NOTES AND COMMENTS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LX, Issue 18334, 26 February 1923, Page 6

NOTES AND COMMENTS.

THE COST OF PREMIERSHIP. Mr. Lloyd George \ says frankly that after 17 years in office he has retired; a poor man, and that it is imperative that lie should turn to writing as a means of livelihood. This may surprise many who know that a Prime Minister's salary is £5000 a year. The amount is, however, illusory, for a Prime Minister's inevitable expenses are very heavy and have not in late years become lighter, says the Manchester Guardian. It would not be at all surprising if the greater part of the salary went in what one may call out-of-pocket expenses perhaps , all of it. As the Prime Minister's salary is no more exempt from income tax than anybody else's, it must be cut down by nearly half to reach the net amount. It may well be believed that Mr. Lloyd George, during an unprecedentedly busy and harassing time, would have little margin for saving.

| SINGULAR AND PLURAL. i Discussing the bestowal of honours, the I Times Literary Supplement has a smart! little note on the difference that can bo made in the meaning of an English word by changing it from the singular into the plural number. In the singular it will often mean an idea, a quality, or a principle, while in the plural it will lose its virtue and become contaminated. The singular expresses the ideal ; the plural brings it down from heaven to earth, clotlies the- abstract in gross, material, ! concrete forms, and makes God into gods. . Thus; in the Middle Ages the principle of liberty was degraded into liberties which I were definite jurisdictions giving their I privileged owners arbitrary powers over j the lives and property of others, -which' might even be transmuted into cash. So, | too, the'revolutionary ideal of fraternity ! has been converted across the Atlantic into "fraternities" or privileged societies, | the exclusiveness of which has instigated | at least one legislative attempt to abolish | them on the ground of their incompatibility with democratic equality. In j our own country we are at the moment 1 more concerned with the dishonour into ■ j which honours can bring honour, and , - wonder why no poet could ever have writ- . i ten, "I could not love thee, dear, so much, n loved I not honours more."

THE MOOD OF FRANCE. After spending some weeks in France Mr. J. A. Spender says ho begins to understand the French attitude to the reparations question. Broadly, he writes, it may be said that, whereas the English people have resigned themselves to the grim fact that after a devastating war the vanquished are not in a position to pay more than a small fraction of the victors' costs, the French are still in vehement protest against it. The taxation which is the practical result of this recognition of facts is so out of line with all their habits and thoughts that their statesmen deem it impossible to propose or recover; and, so far as I know, French politicians have' no ideas to meet the situation which must arise if the Germans fail to pay, or pay only the comparatively little which the Anglo-Saxon economists think possible after long delay. Tho English analysis of the situation, with its careful distinction between transferable and non-transferable wealth, and its insistence on the earning of the "exportable surplus," makes no impression on the ordinary Frenchman. He is persuaded that the wealth is there and can be got if proper means are taken to get it; and the danger of the situation is that the combating of this belief, or even plain disproof of it, produces not (as in England) a sombre acquiescence in the inevitable, but wrath and passion, and a determination to get even with the Boche by single-handed French, action if Britain refuses to join in. In the present mood the Dariac plan, which claims at one and the same time to be able to get money out of Germany and to place German industry under disabilities which will disarm it for future mischief and disintegrate the economic unity of tho country, has a fatal fascination for some French minds; and very careful steering will be needed if we are to avoid disastrous entanglements.

MAKING DEW PONDS. " Though dew ponds are to be found on hills and places where water cannot be collected in any-other way, there are only two men in the world" 'who know how they are made," says the Daily Mail agricultural correspondent. "The making of dew ponds is a secret, 250 years old, that has been kept in one family and handed down from father to son. Now only two brothers remain, and these two men are left in sole possession of the secret of making ponds that need no spring or surface draining. Tho water is simply condensed from the atmosphere, and is therefore the purest form of water obtainable. I have seen the two brothers at their home near Basingstoke, Hampshire, and they showed me a pond being made. The earth is dug out to a depth of five feet in. the centre,, sloping gradually to the ground level at the edtre?, where it is banked up about 18 inches. The pond is lined' with clay, which, is covered with a layer of straw. The straw is covered with lime, and the lime must on no account be allowed to mingle with the clay lining. With the lime a special substance is mixed, and it' is in the constitution of this substance that the secret lies. , On the top of the lime a coating of plain earth is laid or«d hammered down with a special wooden tool. The pond is then finished. It takes probably six months to fill, but, once full, it never empties and requires no attention. It might be expected that the straw lining would rot, but one of the brothers showed me the straw in perfect condition in a pond he was repaiirng made by his grandfather 84 years ago."

DEFLECTION OF LIGHT. . Writing of the recent eclipse of the sun and the Australian and Christmas ! Island scientific expeditions, Sir Oliver Lodge says:—lt may seem a small'matter whether starlight travelling near the sun is micrometrically perturbed or. deflected by the gravitational influence of that body; but it is not really a small matter at all. It is fundamental to every theory of physics to know not only if such deflection is a reality, but also what its exact amount is. There appear to be three, and only three, possibilities. Firstly it may conceivably turn out that there is no displacement at all which is what would j have been expected before the time of I Einstein. Secondly, that the displacel ment will correspond with that to which i light would be subjected if it behaved i like matter, possessing weight, and being thereby deflected like a comet or any other set of particles travelling at the same speed. The speed is so enormous that the orbit of a comet travelling near the sun with a speed like that would be almost indistinguishable from a straight line. It would, however, really be a hyperbola, and the angle between its ! initial and final path, though small, is not I infinitesimal. This deflection could be ! observed and measured, and it may be , called a " Newtonian " deflection, that I is to say, s the deflection which anyone ! could calculate on the unlikely hypothesis 'that light had weight as matter has. | There are many things which render it improbable that light has weight; but it may have. And the fact would be indicated by this Newtonian deflection. The third expectation is the one which | we owe to the genius of Einstein, viz., I that what is called the " gravitational j deflection," whether of matter or any- ! thing else, is due to the peculiar prop- , erties of space— as some would say, | to the ether in the neighbourhood of a i massive body—something which is spoken of as a warping or curvature, so that • the easiest or natural path for anything I traversing such a region of space 'is not la straight line but a curve, of definite 1 curvature, the amount of which can be reckoned by the mathematical theory of relativity. ' Whatever the result may be i' it will be a step in the direction of I truth, and will be welcomed by all, how- ! ever much readjustment of ideas it may ' necessitate.