DUNEDIN NOTES.

Lake Wakatip Mail, Issue 2929, 1 August 1911, Page 4

DUNEDIN NOTES.

(From Our Own Correspondent.)

Strange, is it not, that the illness and death of Mr T. E. Taylor, M.P., should have evoked such universal interest and sympathy throughout the Dominion. There has b»en nothing like it since the death of Mr Seddon. Why was it? Mr Taylor had never held cabinet office (this, of course, is to his credit), he had no following, and he could never have hoped to have one. He was an impossible man to work with ; he was impatient of restraint; he would brook no denial; he had not even a glimmer of apprehension of the necessity that in politics one must give and take. ' Compromise ' was not in his vocabulary. Erery one must go his way, or go out, or be against him. Thertfore, a man who could never have risen to anything but a critic of everybody and everything. This, of course, may have been to his credit. My immediate point is that, these things being so, how was it his illness caused a wave of sympathy to run from one end of the Dominion to the other, and his death furnished a general topic of conversation 1 The answer is that in the lata Mr Taylor's case character told. Wrong, obstinate, wilful, impetuous as he often was, and with a tongue that dripped vitriol (the worst of it was that it was, not rarely, dropped on the wrong person and object), the great mass of people knew him to be sincere, honest, fearless, a true friend of the genuiue worker, and the possessor of au attractive personality. He made people listen and he fought magnificently. Like Sir Joseph Ward he could speak without preparation on almost any public question but, unlike Ward, he had something to say. Ward's commonplaces pour forth in a stream as monotonous as it is ceaseless, but Taylor could arrest the attention and hold his hearers. An able man, a straight nun, and an exceptional man, the Domiuion is the pooler for his going.

The citizens of Duuedin are trying to wake up. lam not prepared to say that they will awaken but they are proposing to follow the American admonition and " get a move on." It ia about time. Dunedin is away behind the other four centres in population. Financially we are solid and intellectually we are sound, but we are not growing. We are tiaining youths for other parts. Excluding babies, who must grow up before they are worth anything, we are stationary. So the call has gone forth. A gentle nan named Inglis Wright has sounded the trumpet. He got the Mayor to convene a meeting and he has had a committee appointed and the committee have power to act. But how 1 I have seen so many committees, or leagues, for regenerating mankind in general and the Otago Harbor and city in particular that I am a profound sceptic. I remember Mayor Christie's superb proposals for making things hum. No single object for him ; nothing shott of an Otego League that should embrace railways and inigation, harbors- and factories, waste lands and street repairing, education and hospitals and so on. Oh, it looked splendid—on paper. And it was to be ushered in with a brass band and the mayoral blessing. I am not quite certain, but I do not think we ever got to the christeniug ceremony. Anyway, its life was short—a delicate child that perished in its early days. It died young, very young' R.I.P. I am afraid, just a weony, tweeny bit afraid, that 1 may yet have to say the funeral service over the newly born universal prosperity reviver that hatched out in the Town Hall on Thursday last, but before getting down my gown and bands and book, I'll wait to hear if the Eugenics Society have any views upon the subject. Mr William Belcher, Chairman of Otago Harbor Board, continues to instruct and amuse an amazed and partially adoring public. I scented ructions when he was elected—the leOpard cannot change its spots—and ructioas we have had. There have bf'en ructions with the Press over finance, ructions with the secretary and engineer (one not two persons) over a suspended employee, and I shall not be very far out if I predict that we shall—some day soon—have ructions with the rest of the Botrd.

Many people like the Belcherian methods. They resemble a cyclone and leave an angry, heaving, fretful pathway behind them. But they clear the air, they shake things up, they mix 'em a l>it, and th°y make people notice. There is a piqu.-a y and an attractiveness about a <ha r nan who refers to the secretary (wtio sits at his elbow) as the official who I a* a cast iron conttact for five years at a thousand a year. The man in the street cries " Go ahead, give it 'em Bill,' and writes triumph antly chortling letters signed " Kcce Homo," if you please, to the papers. What • Bill' Belcher and the man in the street have in common is this- ■ they both have the capitalist bee in their bonnets, they both think the plain laboring man is the only sitnon pure wealth producer, and they both know, beyond the shadow of a shade of dbubt, that the first is robbing the second. Hence when one roars the other sympathetically roars back. i