PASSING NOTES.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 16243, 28 November 1914, Page 4

PASSING NOTES.

To the riddle set us by the German fleet there are two possible solutions, and we know them both : Tlio fleet will come, out and fight, The fleet will decline to como out and Sight A simple alternative, third course none. Yet over this simplicity the wisest heads are 'poring; naval experts find as much to say for the one chance as for the other; newspaper prophets spin a coin. Though inaccessible and invisible, the German fleet is "a fleet in being"; and although declining to come out it will remain " a fleet in being" as long as it detains a superior enemy fleet in the North Sea. The jailor is as close tied as the prisoner. A German "fleet in being,'' able to fight and able at any moment to issue forth with purpose of fighting, is as truly a factor in the war as a German army corps serving in Flanders. Though it should never destroy a single enemy ship, it will have kept half a hundred enemy ships from destroying somethhig else. On this view it is in oven chance that the German fleet now declining to come out and fight will go on declining.

But so ignominious a 'part in the great drama will hardly commend itself to the high-spirited toasters of "The Day." They have toasted "The Day," they have boasted "The Day"—how are they going to hide away from "The Day" and hold up their heads? The worse the plight of Germany on land, the more uTgent the call of honour to attempt something by sea, though it be but a gambler's last throw. All is not lost whilst the naval chance remains untried. Their fleet will come out, then, let us say. They will choose their hour and the conditions that suit them. Snaky submarines will thread the waters below; a flight of Zeppelins will hover above; it will be one mad, despairing, concentrated rush of all the German powers of hell. Despairing ?—not quite that. General Bernhardi has calculated with nicety and explained in his book that foy the time " The Day" arrives British newe will have been worn to a frazzle. Wearied by long watching and waiting, demoralised and unstrung by terrors of the mine and the torpedo, the British sailor is to have no stomach for fight. If al] German calculations bearing on "The Day" axe as far out as this, the issue is already decided.

Day by day the war writes up its ghastly record. Butrthe war is far away.

The lada of the village still merrily, ah, Sound their tabor Sport is the word. With the lads of the village the war cables this Saturday morning are of less concern than the state of the cricket pitch. To-night the picture show; to-morrow the bicvcle jaunt, the beach, the harbour steamers, the band in the gardens. Want of imagination, this, in part. To the lads of the village there is no clear vision of things beyond the horizon; they don't even perceive looming up there the German drill sergeant, though sure it is that if the British go down in this war New Zealand will pass to the Kaiser. Scant imagination is the special endowment of youth. Thanks to a scant imagination, the horror and the heroism of our struggle in Belgium hidden from them, the lads of the village can still go on sounding their tabnr. For them, the one efficient recruiting agency would be a visit from the Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, with a few shells visibly and audibly pitched into the Octagon. The Mons retreat brought in recruits at such a pace that Lord Kitchener raised the standard of height. It has been lowered to take in the Bantams, since a short man can fire as many bullets as a long man, and will stop fewer. Recruiting has slackened, say the newspapers, though K. of K. doesn't seem to admit it. Anyway, the opinion of the Spectator on the moral effect of Zeppelins is -worth quoting:

The only way in which a Zeppelin raid on Ixmdon will affect the war will be to cause a vast rush to the recruiting stations, a rush against which tho War Office will have to protect themselves by raising the standard of height to seven feet.

Besides a plentiful lack of imagination, Saturday cricket needs courage, in a way, sentiment is against it and the public conscience. If cricket has any Pope, Grand Lama, or perpetual archimandrite, that functionary is Dr W. G. Grace, and the words of \V\ G. G. as I quoted them the other week are these: "I think the time has arrived when the county cricket season should be closed, for it is not fitting at a time like the present that ablebodied men should play day after day and pleasure-seekers look on. When the first of cricketers talks thus, small wonder if other people look askance at Saturday recreations, muttering of "flannelled fools at the wickets," and questioning whether the lithe and limber athletes they see gladdening the village green would not be better employed carrying a rifle. Cricket is a serious business, no doubt,—

Casting a ball at three straight sticks and defending the same with a fourth ...

—so exact ingly serious that cricketers would cricket though London lay in ashes and the British fleet were at the bottom of the North Sea. But as things are it demands courage. In fact the daredevil pluck -that takes the lithe and limber athlete to the wickets should more than suffice to carry him to the front.

But a truce to this tone satiric. There are good men—and good cricketers, too— with whom it is just touch and go. They are ready and willing, needing but the least little impulse from without; —a touch, and they go. That is the philosophy of meetings to promote recruiting; —a stirring speech, a patriotic song, and the thing is done. The other night at the Garrison Hall it was done before our eyes. There was recruiting while you wait. Here let me offer a tip. Is it. known that for the finest recruiting music in the world you must go to dear old Handel ? We "have more than one baritone inDunedin who could sing "Arm, Arm, Ye Brave!" We have tenors who could sing "-Sound an Alarm !" "Sing" is not the word ; —it is declaiming these songs want—patriotic fervour, dramatic fire and force. Either pfece would electrify a Garrison Hall crowd. Handel himself was made in Germany, but not his music. Oratorio, the musical form in which chiefly he disported himself, Germany has never pared to assimilate. For nearly half his life Handel was a naturalised British subject, he has been long, long dead, and at this time of day we may claim him as our very own. Any musical society producing just now as a patriotic venture his " Judas Maccabseus" would find that it had struck oil.

" Neither a Gambler nor a Wowser " proposes a Grand National lottery for behoof of the Belgians—one million stealing, half in prizes, half for charity; five-shilling tickets, plus a ticket tax of one penny to coveT expenses. The Australians could be "let in" along with ourselves, he says; the post office revenue would benefit, "the prize-winners of a generous turn might dedicate their winnings to the fund. He has thought it out- neatly, not forgetting the moral objection.

I see a notice in the paper of a grand final effort to raise funds for the Belgians, and jn the same paper I read of a Presbyterian art union. If the Government can give the Presbyterians

a permit to gamble, much more may they give a permit to themselves for a

money lottery which woukl benefit a whole nation reduced to miser- through no fault of their own.

That sounds logic. But on the subject of gambling nobodv is logical, the Government least of all. If the Presbyterian Church may not run off an art union without- a special permit from the State, it must be on the assumption that the State, not the Church, is the guardian of morals, and that the morality of the State is higheT than the morality of the Church. Ouod est absurdum, as logicians say, and I commend this new heresy to the attention of the Rev. P. B. Fraser. For any shred of conscience that the State possesses, it might run a perpetual Tattersails and abolish taxes. It sanctions the totalisator and shares the profits, compensating decency but. outraging logic by the prosecution of bookmakers and the suppression of Chinese fan-tan.

Discussing some throe or four months back the American yellow press, and in relation thereto the American murderrate in particular the discrepancy between the number of murders and the number of convictions for murder, I made a remark which 1 find returned to jne with approval from America itself.

In the year 1913 9000 persons died by

violence in the United States; to be strictly accurate, 8992. No country in

the civilised world can compete

A judgo in the State of Georgia has declared from tho bench that' there are more homicides in that one State than in the whole of the British Empiro with its 400,000,000 of population. In the year 1913, when there were— as near as makes no matter —9000 homicides [in America], there were 88 legal executions. London, with 7,000,000 of population, had in a recent year —the last, for which reliable statistics are at hand —23 murders (" murders " in London). In New York, with 5,000,000 of population, there were 148 homicides, and for 148 homicides there wero 13 convictions.

In Louisville, Ky., with a population of loss than 260,000, for the year ended August 1, 1910, there wore 47 homicides and not a single conviction. Chicago goes ono better, for in a given year, with 202 homicides, it does manage to sentence one single murderer —that is to say, a homicider. They probably have gone into literature, these unconvicted homiciders, and staff the yellow press.

That was what I said. And now from Collier's National Weekly I take a paragraph corroborative: —

As others see us

Commenting on the appalling murder (we should say " homicide") statistics of this country, and on tho f.«ct that Chicago, with 202 " homicides" in a given year, bad actually succeeded in sentencing one solitary murderer (or " homicider"), a prominent New Zealand newspaper observes: " Probably the escaped and unconvicted homiciders have gone into literature and now staff the yellow press." Rather neat when you come to think of it!

The Presbyterian heresy case endfi well, but ends too soon. We were entitled to more out of it. No member of the Assembly appealed with poet Burns: "Orthodox ! orthodox! whae believe in John

Knox,

; there was no collecting

of faggots; on the contrary, there was a unanimous running with buckets of cold water. Times are greatly changed. In solemn seriousness and before the highest court of hie Church, a divinity professor is charged as a heretic and as teaching heresy. Gases no worse than this have lasted months—Otago cases, not yet forgotten. But the present case is rounded up and ended—the professor acquitted, his accuser admonished for " contumacy"— within four-and-twenty hours. In short, this Fraser-Dickie heresy hunt turns out a fiasco, and might borrow the epitaph set up over an infant of days:

Since I am so early done for, I wonder what I was begun for. The Rev. P. B. Eraser, a forlorn and pathetic figure, stands as I make out for a;n order of things and of thinking that is waxing old and ready to vanish away; Professor Dickie, with whom New Zealand Presbyterianism may be content and more, has hie face towards the morning. This is my judicial summing up. I have only to add, as epilogue, a scrap or two supplied me from the Assembly itself: " What, me stab a man in tho dark! Why, I always turn on the limelight." That is one; and this is the other: Puffing loudly, scented far, Comes the modem motor car Frowning, forcing, willy-nilly, Comes the martial Kaiser Billy. But there's one, than car or Kaiser, Roars more loudly,—P. B. Fr-s-r. Always talking, sometimes thinking, Peaooful paper ""blackly" inking. Therefore pray we, Good Lord help us To put up with "Philadelphus." Crvis.