ECHOES OF THE WEEK.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 1352, 27 January 1898, Page 23

ECHOES OF THE WEEK.

Satire's my weapon, but I'm too discreet To run amuck and tilt at all I meet. Pope.

BY SCRUTATOR.

It is somewhat risky work for a mere gossipping chronicler like myself to attempt any serious and detailed comment upon such questions as that of Great Britain's position with regard to the Far East, for a few hours may change the whole situation. It is your daily leader-writer who alone can keep himself thoroughly "up-to-date," writing, as he does, with the " cables " at his elbow, and as the Times' Editor is keeping all of us so thoroughly well in touch with each change of position, I leave it to him to give you the heavy metal.

I cannot help, however, doing a little patriotic " hurrah" over the apparent " back-down "of Germany to the right of Great Britain to trade at the Kaiser's recently-grabbed Kio-Chau. As Kipling, par excellence the poet of the Empire, says — Hands off o' the sons of the Widow, Hands off o' the goods in her shop, For the Kings must come down and the

Emperors fxown When the Widow at Windsor says " Stop " And in this case the "Widow at Windsor " has evidently said " Stop " to some purpose. Whatever be the result of the game, it is pleasant to know that at least We have scored the first trick off the Kaiser.

A good many people talk, I notice, with a sort of fear and trembling as to what will befall the Mother Gountry should she I drift into war with the Teuton. As one who loathes, who abominates, who hates the vSry name of war, I dread the idea of war with any country, but should the worst come to the worst, and John B"ll and Hans Vaterland—who ought to be the best of friends—get to daggers drawn, then I fancy you would soon see what a powerful weapon John has got in his armoury for use against the Teuton. It is the weapon called the "Boycott." Within the last decade, as was recently shown by the statistics of the British Board of Trade, the German exports to Great Britain have more than quadrupled in volume and value. Do we not, does not the British manufacturer, and does not the British citizen*know full well' the significance of that now far too familiar expression " Made in Germany " ? War with Germany would infallibly mean that no . patriotic Britisher, either at Home or in these colonies, would touch a single article of Teuton, manufacture or origin, and .much as the Kaiser may rely upon" the " Junkers," the German Tory country squirearchy, it is the German manufacturer and merchant who contribute most to the revenue. War with Great Britain would spell ruin to hundreds of German business firms, and although, British commerca would suffer, that of Germany would suffer a hundredfold.

. But as I said before, I hate the very name of war. A fine thing may be to those to whom it brings so-called honour and glory; but how rarely do nations really benefit by it? An American philosopher has truly remarked that" War is a game in which princes seldom win, the people never." As to the mockery of socalled "glories," when I read of these "glories" lam reminded of keen-witted, sharp-tongued Douglas Jerrold's words:— "What a fine-looking thing is war! Yet, dress it as we may, dress and feather it, daub it with gold, huzza it, and sing songs about it —what is it, nine times out of ten, but murder in uniform?" Nap. the First, assuredly an authority on the subject, defined war as "atrade of barbarians, the whole art of which consists in being strongest on a given point," and as, for the good old Duke of Wellington, his horror of war has passed into a proverb. "Take my word for it," he is reported to have said on one occasion, "if you had but seen but one day of war, you would pray to Almighty God that you might never see such a thing again."

On the other hand, none can deny that there are certain sets of circumstances under which a nation can in all righteousness take up arms, and as Buskin points out, " Wherever there is war, there must be injustice on one side or the other," and the State which is driven to taka

up arms to combat injustice being done to .the people whose destinies' are in its hands can surely plead justification, that ; is, of course, if it can be proved that all peaceable means of gaining redress have ; first been exhausted. May heaven grant •■ us peace—and this I write in all solemn jtocerity—but better evea way than peace

with dishonour, than peace at the expense of Britain's'commerce, that commerce upon which depend for very existence hundreds of thousands of British toilers, that commerce the permanent and prosperity of which we colonists are ourselves so directly interested in maintaining.

I do not remember seeing in the cables, as published in our New Zealand papers, any mention of the death of the late Amy Sedgwick, for many years one of the most popular of English actresses. Miss Sedgwick, whose death I have just noticed recorded in the cable column of an Australian paper, will be remembered by many colonists who in the Old Country were playgoers. She had a great vogue as an actress, first in the provinces—her name was one to conjure with in Yorkshire and Lancashire, and then in London —in ihe fifties. Manchester was one of her special strongholds. In '57 she made her first appearance 'at the London Hay market under good old Buckstone's management, the play being that horribly stilted, artificial, mawkish, but nevertheless very popular play, " The Lady of Lyons." But her big hit was reserved for the part of Hester Grazebrook, in "The Unequal Match," a character she made her own, and which she must have played in pretty well every provincial theatre from one end of England to the other. The last generation of playgoers swore by Amy Sedgwick's Hester Grazebrook. She played leading characters in Shakepeare, but her big successes were Hester Grazebrook, Julia in Sheridan Knowles' " The Hunchback," a fine play, half forgotten nowadays; Mrs Haller in " The Stranger;" (the character in which "The Fotheringay," nee Millie Costigan, so enraptured the susceptible heart of Pendennis) and Constance in "The 1 Love Chase." I never had the pleasure of seeing her act, but 3 well remember hearing her give a dramatic I recital in a Yorkshire town in the later seventies, and her elocution was even J then a rare treat. She retired from the ! stage proper in 1877.

Another death recorded in the cables is that of Dean Liddell, the famous Oxford magnate. Who that has " wrastled " (as Mark Twain's Huckleberry Twin said of his attempts to read " The Pilgrim's Progress), with the mysteries of the noble language of the Odyssey but does not know Liddell, Liddell of Liddell and Scott's Greek lexicon, a tome of such portentous solidity and weight tha<i it cannot be equalled as a missile in a school fight. He lived to a ripe old age, this worthy Greek scholar, for he was born as far back as 1811. His Lexicon and his History of Kome will always be standard works. i '

Chronic neuralgia is surely one of the severest trials any one can suffer from, and when a man is in his eighty-eighth year the severity of the infliction must be intensified. Such is the fate, so the cable tells us, of the G.0.M., and it will require all his famous patience and long-suffering to cope with the enemy. In the ordinary course of nature the great English Liberal leader cannot well be long for this world, but it is pitiable to read of the poor old gentleman's suffering from such a detestable complaint as persistent neuralgia, for neuralgia of any kind affords the nearest approach to a terrestrial Hades that one can well imagine.

Esperance being the French for Hope, I may reasonably hazard the idea, although ignorant of Spanish, that Esper* anza is the Spanish equivalent for the same English word* The cable tells us that the Spanish troops have "captured Esperanza, the rebel seat of Government in Cuba.'' Shall we conclude that the Cuban patriots have thereby lost all Hope. I trust this may not be the case. When Eichmond, the capital of the Southern Confederacy, was occupied by Grant in 1865, the awful struggle twixt North and South speedily came to an §nd, though I do not say as a consequence. I should be sorry to think that the fall of Esperanza is an omen of the approaching collapse of the Cuban patriotic movement. But it looks bad.

Homer nodded sometimes and even the omiscient editor of the Beview of Reviews (Australian edition) can occasionally be caught tripping. As, for instance, when in a recent article on the political situation in New Zealand, he gives currency and apparently credence to the rumour that Mr Seddon is going Home as Agent General. But he puts it —" to succeed Mr Wwrd as Agent General." The Beview always poses as a species of a Heaven born critic of our political affairs and yet it is ignorant as to who is our Agent General.

Lords Onslow and Hampden have been expressing their views on New Zealand. Onslow, that pompous, pretentious prig, whose back most Wellingtonians were so "glad to see, has apparently been getting off one of his periodic Tory snorts about that bugbear of so many silly people—" New Zealand socialism," which, according to Onslow, " is Undermining good government." Of course this is mere rubbish, but it is just as well that the declaration was taken up by Lord Carrington, the popular ex-Governor of New South Wales, who says " that the facts do not justify the statement." " Trade," continued his Lordship, " was progressing, capital had cheapened, and there was a good surplus shown." Onslow, who is posing now-a-days as an authority on matters colonial, never loses an opportunity of having a dig at the democratic movement in New Zealand. He found to his great surprise that certain prominent Liberal Ministers out here did not feel inclined to accept him at his own exaggerated valuation, and so he snorts and sniffs at " the howwid Wadicals " as only a Tory lordling can do.

Viscount Hampden, the Governor of New South Wales, who has recently made a tour of our colony, has, I notice, been interviewed by a Sydney newspaper. I should have thought it was rather infra j dig for such a high and mighty personage I as a real live governor to submit to being J " pumped " by a pressman, but the Tory | Governor —n«w style—is never so happy i as when he is making himself prominent, j It is consoling, I am sure, to all of us, that Viscount Hampden has been pleased to say that " so far as he could see the people of New Zealand seemed to be none the worse for advanced legislation in force in that colony. Very good of him isn't it ? Did he expect to find the grass growing on Queen street, Auckland; Lambton quay, Wellington; or Princes street Dunedin ? I should not be surprised, had such been his idea for

the silly unpatriotic stuff talked and written by the Opposition members and newspapers is sometimes taken as fact by people outside

the colony, into whose heads the idea is sedulously dinned that "Seddonism" (good old " Seddonism," it is refreshing to the Opposition heart as " Mesopotamia " was to a certain old lady) is "ruining'' New Zealand. As a matter of fact Viscount Hampden's opinion as to this colony and its position is not worth much, for he is the personification of mediocrity, and a holiday jaunt of a fortnight or so gives no man, however acute an observer —which he is not —the right to pass an opinion which is worth hearing. v Still a Governor's dictum is, by the great Snoboeracy, both in England and the colonies, accepted as a species of gospel, and so we may be thankful that in Viscount Hampden's opinion New Zealand is not going to the dogs. We breathe again.

I am heartily sorry to notice that the great struggle between the British engineers and the Employers Federation has ended in the defeat of the men. The latter have made terrible sacrifices in the struggle—the strike cost the Engineers Society alone some £600,000 —and it will be many years before organised labour gets over the blow. The Employers Federation have, however, won, and the Armstrongs (who one year paid a dividend of IB per cent) and other magnates of the engineering trade will have, for the time being, all their own way. But they will have to be careful how they use their victory, a victory gained purely by Money, not by Right and Justice. What the men ought to do is to press for the extension of the franchise, which in England excludes nearly three millions of workers, and work for the redress of their grievances in parliament.

The above brief mention of English labour troubles reminds one of a very silly paragraph in the Auckland Observer, a journal generally remarkable for its common sense and fairness. Here it is: " They say that labour hagitator Burns is coming to Maoriland this year. Tillett and Burns in New Zealand some time ? ' Ow will the pore Hinglish wurruking man get on ?'" I said the paragraph is silly; it is more than that, it contains a glaring misrepresentation of both Burns and Tillett. So far from murdering the English language, John Burns is one of the finest orators of the rough and ready stamp in England. He does not misplace his h's, though that is no great crime, neither does he use the horrible East End Cockney accent attributed to him above. On the contrary I question whether the writer of the Observer paragraph can him-' self speak as grammatically as John. As for he is not only a brilliantly eloquent

speaker, but he-is. one of the most polished speakers it has ever been my good fortune to listen to. We may not all of us agree with anything and everything he says, but in maimer, his speeches, barring an occasional drop into a " slangwhanging " style, which is unworthy of him, are really admirable. He speaks as a rule as a highly educated, highly cultured man. To picture either him or Bums as an aspirate-murdering lamp-post " agitator," is either the result of deplorable ignorance or cruel malice. lam surprised, I repeat, that such a silly paragraph has appeared in a New Zealand paper, especially such an amusing, and, as a a wellconducted journal as the Observer. Surely the editor was away.

There is a peculiar malignity in the ! way in which the Clerk of the Weather is given to spoiling a Wellington holiday. Take Saturday last for example. The previous day was well nigh perfection, and the fair sex got ready their smartest gowns and nattiest headgear and prepared for a wholesale "paralysing" of the gentlemen in the anticipated Lawn and Paddock Parade. Alas for their hopes and preparations Saturday morning was dull, but not dull enough to frighten away the ladies, and so out they went for what —to sit miserably on the Grand Stand all the afternoon and disconsolately watch the heavy showers which swept over the Lawn. Add to this that the luncheon was the very worst arranged, worst served, vilest thing in luncheons ever known at the Hutt, and no wonder the ladies were angry. If the Eacing Club committee do not reform the luncheon arrangements by the time the next meeting comes round they may as well shut up shop at once, for the attendance will fall away to nothing. As a glorious example of "hownot to do it" commend me to the lunch on Saturday last. The food was abominably rough, and even then there was not enough of it, and the charge, considering the quality of the food, was simply monstrous.

The government of France under the Third Bepublic is becoming as rotten as that of the much-abused Second Empire. It is palpable to any careful observer of the history of the Dreyfus affair that the Government are doing everything in their power to stifle enquiry into the so-called " trial" of the unfortunate artillery officer who is kept imprisoned in an iron cage on a malaria-infested island hell near the coast of French Guiana, and it is equally evident that the anti-Semitic fanaticism is being encouraged by the same Government in order to drag a red herring over the trail. Eeferring to the Dreyfus affair, the London correspondent of the Melbourne Argus, who is generally very well informed, states that a friend of his had a conversation the other day with a German officer of the general staff, now in London, about the Dreyfus affair. " The German placidly remarked with reference to the letter upon which Dreyfus was convicted that not a single one of the points or pieces of information which Dreyfus was supposed to allude to in the j letter would have been of the smallest interest or value to the German, or any other foreign Government, while two of them are already published in the French drill-books, which anybody can buy for five francs. The fact is that the coneoctor of Dreyfus's supposed letter had a military imagination, but was wholly ignorant of military details."

Poor Kipling is in trouble again over a bit of what is no doubt unconscious plagiarism which has been discovered in his Second Jungle Book. Oliver Wendell Homes, it appears, wrote as follows in his now half-forgotten novel " Elsie Venner " (chapter III.):—-" It must be a V6ry stupid dog that lets himself be run over by a fast driver in his gig; he can jump out of the wheel's way after the tyre has already reached him." Now note Kipling's variant of the same idea ("The Second Jungle Book," story III.): — " Even a dog, who is very far removed from a wild wolf, his ancestor, can be waked out of a deep sleep by a cart wheel touching his flank, and can spring awfiy unharmed before that wheel comes on." The true explanation no doubt is that Kipling had read " Elsie Venner " years ago, and had made a mental note of the dog there, and then, years afterwards, he had taken the idea out of the brain pigeon-hole, and forgetting it should have been labelled "Holmes," trotted it out in blissful ignorance of its origin, as his own creation. Also, remembering the theory that there is nothing new under the sun, and also that it is quite possible that exactly the same idea or metaphor may occur to two minds at long intervals,

■ Kipling may have never read " Elsit Venner " at all.

Harking back, however, to the dog theory itself, and leaving Kipling to make his own defence, if any be needed, let me point out that from personal observation only this very morning I cannot accept the theory of a dog being always able to jump out of harm's way, as being of universal application. For on this very same morning, as I came down to my office, there stood in lazy'indifference to all things—even a bone that was near—a smart little terrier. To him approached a cyclist—a wicked cyclist —who, regardless of bye-laws, was doing a palpable " scorch" down Boulcott street. Now not only did that cyclist's wheel touch the dog, but the hapless canine did not manage, as he ought to have managed, according to Holmes' or Kipling's theory," to jump out of the way,'* or " spring away unharmed as soon as the tyre touched him." On the contrary the cyclist first ran right over the dog, and then fell, " head over tip," as a slangy onlooker put it. As for the " langwitch" used by the wheelman, it was only equalled in strength by that of the terrier, who, if he did not swear worse than did ever " our army in Flanders," as Uncle Toby says in Tristram Shandy, may I never hear a terrier use his own peculiar cuss words again. Apart from the question, of plagiarism, that dog theory ia itself wrong sometimes; at least it does not always pan out right in New Zealand.

Not a few of my readers who ara sportsmen will be interested in the following letter from Mr Angus Macdonald, of Pahau:— " Sir, —It may interest the Council of our Acclimatisation Society as well as Wellington and Wairarapa sportsmen to hear what one of the best judges of stags head in Scotland has to say concerning Wairarapa stags heads. Mr William Macleary, of Macleary Bros., the leading taxidermists of Inverness, writes to me as follows: "Mr Biddiford's three stags' heads have arrived. They are magnificent heads and far better heads than can be secured in the best deer forests in Scotland. Over five hundred of the best stags' heads killed in Scotland during the last shooting season ''went through the hands of our firm, but the worst of Mr Kiddiford's heads is better than any of them. Mr Biddiford's Boyalia considered by old-and experienced sportsman to be the finest Boyal in Scotland at the present time. During the last shooting season some very good heads were killed by the Duke of York, Lord Tweedmouth and Lord Burton and many others, but Mr Biddiford's heads put them all in the shade."