PASSING NOTES.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 15736, 12 April 1913, Page 6

PASSING NOTES.

Now that the Sydney strikes are reaching, or have already reached, their predestined end, an end foreseen from the beginning, namely, the surrender— graceful or abject as you choose to consider it—of authority, law, and Government, it behoves us !.o note a feature not always discernible 'in strikes.

A feature of this recent .strike is tho orderliness and good behaviour of iho men. Though special police have boon detailed for the strike areas, their duties are purely nominal.

The police were :iot seriously called on, which was lucky; for the police—an intelligent body of men, observant of the signs of the "tunes, able to put two and Wo together—were meditating at the moment a possible strike of their own. That is for another day. Meanwhile we are to learn our lesson; and really, how simple we find it! The men employed in some industry or service essential to the life of the community—railways, tranvways, gasworks, harbour ferries—take a sudden holiday. They will resume when it pleases them, and in the leisurely interim are prepared to discuss the question of higher pay and shorter hours. Sympathetically, and to enforce'the argument, workers in other industries and services equally essential follow suit.

This done, all is done. The Cabinet may sit and sit in solemn Impotence, the Minister of Labour rush to and fro tearing his hair; the strikers have but k) smoke their pipes and sit tight. To what/ purpose waste energy in rioting and violence? Without effort the community is being comfortably starved and strangled; the end is sure. Presently we learn that matters in dispute are adjusted, labour resumes, and there will be ''no victimisation." The net result is that a further share of the total income earned has been appropriated by the strikers. They do not take it all, oh, no—not yet. i'hey are not greedy; they are not impatient. They are taking it by instalments. And in the end they will take the lot. Governments or joint slock companies, as the case may be, will provide capital and' plant; the "workers," so called, will take the earnings. This is the industrial strike, new style—simple, scientific, evolutionary, of no trouble at all on either side, once understood; available only in industries that concern the life, the health and wealth, of a whole community, but within that range of wide application, The police, as we have seen, may ground their batons; the warders of the jails may " come out." Posts and telegraphs may follow railways; why not? In logic the cases are identical. "Thus it is, then, that matters stand. I hardly recognise the millennium; rather, I .should say, we approach a domestic Armageddon. Very literally it will come to push of pike, when victory with the spoils thereof will fall to the' pikes that are longest and strongest, and that push the hardest.

A correspondent 'writing from Milton complains that at an Old Identities' picnic there one of the spsaken;—" present as tho representative of the member for the district, the Hon. James Allen, who is of English extraction''—inordinately ''extolled the Scotch at tho expense of the English."

Is it .the fault of our early training that wo English' cannot talk by the hour of .rile glorious exploits of our ancestors? Or are there no such exploits recorded in history? Here conies in the object of this letter. Could you, out of your wide information, supply us miserable Englishmen with a list o_f, say, half a dozen historic events which we could

sling off to the discomfiture of Scotsmen? "John.Bull" he signs himself, and per'haps I had belter introduce "John Bull" to a kindred spirit up Pembroke way who desires a tilt with one of his 'neighbours on account of letters in the Daily Times disparaging the English foT the greater glory of the Irish.

Dear Civis and Fellow Patriot-Will you please let mo say a few words to my good friend, Mr W. P. Cotter, H'awca Flat? Tho British (lag holds' tho world's record of 300 winning battles. Because of f'nese 300 winning battles, Mr Cotter and I arc are occupying snug and comfortable homes to-day. (Hero follows a descant on the Boer War—of , which, it scorns, his good friend was "an eloquent opponent"; on British mag-'' nanimity in presenting the beaten Boers with self-government; and on the exploit al Johannesburg of "a little British Tar," one M'Swceney, from Cork, in thrashing and dispersing-: two higDutchmen who wore offensively celebrating Majuba,) .... If it had been all Majuba Hill in South Africa, w'hicli the Little Englanders,. and nonmilitarists, and other traitors to their country seemingly wished, New Zealand might by now be in poreossion of the Germans and we can imagine Mr Cotter's feeling.-; v/hen a corporal and four soldiers, with rifles and fixed bayonets ■ would come round every six months to collect a few pounds cash towards the upkeep of tho new. army. ~ Quite so; that is tne way to put it. Pity it is that our skulking anti-militarists haven't imagination enough to see themselves paraded for the delicate attention of a German or Japanese -drill sergeant.

Of course this interchange of compliment between English, Scotch, and Irish is mostly good-humoured make-believe. Siimuel Johnson, the Fleet street sage, said many cruel things about Scotland; they are amongst his best things,' they still live, and (ire still delightsome. Returning from his famous journey to the Hebrides, Johnson was asked by one friendly to the Scotch, " in a firm tone of voice," what he thought' of the country. "That it was a vile country, to be'sure," was the answer. "Well, sir," replied the other,, somewhat mortified, "God made it." "Certainly he did," was the crushing retort, "but we must always remember that he made it for ■ Scotchmen; and comparisons are odious, Mr Strahan: but God made Hell." There were more gentlemen in Scotland, he said, than there were shoes; as for trees—when it chanced that in Mull lie lost his oak walking sticky he could not be persuaded that he might get it back again: " Nu, sir, it is not to be expected that any man in Mull who has "ot it will part with it. Consider' the value of such a piece of timber here." As to fruits: "I have found ' that ■in Scotland gooseberries will grow against a. south wall; but the skins are so tough that it is death to the man who swallows one of them." There was a- Scotchman who had taken up some barren land in America, to the surprise and regret of his friends. Whereupon Johnson: "All barrenness is comparative; being Scotch he would not know it to bo barren." Scottish education: " The general learning of the Scotch nation resembles the condition of a ship's crew condemned to fihort allowance of provisions. Everyone Ins a mouthful, and nobody a bellyful." Blair's sermons: " Though the dog is a Scotchman, and a Presbyterian, and everything he should not he, I was the first to praise them." And anent the view from the top of a high castle to which he had' been taken: "Sir, it is the finest in all Scotland, for I can here see the road to England." Now we may assure ourselves that this preposterous show of antipathy to Scotland and the Scotch is nothing more than a pose, a freak of Johnson's elephantine humour. No chance for a lling at things North British was let pass, yet all the time he was admitting to closest intimacy the son of an Ayrshire Lord of Session, James Boswell, a Scotchman dyed in the wool. And .liuswell's name is for ever linked with his own by the immortal biography.

When the three predominant partners of the British firm have had enough of poking fun at each other they may unite in chivying the fourth, litUc Wales, after the fashion of Cropland's "Taffy was'it Welshman,"—Mr Croslnnd being a sort of literary larrikin who liar, a missile for each nationality in turn. First it was "The Unspeakable Scot," next "The Wild Irishman,"' now it is "Taffy was a Welshman." This is his style:

It is time we remembered that England is our messuage and demesne, and not the backyard of Mr Ellis Griffiths, and that Englishmen were born to.rule, and not to be ruled, and least of all to be ruled by a bumptious, snuffling, flighty, tiresome fifl'ii-rato bunch of barbarians like the. Welsh. There is a Welsh party in the Homo of Commons wilh a topdog swagger about it; the high offices of State *"\vill soon all bo filled with Welshmen; permanent officialdom sporta

the daffodil or nothing in its buttonhole, and the back stairs and baggage rooms of jobbery arc crammed wii'n a. ■welter of slit-mouthed, lantern-jawed, oily-haired, wolf-hungry Taffy ap Taffy*, . who, though intended bv Nature tor milkmen, consider themselves entitled to • unlimited pickings off the fat English ribs, because Davy Bach (Mr David Lloyd George) ha-? "got on." Mr Lloyd George and his "gettings on" make up half the book; now that his Stock Exchange adventures have untimely come to .light an enlarged edition will be wanted. But a truce to scandals and seandalmongering. Invisibly blazoned at the head of this column are the 'rose, the shamrock, and the thistle; I swear by all three,—-not unwilling to add also the leek, or iii its stead the daffodil, since advancing Welsh refinement would have it so. And the daffodil is a sort of leek, when one comes to think of. it. In a letter to the Daily Times a week or two back the Rev. W. J. Williams, of Oamaru, characterised as a "cock and bull story" Mr G. K. Chesterton's account of how a friend of his when travelling in America got liquor in a no-liquor State; remarking in addition that Mr Chesterton's enumevaton of the seven devils which take the place of the one devil—the devil of open drinking—cast out by Prohibition appealed to " the morbid imagination of ' Civis.' " What the pathological condition of Mr Williams's imagination may be I am left to guess from the fact that the picture of a whole community making clean, the outside of the cup and platter whilst within full of all corruption and excess fails to shock it. As for my own imagination, it is quite well, thank you, and going strong; hence can rejoice itself iiv the metrical fable or parable by the same G. K. Chesterton which I here present to Mr Williams with all his Prohibitionist tribe and clan. It will explain them to themselves. Old Noah, tie had an ostrich farm and fowls on the largest scale, He ate his egg with a ladle in an egg cup as big as a pail; And the soup he took was Elephant Soup and the fish he took was Whale; But they all were small to the Cellar ho took when he set out to sail; And Noah would often say to his wife as he eat to down to dine, "I don't care where the water goes if it doesn't get into the wine." The oataraet from the cliff of Heaven ■ fell blinding from the. brink, As it would wash the stars away as suds go down a sink'; And the seven heavens were roaring down for the throats of hell to drink, And Noah, he cocked his eye, and said, "It looks like rain. I think: "The water has drowned the Matte-horn deep as a Mendipi mine, "But I don't care where the water goes If it doesn't get into the wine." But Noah he sinned; and we have sinned; on tipsy feet we trod; Till.a great big black Teetotaller was sent us for a rod. And you can't sot wine at a P.S.A., or chapel, or Eisteddfod. For the curse of water has come igain, because of the Wrath of God. And water is on the Bishop's board, and the Higher Tinkers' shrine, But I don't care where .the water goes, If it doesn't get into the wine.. \ This is " The Second Deluge" ; from which visitation in New Zealand may Heaven preserve us.- • Civis.