A HUNDRED YEARS AGO.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LI, Issue 15504, 10 January 1914, Page 1 (Supplement)

A HUNDRED YEARS AGO.

BT FBANK MOKpMr.

Now the New Year reviving old Desires, The thoughtful Soul to Solitude retires. . . This time I cannot exactly call it solitude, for the sea ripples and whispers multitudinously a few yards from my open window, and the night exults in a smother of stars. Still, the New Year approaches, and here I sit by myself to consider the subject with a befitting gravity.- The first disconcerting thing to be noted about rew years just now, is that they come too frequently for one's liking. This side of forty the years whizz along, and one has an increasing sense of the ancient haunting problem— much to do, so little done! Other thoughts, too. At this year's end I am forty-four. If I live, ten year s-ends hence I shall be fifty-four. Ten year's-ends after that, if I still exist, I shall be sixty-four. Pretty soon then, however it goes, the great waters will flow over me, and the great silence eat me up. The thought is neither morbid nor uncanny. I am in a perfectly cheerful mood here to-night, with all the stars for company. Death and the silence are a fated part of our human lot and fortune —as much apart as birth and marriage md whatever other misery may come to us. Why should one mourn unduly over the things that certainly must be ? There is yet a little while and meantime one must cultivate, one's garden. Ah, the thousands and millions and thousands of millions of men, aspiring, despairing, hoping, fearing, that have watched the new year in! We are all toys that make sport for the unthinkable paradox men call Time, and the accidental divisions of time possess for us a curious and abiding significance. We have a special sort of joy at Christmas, although the only difference between December 25 and any other day of the year is not in the day but in ourselves. And when December 31 comes, and another year slips away into the count, we feel that we have lost something; though in point of fact we have lost no more than we lose every day of the week; after all, every day and every minute, every instant of speeding time, marks the end of a year. But these arbitrary marks set up amidst the waste of time have a significance: one mark significant for one chap, another for another, and some for us all. Thus in Scotland and in France New Year's Day is the great day, and Christmas isn't much (though Christmas is far more in France than in Scotland); whereas in England Christmas is the day of all days, and the new year is merely an excuse for a holiday. In my own county at Home the first Monday in August was in a sense the greatest popular holiday of the year though in other parts of the country it merely stood as a breathing-space for tender bank clerks. We all know what we like, though not always why; we. all adhere to our traditional arrangements; and if we don't always know why, who cares! As I grow older, I find myself less and less inclined to ridicule people who do the things I don't do, or do the things I do do in a very different way. Why, only to-night I was at the theatre. The play was a good enough play of its negligible kind; but thfr acting was fine and in no sense negligible. And yet the thing that struck me as most singiilar and memorable in the whole production was the indescribable quaintness and strangeness of the leading woman's pronounciation of the simple word " financier." I could not reproduce that pronounciation. I only khow that ib hit me in the midriff and left me gasping glad. Ten years ago I should have been shocked to hear the English tongue spoken like that. To-day I am merely interested, and I cordially agree that when a woman is as clever and as human as this charming American actress is she may be granted leave to pronounce an occasional word in any old way she likes best.

So that you will understand why I feel a certain sympathy with striving souls all over the world, whatever the things they do or don't do. If you on New Year's Day choose to stand on your head or to betake you to the gutter to woo that rascal Sleep, I pray that you have full joy of your intent and that God may bring you safely home.

There is no reason that I can discover why any of us should be gloomy or morose as the old year goes drowsing into limbo while the new year dances this way over the crest of the hill. Time goes on and on, and on and on we go, so Jong as we can keep pace with him. When the pace slackens we drop behind and fall out of the race, and our faces are unremembered in the haunts of men.

Bethink you ! the millions of brave fellows that watched the new year in a hundred years ago!

Like us, they were alive. Desire stirred in them, and hope unquenchable. They dreamed great dreams, and planned to pluck down the Morning Star, just as we do. They felt that they were in some strange way themselves responsible for everything, and that in them all things existed and had their being; and toKlay we have the same feeling, with just about the same warrant—which is not a thing to boast about. But they lived through their little day, and now you shall not find a man on earth to remember any two of all the millions of them. Some of them were our .grandfathers' grandfathers; but (since it is well to be candid) we have no certainty of what their names were. A hundred years makes little difference to nature ; but to men a difference tremendous and awe-inspiring. A hundred years ago there were men and women, like us at all points, with the same passions, the same vices, the same poor little virtues, and in us their blood still flows; but between us and them is a chasm no skill can bridge, no audacity overleap. New Year's Day 1814, I would have you mark, was the opening of a great year. In 1814 things happened. There was a devious scandal touching the sacred circle of the aristocrats, Lord Cochrane being accused of defrauding the Stock Exchange by inventing a rumour of the death of Napoleon. In 1814 that same Napoleon is still afield and has a little victory or two, until on April 6 he abdicates and is permitted to retire to Elba. Then Wellington defeats Soult at Toulouse, and Louis XVIII. becomes King and is forced to grant a charter of representative government. A little later the first Treaty of Paris is concluded, and a huge dark page of war is definitely turned over and shut down. That same year, in America, we find British troops burning public buildings in Washington. (Only a hundred years ago; but there you are!) The Wesleyan Missionary Society is organised in England, and a great wave of missionary activity spreads over Europe without affecting European heathen very much. Joanna Southcote dies, last and least satisfactory of the prophetesses- The Inquisition is restored in Italy and in Spain. The Pope, restores the Order of Jesuits and the Index, and condemns Bible Societies founded in Prussia* and Russia. The first Anglican bishopric is established at Calcutta. Sir Walter Scott commences the anonymous publication of the Waverley Novels; Wordsworth's "Excursion" sees the light.; Walter first prints the Times by steam; Edmund Kean makes his first appearance as Shylock. I might tell you much more about that year, bui this will do well enough for my purpose. A notable year, as I said at the beginning. Manv things and causes then afoot are still afoot to-day; but the men and women who gave those causes life, who passed them down the years to us—where are they? They are gone for ever from the places of their foothold. They sigh about us in the sea-breezes, they breathe in the scent of flowers, they have nourished the earth that sustains us with its fruits. But they are dead— as the Sabines— dead as Melchisedec. So shall we be, and so shall we stand, to the people that watch for the new year a hundred years from now. If we bear that fact in mind this January it may help to curb our swelling pride.