TOPICS OF THE DAY.

Lake County Press, Issue 975, 15 August 1901, Page 2

TOPICS OF THE DAY.

[From the Evening Star's Correspondent.] LONDON, June 21. SUGAR AT £970 A TON. In open market at the present time you can purchase a ton of best refined loaf sugar for considerably less than £2O, but at Hackney the other day no less than £972 19s was paid for a" ton thereof at auction. Naturally a quder tale hangs upon the sale of loaf sugar at about 8s a pound. This is how it came about: Messrs Clarke, Nickolls, and Coombe, the wellknown jam makers of Hackney, are engaged in a qurrel with the Inland Revenue authorities over income tax. The firm share a percentage of their profits with their 5,000 workpeople. The Revenue officials want to assess income tax on the gross profits, including that which goes to the workpeople. The firm maintain that this would mean a direct income tax upon the wages of girls earning in some cases only 10s a week; whereas the legal limit for exempt incomes is £l6O per annum. The managing director sent to the Revenue Department a cheque for the amount of tax claimed, less that due on the workers'' share of the profits. The Revenue people refused to accept the settlement, and the dispute culminated in the authorities placing a broker's man in charge of the factories. For six days he sat on some sugar sacks, and then an auction of sugar was held at the factory to raise the sum claimed by the revenue—£972 19s, to wit. Clarke, Nickolls, and Coombe received the auctioneer in style, drawing up their fire brigade in full uniform as a guard of honor. Meanwhile Jews from all parts of London had flocked to Hackney in hopes of being able to secure sweet bargains. The auction beiran: " No. 1 : One ton of best refined loaf sugar—what offer?" A Sheeny bid five pounds, but the words were hardly out of his lips before :i voice said: "I bid £500." The Jews gasped and the auctioneer grinned, as bids of fifty and a hundred pounds the price swiftly to £9OO, and then to £972 19s. "Any more?" cried the auctioneer. "Going—going—gone!" And the lot was knocked down to the head of the firm. The Jews were furious, and one man fiercely demanded of the auctioneer : " Vat you calls dis game. 'Ere I come all ze vay from Voolich to puy sheap sugar und to find dis axshion vas a damdt schvindles—l demandt mine fare und egsbenses, I do." He was backed up by his compatriots, and there seemed to be a chance of some "fun," but the fire brigade and the hosepipe began to look like business, and the badly sold Jew boys departed, swearing strange oaths. They waited for the auctioneer in the street, but he, wise man, stole silently away by the back door. The profit-sharing system of the firm of Clarke, Nickolls, and Coombe is interesting. After paying the ordinary shareholder 6 per cent., the surplus profits are divided in equal proportions between the workpeople and the shareholders. All who have worked one year participate in the bonus. Is began in' 1891 with £1,400, and last year reached £9,500. Most of the speakers at the Colonial Club's annual banquet last Tuesday could conscientiously have said with Ma'rk Antony " I am no orator; I only speak right on." They did speak right on with a vengeance, and only Mr Justice Hodges's bombshell aroused us from the drowsiness begotten by dull discourses.'The evening that almost ended with a snore began with a prophetic dream which Sir Taubman Goldie put into the Duke of Wellington's brain on Waterloo eve. The Imperial forces was his toast, and he advocated a Kriegsverein, a more definite Imperial organisation than would be extemporised on a sudden call to arms. The English people deplored the growth of bloated armaments. They certainly could not be accused of beginning it. for they were always years behind with their armaments. General Buller. tall and grey, his dour expression occasionally softening into a smile, responded. He is a fluent speaker, but if he were less fluent he would be-more effective, for the words often come where, to use his own phrase, " there is really little bona-fide matter behind." This matter, he declared, must back up the Imperial idea expressed in the toast, otherwise the "Imperial Forces," which had now .taken the place of the " Navy, Army, and Reserve Forces," would be a. mere nickname. The Englishman, he said, formerly looked upon himself as a small god in a small island possessing a number of small and obedient colonies. But now round the Mother Country there weie a number of lusty nations, ready to help her in every difficulty in which they thought her right.' Two watchwords, "Britannia rules the waves" and "Defence, Not Defiance." sum up the rest of his speech. It was after ten when Sir Montague Omnianev intoned in the usual stereotyped and complimentary phrases the praises of the retiring Agents-General, Sir John Cockburn and Sir E. H. Wittenoom. Sir John's ten-minute reply was somewhat in the heroic vein. He regarded the growth of the club during the last three years as one of the outward and visible signs of the solidarity of the British Empire, a phrase which is rather an obsession of his. Very appropriately he reviewed the epoch-making events that he had seen in the heart of the Empire during his term of office, during which the modern history of the Empire had commenced and been consummated, for the Empire had risen to the full height and consciousness of its corporate existence. He had seen the troops return in triumph from Omdurman, and, alas! the close of the Victorian era. The funeral march of the great White Queen in St. George's Chapel would ring for ever in his ears. But the sun had risen on a new and glorious era. " Quis separabit" and "Nemo me impitne laeessit " were the keynotes of Sir John's eloquent peroration. There was no cement like blood, and every Power must confess that Great Britain now stands as a much more powerful association than ever before the nations had confronted in the world's history. Who touches one part, touches all. After a reference to the tact, dignity, sympathy, and urbanity displayed by the Duke and Duchess, Sir John mentioned the .salutation of the flag by the Australian school children on the 14th May. Several speakers corrected him by asserting it was the 24th, but Sir John stuck to his guns. An American had suggested the ceremony to him out in Australia some years before, but then there was not the necessary enthusiasm. Now the Union Jack bore a meaning that it had never borne before. Could not the occasion lie crystallised by the addition of some little emblem to the old flag, that would appeal to colonials and commemorate the part they took in the war? Sir John concluded with a. tribute to Sir Montague's courteous consideration. " Whenever we came to him with a good, real, solid case we always received satisfaction," said Sir John, rather suggesting that not infrequently the Agents-General "tried it on " with the Permanent Under-Secretary. We were beginning to nod again, when an obiter dictum of Mr Justice Hodges startled us from our somnolent serenity. During his three months in England, he told us, he has been trying to. see the Australian as John Bull sees him, and the Victorian jurist is dissatisfied with the vision. For while the polisheUJiorde of society admitted that the Antipodean could fight,

they declared that socially the colonial cousin was—well, not quite comme il faut, don't you know. " Perhaps," said the colonial judge, "we have lost the faculty of capering nimbly in a lady's chamber to the lascivious playing of the lute, but we have not forgotten how to charge home with fixed bayonet. If, in the fierce combat with Nature, some of the softness which covers the highly civilised individual disappears and is replaced by something of hardness and roughness, the* heart of the colonial that faces the foe without fear is the warm heart, as broad as the British Empire, that gives a downright hearty British welcome to every British citizen.'" Suddenly the placid atmosphere of mutual conventional compliments became charged with the electricity of controversy. Subsequent speakers protested that John Bull and his wife had nowadays no social feeling against colonials, but lavished hospitality and social distinction upon them. The judge's sentence was the subject of discussion as we filed out of the banqueting hall. Coming out, an Anglocolonial summed up the position thus: " You Englishmen are all right when we know you, but you do take a bit of knowinV' THE P. AND 0. AND LASCARS. On Tuesday last Mr Justice Mathew sat in the King's Bench Division to hear the P. and 0. Company's petition raising the question as to the crew space to be provided by the company for Lascars on board then- ships. The company contended that this matter was regulated by the Indian Act, 1876, whereas the Crown said that it came under the Merchant Shipping Act, 1894, the point in difference involving a, large additional burden to the company if decided in favor of the Crown. The petitioners set out that they were a corporation owning ships, and employed to navigate their ships a class of British subjects known as Lascars. The Lascars were shipped under agreement approved by the Governor-General of India in Council. For many years the crew space provided for them largely exceeded that required for them by the Indian Act, 1876, but fell short of the crew space required by the Merchant Shipping Act, 1894. The crew space occupied by the Lascars was usually deducted from the tonnage of the ship, with the consequence that light and other dues payable on the tonnage was not paid in respect of such space. One of the vessels in question was the Australia, trading between England and Australia; another was the Oriental, trading between England and India. A surveyor of the Board of Trade inspected the crew space for the Lascars on both ships, and alleging that the provisions of the Merchant Shipping Act, 1894, had not been complied with, reported this failure to the chief officer of the Customs, who thereupon altered the registered tonnage of the ships, and disallowed the deduction of the crew spaces. The petitioners admitted that if Lascars were seamen within the meaning of section 210 of the 1894 Act the space required was not provided, but they submitted that the surveyor took an erroI neous view of the statutes, and wrongly I considered that the English Acts and not ! the Indian Acts regulated the crew space for Lascars. If the view of the surveyor was correct, they must either reduce the number of Lascars employed on their ships or give up part of their freight-earning I space for them, with the result that they would have to pay larger dues on the tonnage, and particularly larger dues to the general lighthouse fund. The company asked for a declaration in the sense of their contention, and sought the repayment of extra sums they had paid in consequence of the surveyor's disallowance. Sir Robert Reid, in support of the petition, analysed the various Acts on the subject, and submitted that the Indian Act had not been repealed, and that it applied to British vessels which shipped crews of Lascars to whatever part of the world they went. The Attorney-Genera!, on the other hand. urgued that both the ships were registered in the United Kingdom, and that-.they came, therefore, under the provisions of the Merchant Shipping Act. which had a general application throughout His Majesty's dominions. Accordingly, the company were bound to appropriate to the use of the Lascars the accommodation specified in the Act. THE TWIN DUCHESSES. Why (ask some of the papers) did we hear nothing of the Duchess that was bequeathed when in 1876 everyone was talking of the Duchess that was stolen. Mrs R. C. Saunders, the owner of the Duchess of Devonshire No. 2. says that the present appearance of her Duchess at the Graves Gallery is the third made by the picture in this country. Mr Foster brought the portrait from Australia in 1867 to the Leeds Art Exhibition, but it was not exhibited, as Mr Foster insisted that the commissioners should buy it. This could not be done, as the exhibition was a loan one, so the picture returned to Australia. In 1877, the year after Duchess No. 1 had been stolen, the picture was shown at the Byron Gallery in Savile row. Mr Saunders, who had had previous negotiations with Mr Foster, the owner of thp picture, sent to him in Australia, when the one picture by Gainsborough had obtained such a large sum of money, and said: " Now is the time to sell your Gainsborough picture." So it was brought over from Australia and shown in an exhibition of pictures of the Titian country. Mr Saunders soon afterwards bought*it from Mr Foster for £2,000, and (says Mrs Saunders) " from the day it left the Byron Gallery until it was removed from my house in the Isle of Wight to be taken to the Graves Gallery, it has not been out of our possession, and has not had anything whatever done to it. It needed touching up, but my husband always said he preferred it as it was, showing its antiquity." At the time of its exhibition at the Byron Gallery, says Mrs Saunders, Millais and Leighton pronounced it an undoubted Gainsborough, and the papers declared it was obviously the very work from which Sir Thomas Lawrence rilled in the rough outline of the replica left by Gainsborough. The original of the portrait (Mrs Saunders declares) was not Georgina, Duchess of Devonshire, but beautiful Lady Betty Foster, whom the fifth duke married three years after the death of Georgina. Lady Betty Foster gave the picture when finished by Gainsborough to her relative Mr John Cavendish Foster, the father of the Mr Foster from whom Mr Saunders bought it. The present foster-mother of the picture certainly seems to make out a good case for its authenticity, and also for the identity of its subject.