NOTES AND COMMENTS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXIV, Issue 19625, 2 May 1927, Page 8

NOTES AND COMMENTS.

BEETHOVEN'S MALADY. To the ordinary individual, deafness is bad enough; but to a musician, whose thought and life are in the world of sound, to be insulated not only from communication with his fellows, but from the entire world of sound, is a calamity that no one can find words adequately to describe. In 1798 Beethoven was attacked with the first symptoms of deafness, which increased in seriousness until he became stone deaf, and continued so until his death in 1827. Previously most of his time and energies had been devoted to the somewhat unprofitable life of a virtuoso; but deafness compelled him to concentrate upon composition only, and in consequence the world is richer by some of its finest and most impressive music. It must not be supposed that he accepted without demur, without protest, this unkind infliction of Fate. He grumbled and inveighed against his deafness, continuously, in private and in public, and tired numerous specialists and various mechanical devices to alleviate the curse. All were of no avail. Deaf he had become, and deaf—stone deaf—he remained to the conclusion of his eventful chapter. THE MEANING OF A WORD. The litigation between Canada and Newfoundland over the boundary of Labrador, which was recently concluded by the decision of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in favour of Newfoundland, is said to have cost the parties a quarter of a million. But it involved £50,000,000, the estimated value of the spruce forests, minerals and water pojver of Labrador. The whole case turned upon the meaning of a single word. The parties agreed that, less a certain portion reannexed to Lower Canada by the Statute of 1825, the territory in Labrador, new subject to the authority of Newfoundland, is the "coast" which, by the Commission of April, 1763,was put under " the care and supervision " of Governor Graves, of Newfoundland, as declared by the Royal Proclamation of October, 1763. But what was meant by the coast'! For over a hundred years nobody cared. Its meaning has been given an unforeseen importance by the modern world's immense demand for paper. Labrador has thousands of square. miles of untouched timber, and has, moreover, the water power to convert them into pulp. Whether or not she has also, as Alaska was found to have, mineral resources.of great and unsuspected value, her timber is an enviable asset. The Canadian contention was that the " coast " is a strip only a mile wide. Counsed for Newfoundland were able to convince the Judicial Committee that "coast" habitually comprised in ancient treaties the hinterland as far as the watershed. THE EMPIRE'S GREATEST COURT. The judgment in the Labrador case lias been discussed by all the leading newspapers in England. The Liverpool Post remarked it was a dispute of the kind that, outside the British Empire, would probably have led to war. "No Court upon earth exercises a jurisdiction so wide, so varied, and so far-reaching in its consequences as this august iribuna.l, 1 " says the Times. " The material result is far surpassed in importance by the moral consequences to the Empire of the reference of this case to the Privy Council at all. That shows the readiness of two great, self-governing members of the British Commonwealth of Nations to submit a question they both deem to be of very great concern to settlement by a judicial procedure which they severally carried out :n the iairest and friendliest fashion. That is a great tribute to the reputation which this Court has won among the sister communities beyond the seas. By spontaneously invoking the jurisdiction which the law of former days regarded as the most appropriate for the considers tion of intercolonial differences, Newfoundland and Canada have shown not only their confidence in British justice, but their instinctive sense of the unity which underlies onr legal conceptions and the practice of our Courts. The decision is a splendid proof how well their confideoce was founded. There was, indeed, no middle course for the Committee to adopt. The contentions of the claimants differed too fundamentally to admit of compromise. But a weak Court, a Court prone to allow outside considerations to influence its views of right and of law, might well have been tempted to seek about for a compromise in a cause of such magnitude and such complexity."