PASSING NOTES.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 7783, 29 January 1887, Page 5 (Supplement)

PASSING NOTES.

(Prom Otago Witness.)

In sensations the market has been brisk this week. Murder trials in the North and South— the Great Barrier case in Auckland and the Cain poisoning case inDunedin—and inDunedin also a phenomenal fire to relieve the usual monotony of the Sabbath afternoon. The g>eat conflagration at the Iron and Woodware Factory might in many quarters have been regarded with resignation if not with absolute complacency, were it not for the lamentable loss of life that attended it. Tracing the matter out, we fiad that four men have died a horrible death owing to the solicitude of a few people about certain articles of portable property that belonged to someone else! In order to save to a bank one or two shovels, firegrates, and door hinges, men were found willing, unsolicited, to enter a burning building, carrying their lives in their hands, and face danger that might make A Balaclava hero blench. Overhead were four floors of an enormous building enveloped in flames, the burning woodwork supporting tons of iron manufactures. Rafters were giving way and staircases falling in the upper storeys every minute, and beneath this crashing, blazing.mass people cheerfully wandered in quest of seven and sixpenny spades and bolts at so much per dozen. This is not bravery. It is an ignorant unthinking disregard for danger—the inability to souudly gauge a situation. Those who embarked on this enterprise, bent upon the salvation of a little ironmongery for the insurance companies, were attracted by the prospect of a little sharp exercise flavoured with a dash of excitement; instead of which they were preparing the stage for one of those tragedies which are generally enacted periodically at the mouth of coal pits. Tho scene of the rescuers sharing the fate of those they went to save aud the long hours of heroic work to extricate the entombed men is more familiar below than above ground. But it is a thrilling 6cene wherever it is presented.

Putting aside this melancholy phase of the subject, opinion seems to be divided as to whether the fire should be hailed as a blessing or deplored as a calamity. There is no question as to the light in which the hundred or two unfortunates thrown suddenly out of employment will regard it; but rival factories and small ironmongery establishments and timber yards \viiich have been overshadowed or squeezed flat by this very big brother will look upon the event as a special dispensation on their behalf. There is actually in evidence the conduct of one interested party whobestrided ahorseon the eventful Sunday afternoon and rode excitedly about the qity offering up a service of praise, and praying loudly and fervently that .every stick might be oi^roy%ar--£!K£-£?s!^ more than fiddle while Rome was graining.;... He '^rould'in'aU probability have danced a hornpipe $nd turned ecstatic somersaults. As regards the proprietorship which "ran" this big concern, are they to be condoled with in a pecuniary loss, or congratulated upon having rid themselves of a remarkably bulky white elephant in an unexpectedly expeditious manner ? Opinion is again divided. That there was something of the white elephant about this vastly imposing establishment the history of successive proprietorships seems to indicate, but there is considerable value even in/ a white elephant if it is driven to proper market. That was all the Iron and Woodware Factory needed to make it 6uccess- • ful. It might have thrived splendidly somewhere else, but here it did not. What it wanted was pot burning but translating to another sphere. ■ A phenomenon well worth studying at the present time is Mr H. S. Fish. Two years ago Mr Fish, at that time a blazing portent in the political firmament, fell—suddenly, swiftly, like Litcifer ffbm heaven—and disappeared below the horizon. We all remember the circumstances; there is not.the least need to recount them. It was a fall "with hideous ruin mud combustion dire," followed by a prolonged crackle of newspaper comment, and a bad smell. The great ward politician, who had bossed the City Council year after year, had rough-hewed his way into Parliament, and was evidently bent on becoming a Minister, had fallen to rise no more. The people who said this, however, did not know Mr Fish, nor the triple brass which forms the cuticle of a veteran ward politician. Accused as Fish was accused by • Walter, and^-unable to answer, any other pub--115 man wouiS have gone undef finally. The exmember for Dunedin South went under for the space of two years, at the end of which time he emerges coolly and comfortably as if nothing had happened, .and with a face as incapable of blushing as the Burns Statue. We are now confronted by th.3 problem of Fish rediviws — ■ Fish, loud-voiced as of yore in the City Council, Fish on art, Fish on higher education, and— most engaging and most distressing of all—Fish on the duty of preserving the purity of public worship I—vide report of St. Matthew's parish meeting. . From his remarks' as reported I infer that Mr Fish now intends to run on what may be called the religious ticket. He wae solicitous for the " temporal and spiritual weL fare of the Church," and thought "an effori i should be made to get a large number of peopl< ! who were really within the fold of the Churcl to attend Divine service at least once a week.' Now this is really too much. Fish on art anc education we can.perhaps manage to endure but Fish on religion—Fish as district visitor distributing tracts, and urging people to " atteni Divine service at least once a week " —this is no only too much Fish, but Fish at the out rageously wrong time and place. Is there h< department of life, then, that can be kep sacredfrom invasion by Fish ? To.tjoursperdiu, is bad enough, but with to'tjours poisson w shall positively be poisoned.

'Until lately the Csar obtained a good deal of sympathy in Western Europe as a well-meaning ruler much persecuted by Nihilists. Since the Afghan affair English people have liked him less, and less still since the affair of Prince Alexander. But since he shot an aide-de-camp the Czar has been looked upon as the mauvais sujet amongst sovereigns, and everybody has been trying to remember something to his discredit. The papers have gone back on his family history, disinterring a few facts which are regularly dragged to light whenever the Romanoffs are behaving badly, and as regularly buried again as soon as the Romanoffs begin to keep reasonably straight. The family history of the Czar is bad—bad as bad can be. If not a Romanoff and a Czar his Imperial Majesty Alexander 111 would infallibly be described, in virtue of his ancestry, as a member of the criminal classes. There can hardly be a family in existence that in the course of ten generations b»s produced so many madmen, imbeciles, profligates, and assassins. Curiously enough, they are all descended from the son of »n eminent churchman, the Metropolitan of Rostoff, whose English equivalent would be the Archbishop of Canterbury. This first of the I Imperial Romanoffs, Michael, chosen by the nobles as Czar in 1613, was a wise and capable ruler; so was his son Alexis after him: then begins the usual story of mad Caesarism to be read in the records of half-a-dozen Imperial houses, the story of a neurosis inseparable, apparently, from an inheritance of absolute power. But, really, I am growing too philosophical, and must pull up. What I meant to say was, that absolute monarchy is a bad trade to bring a boy up to, bad *■ for his body, bad for his floul, not favourable to longevity, and pretty certain to generate madness in the third generation. No wise man who could choose would be an absolute monarch, —not even Over his

own wife.

What the present Czar was like as a child, and under what kind of domestic discipline he was nurtured, may be, gleaned from a story given by an English paper. One day the late Czar, who looked carefully after the education of his children, entered the schoolroom unexpectedly and saw his second son, the present Czar, kicking his English governess. " Beg her pardon," ordered the father. , "I won't," said the boy, and stuck to it. "Call the guard," said the Czar to his attendants; in inarched & squad of grenadiers and the young rebel was carried off as a military prisoner to barracks, where he was kept 14 days on black bread and other cheerful prison fare. How the affair ended is told thus :—

At the end of the 14 days he was brought back, and in the presence of the father asked the pardon he had refused to beg before. "Take her hand," ordered the Czar. The boy did so sullenly, and bent his head, to kiss it apparently, but in reality to bite it. My informant said she had felt distressed at her young charge's humiliation, and had begged him off; bo, when she felt his sharp teeth on her finger she merely started back, and said nothing; but the Czar had seen the action, and the young savage got another fortnight in durance vile.

No doubt it was wicked in little Romanoff to kick the shins of his foreign governess, and refuse to beg her pardon, but there are a good many of us who must have been capable at the same early age of atrocities quite as harrowing, Luokily for bur future moral development we were not privileged with. Imperial fathers who

were a law unto themselves, and who could order in a corporal's guard and march us off to 14 days of bread and water in a dungeon cell. It is a miserable walk in life, depend upon it, that of being a Romanoff—for whom the very nursery is disciplined by bayonets.

The deputation of trades representatives who waited Upon Messrs Hazell and Hodgkin to point out the barrenness of the land scarcely met with the ready credence and sympathy they looked for. Their motives were probably disiuterested and lofty. Observing we as a small community are in something of a pecuniary pickle, they are generously anxious that no one else shall come out to share our debt with us. All the members of the deputation had reasons for their views, which they stated in lugubrious chorus, and all the different reasons pointed in one direction — the preservation of New Zealand as a close borough if possible. The country in the opinion of these gentlemen has been "struck" by too many white men already, and although they themselves have failed to make very much out of it themselves, they are nervously anxious to prevent anyone else trying his hand. Mark how the emigration delegates "took the measure" of a certain Mr Warner, who bemoaned the dullness of the building trade. "If we offered you a free passage back " said Mr Hodgkin, " would you take it ? " "Well, no," replied Mr Warner, and the bottom was then and there knocked out of his argument. Both Mr Warner and a Mr Aris entertained suspicions—the one of the Home aristocracy, and the other of the Home capitalists. The latter gentleman, astonishing to relate, suspected the capitalists of wishing *' to get rid of their labour"; and Mr Warner, who had had his eye on the aristocracy and their doings, believed that they wished to get the people out of the country lest they themselves should be hurled from their proud positions. Mr Hazell finally reckoning up his men, supposed that they wished it to bo reported that there was no opening in Otago for skilled labour, and the deputation replied with alacrity " Yes." The delegates being shrewd men will

probably report: " Artisans extremely anxious to keep the thing to themselves. Splendid field."

The Burns Statue again! This is a subject about which we are in danger of hearing too much, but as the writer of the following note has a grievance against Civis I let him say his say :— To Civis : Sir, —To myself and a good many other people your toue about the Burns Statue is offensive. Will you kindly say what there is in this attempt to honour a great poet that entitles you to laugh at it? The Statue itself will be an ornament to the city. It; has cost a great deal of money; the community generally are interested in it and will be proud of it. The only jarring string is that struck by Passing Notes; though generally an admirer I must, on. this subject, sign myself All this forsooth because, when a dispute is raging about the site, I have suggested White Island, opposite the Ocean Beach as a spot that has some obvious advantages over any other ! proposed. And why should it be forbidden me to offer my little contribution of advice ? May not Civis know as much about statues as Mr H. S. Fish ? Moreover, does not the great Bartholdi Statue of Liberty at New York stand on an island somewhere off Sandy Hook ? The more I consider and reconsider my suggestion the more lam in love with it. I believe I also suggested that inasmuch as he is to stand in the open air Burns should wear a hat. This is apparently taken as satirical, but let me say that the hat question in connection with statues is a very old question indeed. Does my correspondent know the origin of the dinner-plate aureole or glory shown in mediaeval pictures of saints ? The Greeks used to cap their statues with a dish-like protector against the droppings of birds; later ages mistook it for the sign of a deity and transferred it, in the form we know, to saints in stained glass windows. Now Robert Burns was no saint. I don't propose that he should have an aureole—though on White Island, the very name of which is suggestive of guano deposits, such a protection might be far from useless—but I do propose that he should have a hat. This is said to be poking fun at Burns and also his statue! Really some of my readers seem to have no sense of gravity. About street statues in general I may add that I don't like them, and will quote a sentence or two from a London paper to show that this dislike is not singular. "We are threatened," saya the Pall Mall Gazette," with an inundation of statues. Why not adopt a suggestion which appeared some years ago in one of the magazines, and whenever a great man dies show our appreciation of him by pulling down a statue in his honour instead of putting one up ?" The writer then proposes to pull down the Temple Bar Griffin in honor of the late Sir George Jessel, Master of the Rolls, and adds— " Having once begun the good work we could take a turn at the other statues, and rid the metropolis bit by bit of the outward and visible signs of bad taste and waste of public money." On this principle instead of erecting a statue to Burns we should have pulled down, in his name and to his honour, the Cargill Monument.