ON THINGS IN GENERAL

New Zealand Herald, Volume XXXIII, Issue 10124, 6 May 1896, Page 3

ON THINGS IN GENERAL

MORE WAR

From the controversy it has elicited, war seenis to have a peculiar fascination for those who denounce it; antf the combative* nets with which they come up to. time shows the old Adam under whatever disguise. The flummery they have written on the subject is marked with the un<. miitakablo signs of insincerity, which are confirmed by the scrupulous care with which they evade the simple fact, that if \ war in wickedness on one side, resistance to ' its ■ wickedness must be holiness on the other. Would they toll us it was wicked foe the Christian nations to unite in repelling the overwhelming wave of Moslemisnr whan it was sweeping over Europe! Or would it have been the "mind of Christ" that the crescent should have been now waving over St. Paul's? Or if we place ourselves in the position of the Armenians, their wive? and daughters subjected "to nameless horrors, is it nob calculated to make religion ridiculous to say that we ought to wait for " thd sword of the Spirit" to save us and our children from the hands of the marauding and murdering hordes ? Mrs. Aldls writes that "in 1883 when we came .to Auckland there was a cry that a great European war was inevitable, was coming at once, and that New Zealand was in danger." Does she moan that it was their "coming to Auckland" that averted the catastrophe; and that her "unflinching witness to the truth which has never failed against any Jorm of evil" has had the effect ot keeping the Russian cruisers at Vladivostok ? Or does it not enter her mind even a little bit that the fact that England is omnipotent at sea, has had some little thine to do in giving us peace in our time? To allow a burglar to have his way and to carry off the rewards of his misdeeds would be to stimulate burglary with all its wickedness; and the cause of righteousness quito as much as public safety requires that he should be arrested—even by violence if necessary—and placed in gaol, and if a nation burglariously intent invades on] homes, to cake a way our liberty, oui goods, mayhap our persons to be subjected to slavery, surely the cause of righteousnei<s, which is the cause of God, would demand that that nation should be arrested in its career of wickedness.

THE LAW OF NATURE. But war is the law of nature, and nature is the voice of God. Look where we will, and we rind that ail 'he operations and developments of nature aro carried out by strife and destructive contention. Jt is only in the equipoise produced by the forces of contending microbe* that we are enabled to live at all. Some of those mictogerm3 are absolutely murderous in their nature, and then there are others that have been expressly made to fight them. In the veins of the fevered patient this war of extermination if proceeding during all the stages of the disease, and if it comes to pass that the germicidal bacilli win the day and suppress the murderous microbes, the exhausted patient slowly but steadily comes back to health and life again. Even feri mentation and other wholesome processes in the economy of life are merely resolution and dissolution effected by variant forces. Beasts of prey live on other beast*, and in doing so keep down the multiplication of the species within due limits. The hawk and the eagle have their appointed work in the air, and the shark and other voracious fishes render the same service in the waters below in regulating the numbers of the finny inhabitants of the sea. No doubt the little fishes wish to goodness the sharks would cease to bite, and the dove and the tomtit in their little bosoms protest against the cruelty of the osprey and the kite. And of course a time will come when fish and towl will be oa their mild behaviour, and the lion will lie down with the lamb, and thenaboabs men will beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning hooks. Bab in the meantime the game of war goes merrily on in God's appointed way, and in fulfilment of His wise designs in the providential government of Bis creatures, And so it is that God carries on His work of death, ad an essential part in his administration of this great cosmos, and of all the living entities thereon—hereby the microbe, there by the Maxim gun, but it is all the same. To man He has fixed the limit of bis years, and whether it be the. fifty millions or so that He cuts off every year by the microbes of disease, or merely the fifty thousand nr bo that fall in war, it is all a part of the one great battle that is being waged against human life on earth, and " there is no discharge in that war."

THE PRETTY HAT. ' ■ We cannot feel in our heart) to resent tha gentle railing of Mrs. Daldy against "Tha General" in her letter in Friday's Herald. Mrs, Daldy we believe to be genuinely good, ami sincerely earnest in her effort to benefit women, anil she is far too sensible to bo held responsible for gome of the strange resolutions that were passed at the Women's National Council at Cliristchurch, Farther than this, we would desire, as she wishes, to " give women all the help and encourage' ment in our power in their trying to interest other women in something higher and nobler" than dress. But a little chaffing now and than may be relished by the best of men, and women too—even ; though engaged in the solution of grava social problems. But what shall we say of thin ? " Lot' The General' recall his young days, and candidly admit which attracted his attention most, the girl with her last year's hat re-trimmed and dress re-made, 01 the girl who wine out attired in the latest fashion from head to foot '' "Recall his young days,'' indeed ! Why "TbeGeneral" . is in the very prime of his youth and beauty, and m tuiscptible to a pretty hat, and a pretty face under it, too, as anyone in Ivew Zealand. Why, nobody doubts the potency of a pretty hat, and the irresistible attraction of a pretty face. " Young days'' have nothing to do with it, for the older one gets the funnier ha feels, and id is just because of the botheration caused to our rough and ungainly sex by the pretty hats that we lodge our appeal with Mrs. Daldy and the o»her reforming women to save us from the fashions. TO ALLURE MEN. Bnt Mrs. Daldy gives the whole case nwaT when she says >" her letter: " Let me tell the General it is of little use for women to attempt t'i curb extravagance in flriw. -o lung as men are allured by it." Aye ! th-no'e the secret out; they pub on these pretty things to allure" men. Bub isn't tlmt naughty ? Is it right of them to play upon our tender susceptibilities? It is surely our misfortune and not our fault that we are subject to these little'heart t-emors, and is it not cruel to the last degree of women to go out of their way w make themselves nv>re attractive than even Nature made them, to throw men into that hypnotic state of mental confusion in which they are unfitted for the serious duties of life, so that sometimes, in fact, "'e don't know where 'o are" ? In the words of the immortal bard, Oh, love ! Oh, love! Oh, what a dizziness ! Won't let a poor man go about his business. And then to be deliberately and authoritatively told that it is with th : B express object, that, the lovely creatures, dangerous as they are already, should deck themselves out, of mali-v. pnpenst, in all this fine array-" to allure men." Was ever an arguments stronger in tavour of our contention, that one ot the first duties of these intending benefactresses of their sex and of their race, should be to put a firm, foot dewn on what is confessedly such a disturbing element in the economy of life. ART IN SIMPLICITY. Mrs. Ualrty '" iKt ,otlcl ' B P ea ' iS °* the simplicity of dress that characterised the ladies of the Council as they sat around the Council table, and she encloses an extract report from a Southern paper in proof of the statement. Yes, we have read it, The guileless reporter, poor fellow, fell a. victim to the impressiveness of the lout mtmlU, and in th« ecstatic terms in which in which he describes the vision of simplicity and loveliness, disclosed to hit eye around that Council table, adds only one proof more to the fatal facility with whifch women can make themselves irresistible, even with the most slender materials. For it is not in the material, but it is that divine—or maligninherited by all the dauehters of Evo, for infujing even into simplicity that subtle but irresistible 'power to "allure men.' Newspaper men are notoriously tenderhearted, and this unfortunate reporter km utterly subdued by the artless art witn Which the ladies of the Council appear to have prepared eye.