NOTES AND COMMENTS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LX, Issue 18537, 23 October 1923, Page 6

NOTES AND COMMENTS.

THE LABOUR NEWSPAPER. The Labour , journalist is handicapped by the necessity of; respecting persons, writes E. Tv Raymond in the Outlook. He must solemnly , accept' everything in the party programme, and everybody in K the party personnel, at *. face value. :; He must be : respectful to Mr. Snowden's teetotalism, ' Mr. Sidney : Webb's economics, ,: Mr. J. H. Thomas' excursions into literature. He can never > indulge ; in the . joy— of the finest tonics to a journalist—of ' jeering at a pompous leader/ or laughing 'aii a stupid - fad. . Every plank isi> sacred, Every fool is immune . from ridicule. Consequently a; ; double dullness <; afflicts the Labour organ. Vlt is bound ;to deal . continually on routine, lines with one set of subjects. -It is condemned to glorify on routine lines one set of individuals. All its . opinions can be foretold, and '\ even the expression ■ of them can generally ■be guessed in advance. "" v -i- • _

' • DOMESTIC i DISTURBANCES.: r"' People who make unnecessary noise are castigated' by Air. Stanley Rowland, in the Nineteenth - Century:—Firstly, he (or she) has never learnt the mechanism of the common door-handle, and, invariably, when closing a door creates a quite: unnecessary noise by forcing the latch instead of turning it," and even achieves a similar explosive result when, opening it. He walks heavily, planting the whole foot aggressively on the ground, instead of using its excellent springs, that Nature has provided.; He rustles his newspaper with crackling explosions. He puts things down with ' a bang—books, chairs, anything; in fact, he has an extraordinary faculty for announcing himself dynamically wherever he is; and he has the other half of creation entirely at his mercy. Then there is a contrast between the man who talks quietly to his neighbour, shutting off for the' time all other connections, *nd there is the man who, while nominally holding a dialogue, is actually engaged in broadcasting himself to every oar within range. In the long run it is the difference between self-possession and selfassertion—or, more generally, self-diffu-sion. ■ ■ ' •■• ' • ' '

LONDON'S LORD MAYORS/ : ' Sir William Soulsby, who for nearly fifty years has been secretary to successive Lord Mayors, has seen many changes of custom at the Mansion House, and he has lately been confiding some of his experiences to the' Press, s? '~ the Church Times. Ho recalls the lit that until forty years ago the Lord Mayor and the sheriffs went to a different church in the city every Sunday in full state, and spent the afternoon in entertaining the Common Councilmen, the clergy, the churchwardens and tho . sidesmen. The practice. was abandoned by a Quaker Lord Mayor in 1883,; and ha:s never been resumed. Another of Sir' William's recollections «'■ is worth record He remembers a time when at City and other entertainments inebriety was not uncommon: nowadays the average consumption of wine is less than a bottle, between three guests. It is to be remarked that when Sir Willi was serving his first Lord Mayor Charles Dickens had been but fivo years in his grave; and the descriptions of gargantuan feasting and free and confused drinking which are found in his novels were read without amazement. To-day they are chronicles of a past not only dead, but. all but incredible. Our •< great-grand-fathers essayed their third bottles where we hesitate ,at the second glass;,,';-' ■'

DISORDER-IN AMERICA. "What does it. all mean—this story of a revolt in the Middle West; panic among politicians; Henry Ford in the public eye; , Congress in a state of chaos asks the Round Table. "And those other things which have not been mentioned: the stock exchange treading as cautiously as a cat; industry seeing shadows on the wall at every turn; the . Protestant churches in a fine fury over the appearance of theological doctrines which are already antiquated abroad; skirmishes off the New Jersey coast "with rum-running ships twenty-five, persons killed in motor accidents on a single Sunday; a lynching in Missouri attended by high school girls; the Ku Klux Klan moving unchecked over the face of the country. .; . . What docs it mean— business. of stepping courageously up to a'; League : : of Nations, and then running away from it; embracing an Internaitiohal Court, and then pushing it aside ? It -means this: that the labour of consolidating the United States, into a nation is far from finished. It was a task severe enough for the best thought and work devoted to it before the war; 1 it has been infinitely complicated .by the,, war itself and by America's part in that war.: Never did the problems of the country demand more quick obedience to their summons, more sleepless service, more plain, ;■ old-fashioned prayer than they demand to-day. .Yet. never have these springs of national virtue stood at a lower level. /In the presence of Germany's dissolution, crises of unemployment and the threat of - ; ' war, does this seem a trivial affair? Be assured, that it is not. ';' Some day the historian may speak of .the : task of establishing conditions of freedom among men on the American Continent as one equal in magnitude to the reconstruction 'of Europe."

THE JOY OF YACHT RACING. "I have just been enjoying a fortnight of what is perhaps one of the /noblest and most beautiful sports that man has ever devised: I mean yacht racing on the grand scale:' in which the great cutters, represented this year by Britannia, Nyna and Terpsichore, compete in glorious and exciting rivalry,'' writes Mr. Filson Young in the Saturday Reiew. I know nothing more thrilling than the flying start of a race in which several of these great craft are jockeying one another and charging down on the' starting line together ; or the .finish when, after forty or fifty miles or reaching, running, tacking and gybing, a matter of inches and seconds lie between the winner and her rival. The.real wonder to me is that so few people who could enjoy it take to what ,is the most fascinating and healthful of all outdoor sports. Yet one of its appeals is 'that it has infinite variety of scale to please everyone, and between the twelvefoot dinghy -and the twenty-three-metre racing cutter of cruising schooner there is a craft to suit every taste, and .a kind of sailing that will adapt itself /to almost every purse. To live and' race; and travel in a vehicle in which there is, not,/one scrap of machinery; where everything , is made of hemp, canvas, wood and meiai; where o'teh .the/only sounds to be heard are those made, by wind and ,: water, ,; 'in about as; complete. a, change : from our modern machine-made life of the land as could be imagined. To sleep, as I did; through one short night and '.' long/ dawn on. a yacht lying becalmed off Ailsa Craig is surely to have as near as ; possible a foretaste of that peace which the world, as most of us know it, cannot give. : We in England were made by the sea; and lovers of England must hope that our youth never forsake it as .a playground—unless, indeed, we are to become a nation of motor-cyclists."