EDITORIAL NOTES AND COMMENTS.

Oamaru Mail, Volume XXIII, Issue 7183, 11 April 1898, Page 1

EDITORIAL NOTES AND COMMENTS.

The associations of Easter would suggest that its recognition, to be in keeping, should be rather that of a religious festival than of a general public holiday of the heathen. But we in New Zealand are not slow to take advantage of any excuse for knocking off work to start making the bricks of a laborious pleasure-seeking, and our calendar of recognised holidays is as long as the arm of the law. One would take us to be at once the most loyal, most patriotic, and most pious nation in the wide world, with our observance of the Queen's Birthday, Prince of Wales' Birthday, St. George's Day, St. Andrew's Day, St. Patrick's Day, Eister, and all the recognised festivals of Christendom. Many of these are days which at Home are practi cally unknown. The Queen's Birthday is the occasion of an official display of loyalty in departmental circles, but is not a general holiday. The Prince of Wales' Birthday is absolutely unknown, and we doubfc. if even the Heir Apparent could name the date without thinking hard. St. George's Day is on the almanac if people care to look it up. St. Andrew's Day is simply and solely an excuse for a few pure-bred, hyper-patriotic Scots, whose fixity of environment has imbuea them with a passion of patriotism, to assert the egotism of nationality by drinking much whisky and relapsing into much broad Doric. Perhaps the best known saint is the genial St. Patrick, whose disciples have scored him on the public mind by a sheer reiteration of assertiveness. At anyrate all these festivals, which are Jive embers in New Zealand, aro but dead ashea in tho Old World. Curiously eiiough, the one great public holiday at Home which overshadows all others—the great festival of Whitsuntide, when England makes holiday from end to end —is not recognised at all in New Zealand. Easter, in its universality of personal enjoyment, seems to have taken its place. Possibly this may be due to a difference in season—our antipodean topsy-turvydom of the cycle would briner Whitsuntide parlous near the winter of our continent —but that winter is so often crowned with such ridiculously " long blue Eolemn hours," and wreathed with such " good gigantic smiles o' the brown old earth," that it does seem wonderful tint in the hunt through the calendar for holiday excuses young New Zealand with the exception of the wily bank clork, who has an additional heritage of historical holidays—should have overlooked so obvious an opportunity for going out to kill something. However, it ia not too late yet. Meanwhile we make the most of Easter. After Lhe lung Lenten fast—the fasting of most- New Zealanders is like that of the cliff-dwellers who do penance by abstaining from cycling, or the small buy who abjures soap and water for six weeks—a little mental and physical relaxation is "a fair thing." The harvest is over, there is a lull in the commercial world, the drapers' summer displenishing sales have ceased from troubling, the Police Commission is at rest; so in the Indian summer of th 3 E-ister recess we garner an aftermath of pleasurable ease—even the übiquitous pressman ceases for a day to ply his eternal pen and makes holiday in the Tantalus-enjoyment of reporting the pleasure of others. And so the bowlers, and the tennis players, and the athletes, and the racing men, and the parsons, hold high carnival, and " earth turns from work in gamesome mood," the only anxiety of each individual this morning being—- •' Oh, Day, not to squander a wavelet of

Thee, A mite of my twelve hours' pleasure, One of Thy choices, or one of Thy chances." So far as Oamaru is concerned, the choices and the chances are appetisingly varied, and we can safely trust a community of a colony which unblushingly seizes every opportunity from the anniversary of Robbie Burns' natal day to that of the death of Cock Robin—for an excuse to play, to safely see that their one white holiday has no drear dark close, but is exploited for all its infinite worth.

The Opposition Press, suffering spasms of somewhat windy virtue, is dwelling with all the horrified indignation of Mrs Chant at a music hall upon a new iniquity of the Ministry. It is Mr John Hutcheson, one of the Wellington members, who has supplied the text for the text for the latest Commination Service. Mr Hutcheson, we are told, created some sensation by urging the absolute necessity for honesty and independence in labor members, otherwise they were liable to be got at and corrupted. There were, he assured his hearers, temptations put in the way of labor members. He had been offered money to procure legislation, and he had been offered paid-up shares in gold mines to allow his name to grace them. He was offered to the value of L2OO. This sort of people he had to show out of his office. Now what is the logical deduction from this statement of Mr Hutcheson's ? Like the toothless inebriate who promptly expressed his ability to do six months' bard " on his ear," the Opposition papers were not long in solving this problem. Mr Hutcheson's reservations were no veil for their acumen; his revelations were quite sufficient to show that the would - be corrupters of his political honesty must be members of the Government Party. It required no first six books of Euclid with portions of the eleventh and twelfth to prove this beyond all shadow of doubt; even the elementary knowledge of the student who stands shivering on th 6 brink of pons asinorum, with only four frail problems between him and logical perdition, would be mastery sufficient to accept the finding of the journals in question. Mr Hutcheson gave no data save the above, but that was quite sufficient for our contemporaries, for with an occult genius as wide and, no doubt, as honest as that of Mr Sludge, the Medium, they immediately saw into the heart of things, and lo ! the Ministry and a band of their shameless supporters, with money bags in their hands, at the feet of Mr John Hutcheson, offering to buy the vote which that member had already given to them. It is unfortunate for this position that it should appear illogical; it must be painful for any well-brought-up natural position to appear illogical, but that is not the fault of the Opposition Press, who arrived at their finding by time-honored and proper methods. Ever since there was a Conservative Party, away back to the Stone Age when Ug, the son of Gor, made a corner in flints, there has been one divine immutable axiom, beside which the proverbial law of the Medes and Persians is as frail as a bruised reed or an 11 o clock license—and that that is that the Party can do no wrong. It is a comforting and all- powerfnl foundation which no bar sinister can soil in Conservative eyes, and which the challenge of the traditions of centuries cannot shake in Conservative minds—a sort of jealously-guarded Philosopher's Stone, which turns the base metal of greedy monopoly into the glittering gold of a good action. And since the Conservatives can do not wrong, and there' are only two Parties interested in Mr'

John Hutcheson's vote, it must follow, as the night the day, that it is the Government Party who have approached that gentleman. 'Tisa simple argument for simple people—in fact, it's chief merit is its frank simplicity—a valuable addition to the volume of political Precept upon Precept which the guided hands of the Opposition journalism are penning from day to day for the delectation of a lordly patronage, and as the proper pap for the young patrician. Meanwhile Mr John Hutcheson—who probably realises that a libel action is more easily precipitated than defended—is smiling inscrutably, and the low, common herd of plebeians who disgrace our shores, and whose stunted intellects can never induce two and two to make more than four, knowing whose interest it would be to purchase Mr John Hutcheson's vote, go_ on thinking, and thinking, and thinking, with a beastly stolidity that is impervious to the brilliancy of Opposition logic.