THE WEEK, THE WORLD. AND WELLINGTON.

Marlborough Express, Volume XLIV, Issue 56, 11 March 1910, Page 2

THE WEEK, THE WORLD. AND WELLINGTON.

(By Frank Morton.) Hot weather continues here, and so far there is no perceptible mellowing of summer into autumn. Autumn ~^comes late this year, and good Wellingtonians tell me that a late autumn means a bad winter. -That 19 as it may be. I never do like Wellington winters, though last winter was better than most. The thing I admire chiefly in the average Wellingtonian Is his splendid lack of scruple whenever he is in the mood to boast about liis town. One. of the fallacies that the Wellingtonian is everlastingly -eager to buttress is "the fallacy that ".Yellington has a very fine climate. That also is as it may be; but from my point of view this is not a good climate at all. The hot weather is too muggy, and the cold weather is too raw; the dust is too dirty, and the wind is almost always too strong. I am perfectly willing to become enthusiastic over any climate when it is a good climate, but this climate ' leaves me cold. People think that the Auckland dust is worse, merely because the Auckland trams are -dirtier. The Auckland trams are perhaps the dirtiest on earth. That is Auckland's distinction. That and Captain Knyvett. * * * . THE FINISH OF THINGS. An excellently emphatic gentleman in Wanganui writes to inform me that the world will certainly come to a sudden end this May. He says: "A stiff-necked generation waiteth for a sign, but when the sign is -vouchsafed unto them, their eyes are blinded and God hardeneth their hearts. It is in the writing of this dispensation that the world shall be consumed, the Elect transfigured, and the spirits of the damned be called to judgment on the 17th of May, 1910; but the people of the earth still sin and scoff and mark not the sign of the times, as was the folly of Babylon of old. Be not deceived. God is not mocked. Come out from among them, and be ye separate, saith the Lord. Leave these vile sinners to their wretched fate." Won't! There is a good deal more, but the rest does not particularly concern or interest me. I am clearly told that if I don't come out . of sonic where soon I shall go to hell, for' certain. My Whanganuisance has everything fixed up completely to satisfaction. He prattles scurvily to a-n easily imagined crackling of lost souls. Only the "Elect" have any hope; and the Eliect, according to his pious idea, form a very small party. Well, with all reverence I declare that I'd sooner go to hell with decent human folk than to the heaven of any God that would glorify a man ■exulting in a religion like that. 1 can't imagine myself finding callous ■enjoyment in the damnation of the heathen, even if I could find any. All of which is by the way. But 1 have been wondering again how we should feel, you and I, if we knew for .certain that the world would cease and perish on the 17th of May this year. In ease of collision with any bpdy big enough to damage us, the force of the impact would be so vast -that we should immediately dissolve in fervent heat. So much is clear, and from that much I take cheerful comfort. If in the twinkling of an eye the world should end on any given day, I have no reason to be 'particularly troubled about it. It ■would be a good death, as compared with most deaths, and the thing would happen so suddenly that 1 . shouldn't know. If there is any lite

beyond this life, any carrying over of finite into Infinite, it cannot make the least difference in the world to m» whether the temporal is swallowed j in the eternal now or in a nozen or twenty years* time. If there is no nWe after .this life, what can it pps*«i|)>y matter to me when and how tnis life ends? Why worry? . M Camille Flammarion admits that he dosen't know whether Hal-; lev's comet is likely to harm us or s not. It is delightful and refreshing -to find M. Flammarion in such a mood of modest admission. "In any case, ■Jet us live in peace," he says. Why not? _ . » * * | A WOMAN DEPARTING. j A woman friend who came to us from Singapore a year ago leaves on Friday on her return to Singapore. When she came, she fully intended to settle in New Zealand; but a year has been enough for her. We are the folks, of course; but other people, other opinions. My friend is a Journalist and a cosmopolitan, past the age of girlish folly or impossible ■dreams. She came here looking for a place to stay and be comfortable in, and I have always found her an eminently reasonable woman. liorn in England, she has lived much in Trance, in Belgium, in the Far East, and in several States of Australia. She says that she would live m Pans or Brussels now, if she could iaffoid if but being a working woman, she wants to go back to a place where a woman's work seems worth while. "I had heard so much or New Z-ea-land as a free democracy, she writes, "that I had come to look on it with eager eyes as a place ot Arcadian promise. I am utterly disillusioned. Out in the tropics lite is at once more generous and more free than here. Tropical whites are as a rule much more hospitable and tolerant and friendly than your New Zealanders are. They don't have to scheme day and night to make ends meet, and they don't waste their leisure in slandering their neighbours. They don't treat all strangers with suspicion. New Zealand would "be a very good place to live, m it there were ten million more people in it, of whom nine million and a-halt zealously minded their own business, and if it were possible to Keep house decently on a moderate income. It isn't possible. You know that it isn't possible. I have seen splendid women, friends of mine here, wearied out of their sweet lives by constant irritations of the household. Housewives in the tropics don't have to do the, work of parlourmaids and scullions, and they don't have to spoil their hands and their tempers over smutty cook-pots. They have -Chinese servants, who do all such work admirably and with despatch, and. who never dream of being impudent to their employers. The housewife of the East keeps an eye on the accounts, orders the meals, and has plenty of time to give to her husband and children. I have had a fair stomachful of White Australasia talk; but you can give me a white Straits Settlements, with plenty of useful I -Chinese to do the mean work and smooth the rough edges. I am perfectly sure now that it is not good j for women to be over-burdened with irtsnial tasks and a daily tale ot besetting nuisances. If woman wants ijcedom, it is freedom from such

things that will most surely bring; her soul-health and expansion. These i New Zealand women, with all their ; pother of political freedom, are the , bond-slaves of their tradesmen and dressmakers. And that sort of thing tells. It tells more here than it does in Europe—far more. In Mropo j there are traditional grooves and rich [ historical associations, and with that ; the crowding comforts and securities j of the ancient lands. But in New , Zealand everything is very crude and , new, and the women are constantly i forced back into morasses of small ; talk. Nowhere else in the whole j course of my life have I heard so I much silly tittle-tattle among Avomen j as I have heard in New Zealand. Nowhere else on earth have I found women generally so intent on digging nastly holes in each others characters. What, then, is this political enfranchisement worth? Your women are not more moral or happier than the women of the old lands. Their lives are not nearly so interesting and spacious. The women in the Straits are sisterly, good comrades, i mnd straightgoers. If one of them is j detected in a fault, the first thought; of the others is to conceal or belittle it. I naturally hate to leave, the few loyal friends I have made in New Zealand, but I want to get back to the sun. I have had a good j enough time, and Rotorua and the | places up there I enjoyed immensely, j But I am sure that the talk of New Zealand scenery is overdone. I have seen no soenery anywhere in the Dominion so good as the best of the ; scenery I saw in .Australia. You have no mountain scenery to match the Blue Mountains in New South Wales for quiet, comfortable loveliness. You have no exquisite soothing verdure such as one finds all over the East. You have no such glorious riot of color as we have every day in Singapore and Penang. With all i your length of coastline, you have no watering-places. You have some brave little towns, but they are all too intent on trifles. Rotorua is wonderful because, of its strangeness, and not because of its scenery. If you want to have a beautiful country you must attend to afforestation. Your million people should plant every year at least a million trees. Wellington would be a really beautiful city if all the hills about it were well wooded. As it is, all the surrounding skylines are harsh and cold. But, after all, the great thing that New Zealand has to learn is that whenever idle talk becomes malicious it degrades the mind and retards the healthful progress of any community. It is because New Zealand is so slow to learn that lesson that it is so dreadfully lacking in dignity. Your public men have no dignity at all. Any cadet in the East has more dignity than the whole parcel of your judges. In the East, _ white men would not dream of jostling ladies in the street, or of letting them stand in public conveyances. The East is best. lam a good cosmopolitan, but when I think of Singapore I thank God that 1 am going back home." Horne —that's it. I shall never lire in Asia again, because I am sure that it would rot be good for me; but in all that has been written, by all the writers that ever wrote, far too little has been made of the essential comfort of the East.

* * * NORMAN LINDSAY

All the evidence so far points to the fact that Norman Lindsay is likely to stay in Europe. Australia is a good country, but when she has a brilliant son she rarely makes it worth his while to stay at home. She suffers from a constant draining away of her best blood. Lindsay started in London by selling one set of illustrations for six hundred pounds. His sister Ruby and her able husband, Will Dyson, the caricaturist, are reported to be doing well. Lindsay can sell at big prices whatever lie chooses to "draw. London, in short, can recognise genius, t without twaddling about "brutality." If Norman Lindsay were merely a designer of pretty women, London would have no special use for 'him. That sort of designer grows on every hedge in the Old Country.

Lindsay, if he likes, will soon be j the bearer of one of the world's great names on that side. Then Australasians, who have talked nonsense about him often enough, will begin to say that they knew he was a genius all the time. A queer world. * * .». STRIKES. Despite the calamitous and farreaching results of the Newcastle coal strike, which has gone far towards ruining many people's chances of benefiting from what should Ihave been an unusually prosperous season,' | Australian Labor has not learnt its lesson. The instigators of the strike, having deliberately and with full knowledge broken the law, are serving terms of imprisonment; and the labor unions have taken offence at that. If a strike leader committed any other offence, the unions would not greatly care, however heavily he was punished; but it seems that an offence committed in the cause of Labor must at all hazards be overlooked. So that now there is talk lof a week's general strike. No more ruinous and heinous mode of protest

could possibly be devised. A week s general strike means temporary paralysis of every industry, and the ■ effect of such paralysis cannot fail . to be far-reaching. It is an abomm- \ able proposal, whichever way you look | at it. . ! The fact is that every, strike is a calculated iniquity. If the men have real grievances, the iniquity is not lessened. Nor a strike does not merely punish the employers immediately concerned; it inflicts grievous loss on thousands and tens of thousands of people who have no possible responsibility for the strikers' grievance. It is a horribly idiotic way of settling a dispute. * * * THE FIGHTING BRUTALITY. Among professional boxers I have met a few very decent fellows. lam told that Bob Fitzsimmons (whom I have not met) is a very decent fellow. All the same, I am more than ever convinced- that prize-fighting is indecent and most brutal. Only to-day news comes from London of the death of one Girley Watson, ex-champion boxer of the Navy, killed in a "match" with a negro named Inglis. A few years ago there was in every civilised country on earth a healthy feeling against fights of this sort \ but since prize-fights have been called "boxing contests" the ancient evil has been re-born. In such a re-birth there is matter enough to disgust and horrify all men . and women capable of humane emotion. A prize-fight, under whatever disguise, is a vastly bad and brutal business, and a world that will tolerate public prize-fighting is over-hasty or unintelligent whenever it is in the mood to talk of itself as civilised. The respectable persons concerned in the promotion of public boxing in Wellington are brutalising the community, however high and mighty their opinion of themselves may be. However much they may whine and shuffle, they are putting themselves on common ground with the riff-raff of the world. Inglis has been arrested. To meet the ends of justice, and in the interest of the race, he should be hanged. « * * THE GAOLS. It is too early to give details, b*t disquieting rumours have again reached me concerning the condition of one of our big gaols and certain hideous vices and abominations that are said to flourish there. lam told that there is little hope for any offender of spirit, once he is* incarcerated in that gaol. To send a man there, lam assured by a correspondent who has been there, is "to take him out of mischief and plunge him into hell." That may or may ot be a exaggerated statement. For myself, I regard our whole gaol system as utterly barbarous and dehumanising, When a gaol, which in modern tittles is supposed to \ be a reformatory, vitiates & man and does not reform him, that gaol becomes a centre of vileness and corruption. In Christian America a Commission of Inquiry has been visiting certain gaols in the southern States. Some of the facts vouched for in the report are appalling. Take this, as to a gaol in Georgia: "We found over one hundred men living in rooms unventilated and filthy, without bathing facilities or opportunities of changing their clothes, in sickening, indescribable squalour. There is practically no discipline, and there are no hospital arrangements. The superintendent stated that when the men get so that they couldn't get out of bed—'bed-ridden,' he termed it— they were sent to Grady Hospital." Some revolting details of barbarous modes of punishment and torture follow. Then this:

"We inspected the quarters for the mules, and found them to be almost perfect in their appointments and inestimably better than those occupied by the prisoners." This is a prison in which Christian America herds its emancipated negroes, mostly; but there is talk of worse things than these in one of our own gaols—things only to be hinted at. We have gaols badly managed, stocked by judges who in some cases have been known to scoff at the science of the world in the big matter of criminology We have not latterly heard much of the Lionel Terry farce—a tragic farce enough, since the man is insane, and should not b©

in a gaol at all—but there are other things, going on. The next time there is money to spare for Royal Commissions, the whole matter of our gaol management might profitably be inquired into.

THE DOCTORS. . There has been a typical silly-season correspondence in a Wellington ! newspaper concerning doctors and I their fees. Some few people have declared that doctors in this city are exertionate. From what I have personally seen, I should say that the charge is absurd. I confess at once that I have a strong admiration for medical men as a class, and that to that extent I may be biased. But taking facts within my own knowledge, and giving them simply their face-value, I am convinced that Wellington doctors are humane and un- ' selfish.. One. or two I know to be ] worthy of nothing less than unstinted ' i praise. Three parts of the talk ' against doctors is mere chatter of ignorance and gr6ed. Medical men, working much and posing little,.are the true dragon-slayers of this somewhat barren age. Occasionally they make mistakes, but that, ,a% a rule, -is when people take to general practitioners cases that should properly be referred to a specialist. However that may be, I have come across a very able article on the Ideal Physician, written by Dr F. Cathelin, and published in the French Revue dv Mois. According to this authority, the ideal physician should have six moral senses—the senses of duty, responsibility, kindness, manual skill, beauty, and sociability. He saj's: — "The sense of duty toward the patient is the very first requisite in a doctor. This sense can arise only from a positive and innate altruisnij or love of one's fellow-creatures —a qualtty similar to that which moves the hospital nurse to devote her life to the cure of the stricken. There can be no personal sensitiveness nor lack of interest in details, as against an absorbing curiosity that complicated cases arouse. And yet,. with all this sense of duty, which calls for extreme goodness or sensitiveness of heart, he must not show a trace of emotion when his duty calls him to operate on a McKinley, a Carnot, or a Frederick 11. In the profession the word equality has certainly found a lasting place. No matter how far he may have gone in his profession, or how rich he may have become, if he possess, this sense of duty in his heart he will die an active member of his profession, unless ol& age prevents him from working. ; "In the matter of responsibility a doctor must follow the traditional advice; namely, to do as he ought to do, no matter what the issue. No doctor can be held responsible for results that are independent of his zeal, and to limit his action by undue legislation is to put a stop to scientific medical progress. As for the sense of kindness, it is certain that the age of the brutal surgeon has gone by. There may be occasions when it is desirable, on account of a surviving family, to tell a patient that his end is approaching. But in the generality of cases, to pretend to see recovery in a patient is often effective, and is always kind. "The proper sense of manual skill in a physician is founded on reflected audacity; that is to say, an audacity born of a sincere wish to succeed, and of common sense. Bold doctors are frequently characterised as innovators. It is incentestable, nevertheless, that many of these doctors prove the greatest. Bdldness is frequently the difference between the able and conscientious surgeon and the simple operator or dissector who has grown bold through indifference. And* yet the surgeon's nerve must always be kept in check by his prudence." I nany case, the importance of the doctor's function can scarcely be exaggerated, and only a fool could pretend that the tasks of the doctor are pleasant. Having regard to their responsibilities and risks, they are the worst paid men in the world. *• * * THE PROTESTING JEW. The Jews of America, although they drive the multitude of men before them and are again obtaining a , strong hold of the finances of the world, are regarding themselves as an ill-used race, and The American Israelite gets mighty eloquent about it. Curiously enough, the eloquent writer in this case is the Rev. Madison C. Peters of New York, who has not the distinction of Jewish blood. The fashionable preacher says that the Jews~are denied "fraternity arid equality," and proceeds: "At many of the clubs, social, professional, and political, he is ostracised—lodges whose proud boast is the Fatherhood of God and brotherhood of man, blackball him —and even his money cannot admit him into the ranks of so-called society, which worships at the shrine of the goiden calf. "The Jew cannot send his children to many of the select private schools of the country. In many of the hotels and summer-resorts, conspicuous signs are displayed bearing such bigoted inscriptions as: 'No Jews wanted.' 'No Jews need ap-

ply.' " And so forth. I don't know. I have friends among the Jews, even intimate friends. I yield to no man in my admiration of good Jews. But I have to admit that there is always a something between us, a something like a deep and terrifying gulf that cannot be bridged. There is no crossing it, this chasm that separates race from race. We like and admire the Jews, we enjoy their conversation whenever they are in the mood to subdue it; but their ways are not our ways, nor our codes their codes when all is said. We are apt to overlook the fact that the people of India, in so far as they are Aryans,, are our own brothers in blood; but with the Semitic race we have no point of

t contact. Whom God hath put i asunder, I don't think that all the , ! parsons in New York or the world- ' can ever effectively Join. ! But it is silly, this talk about the ! ostracism of the Jews. They are not 1 ostracised; but in circles where they. .; clash they are not welcomed. Why 1 should they be? If I wished to jom : a Jewish club, and was blackballed, could I pretend to have any real grievance? No good Jew eyer wanta to go where he isn't wanted, because ■ that is just the place where he would be most uncomfortable himself.