarding, which it so much execrates, and punishes, when indulged in by the mostly well-behaved private citizen. Instead of quoting the saw about Satan reproving sin (which may be seditious) let us merely repeat sotto voce Robert Burns’s couplet:

O would some power the giftie gie us To see oursels as ithers see us.

This quotation, hard-worked, but never losing condition, sprang to mind when it was announced this week that from its considerable stocks of galvanised iron at one of the military camps the Government was issuing a microscopic dole to " alleviate a shortage of that indispensable of commerce in one of the big centres.”

Poor Muscovite! _ Now. writhing in The clutches of The cruel Finn. Sad is your fate And hard your lot. I pity you; As who would not? Your General And Commissar Commanded you To go to war And save thereby ■ Your native land— That’s what they made You understand. The Soviet . (They let you know) Must arm against A savage foe, Inflamed by one Insane desire To waste your land With sword and fire. You came,: you saw, You likewise fought; And thereupon Were promptly caught, Disarmed and sent, With many more, To find what fate Yet held in store. They did not shoot Or flog or kick Or fetter you, Poor Bolshevik. You could have borne A blow or curse; . But ah! your fate Was ten times worse. They burned your clothes, Yes, every stitch, And furnished you , . , With garments which Appeared obscene— Indecently And strangely clean. But ere you donned l This uniform They made a tub Of water warm; Inserted you, ■ Despite your squeals, And made you wash From head' to heels. It’s had indeed To fall into Tho hands of such A cruel crew. Far worse than chains, Or taunt or lash, The Russian feels That fearful wash.

The sale of Larnach’s Castle on Wednesday found speculation of the financial kind in Dunedin almost at vanishing point, but the of the bidding and the purchase price provoked among newspaper readers more speculation than does the destination of the formidable army of Anzacs now assembled at the appointed rendezvous near the connectin': link between the Red Sea and the Mediterranean Sea—a development .which has especially stirred the Italian mentality, whe/ai-r of brass hats or the autocrats of + he Italian Press. Reverting to the knocking down of a local landmark absolutely without reserve, the current takes the form of guessing what multiple profits might be made from demolition and the piecemeal cisposal of second-hand building material on a market deprived of manufacturc-s’ supplies. There is a sordid aspect to such a form of mental arithmetic. As a counter-irritant let it be asked here and now whether it would not have

been better for the City Fathers to have waited awhile and acquired Larnach’s Castle for a song and constituted it Dunedin’s Centeii" ; ’i Memorial instead of the Signal Hill project on a rival peak on the other side of Otago Harbour. However, in vuew of the dilemma in which the free gift of Littlebourne House has involved the City Corporation thus far, it is easy to imagine junior clerks in the Town Hall who learned some Latin across the much-debated tnam line from the late Sir John Roberts’s home saying to one another: “ Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes ”; to which another disciple of Virgil might add: “ Infandum, Regina, jubes renovare dotorem.” This latter hexameter is said to have been the answer of a Winchester schoolboy to Queen Elizabeth (of the “ spacious days ’’) when she asked him if ever he was birched.