PASSING NOTES.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 17216, 19 January 1918, Page 4

PASSING NOTES.

"The world must be made safe for democracy," says President Wilson, and in saying this presents to us a democracy ruled by* an absolute autocrat. Which is exactly as it ought to be. Essential to democracy is discipline, —discipline as order, arrangement, adjustment of part to part; and tho last word in discipline "may he a single will summing up, authenticating, making effective, a million separate and individual wills, in America a hundred million. Democracy minus discipline is anarchy and civil war, as in Russia. " And in Britain also," the pesJ siinist would add. Speaking for one, I abhor the pessimist as I abhor the proGerman ; but to any man watching from tho British side the course of this war the.ro may come, at intervals, a bad quarter-of-an-hour. We 'are not exactly at the mercy of the enemy without (thanks he), but, we seem very much at tho mercy of fools and knaves within. Lalxrar unionists on the ship-building Clyde take the Government by the thro,lt, threatening a "down tools" policy. Manchester " shop stewards " threaten the same. Ireland, champion example of meanness, chooses this hour for arming rebels and preaching the "Irish Republic." The Australians — Misoricord and Justice both disdain them: Let us not speak of them, but look, and pass. And thero are politicians both in and out of Parliament who tell our soldiers that their lives are being cast away by reckless and incompetent commanders. Looking around him, the most thorough-going British optimist may count now and then on a bad quarter-of-an-hour.

And yet, being the people we are, somehow we have come to the top of the world. Being the people we are, somehow we have placed in the field seven and a-half millions of men, and not on one front only. We are campaigning in East Africa, and have just cleared out the Hun. We are campaigning in Mesopotamia, and have taken Bagdad ; in Palestine, and have taken Jerusalem. We maintain an army of sorts at Salonika; British forces with the Italians are helping to save Italy: in France and Flanders we stand rank and rank beside the gallant French, and with them bear the brunt. There is a hackneyed phrase, vague and fine, about having "the defects of one's qualities." That is what is the matter with the British people. Their qualities have carried them far and will carry them through, spite of the defects which these same qualities connote. Listen for a moment to Mr G. K. Chesterton :

Not in any other story of mankind has the irony of God chosen the foolish things so eatasfrophically to confound the wise. For the common crowd of poor and ignorant Englishmen, because they only knew that they were Englishmen. burst through the filthy cobwebs of four hundred years and stood where their fathers stood when they knew they were Christian men. The English poor, broken in every revolt, bullied by every fashion, long despoiled of property, and now being despoiled of liberty, entered history with a noise, of trumpets, and turned themselves in two years into one of the iron armies of tho world. And when the critic of polities and literature, 'feeling that this war is after all heroic, looks around him to find the hero, he can point to nothing but a mob.

"I have boen greatly struck by tho growth of cigarette smoking. One cannot walk through the streets of any of our towns without seeing mere youths, some of them I should think not more than 13 or 14 years of age, smoking cigarettes. This is contrary to law, but it is done without question."—Sir Robert Stout, de omnibus rebus, in a northern paper.

" I can remember when there was only one person in Dunedin to smoke cigarettes," continued Sir Robert. There is a Dunedin tradition of that pioneer. He was a man in public life, sat upon boards and the like; when in session -would automatically roll the material of cigarettes between his tobacco-stained fingers, wrap the paper about it, produce a match and be on the point of up when stopped by the scandalised chairman. He was the first in a never-ending procession. Tobacco smoking will never end ;for the all-sufficing reason that men like.it. Yet it is indisputable that people who do not smoke are just as happy. There was no smoking in Shakespeare—you must come down to Cowper before there is any recognition in the poets of " the short black tube that fumes beneath the nose." Nevertheless tho people of Shakespeare's time and earlier were reasonably happy. The world went very well then. Tobacco is a modern luxury, and we pay for it in more than coin. From a keen intellect tobacco takes off the fine edge; the smart business man is a trifle less smart, the energetic man a trifle less energetic. Which nobody can deny, and we may as well admit the truth. All the same, people will still go on smoking, because, ead to say, they like it.

When Sir Robert Stout visits Otago, his native heath, so to speak, 'twere pity he should laclc an Otago welcome. With him, old times come back, old identities, old controversies, quorum pars magna fuit. There must have been a good many spoiled evangelicals and lapsed Presbyterians about in those days, for they were able to run a Freethought lecturer (im ported from Melbourne), build a Freethought Lyceum (on the site of the Rev. Dr Burns's First Church), and to publish a Lyceum Guide, now unhappily out of print, or I should say as I said of yore, Buy the book and ruin the doctors. And again the tag holds of Sir Robert,— quorum pars magna fuit. Then thero were politics; and never were politics so lively as in the Stout-Vogel time. Then came the knighthood;—our typical democrat had risen superior to prejudice and entered the realm of higher things. And this is what we said :—

Ave, Roberta ! —Macte Virtute esto ! Sir Bob, your elevation We hail with shout; Yet, condescend ! To us poor plebs Continue "Stout!" And still in war political Out-snout, each spouter. Than all our foes, than all your own, Continue stouter; But not in war religious 1 Our hope devoutest Is there to find you, as of yore, Though Stout, not stoutest! Tt was a loss to the gaiety of nations when Sir Robert was shunted to the judicial bench. To-day, back in Dunedin, he sits chief man in a sanhedrin of academical fossils debating the non-utility of Latin. O Hamlet, what a falling-off was there! All the same, Sir Robert Stout can never come back to us without the kindliest welcome.

This debate in the University Senate on the leaving out of Latin from a liberal education turned on a motion by the viceChancellor, Professor Macmillan Brown, that Latin be left in. There was nothing new to be said, and the Vice-chancellor said it in detail, and to the Vice-chancel-lor's doctrine I cordially subscribe. But in the Senate things proceeded thus: Professor Kirk disagreed with the whole of the views expressed by the Vice-chan-cellor, but proposed supporting his motion. Sir Tibbs, on the other hand, agreed with every word that had fallen from the Vicechancellor but would vote against his motion. The Chancellor at this point, falling back on his legal memories, might ha/ve recalled the presiding judge who agreed with the views of Brother A on his right for the reasons advanced Against them by Brother B on his left. And, after hearing Dr Anderson oppose the motion though still desirous of seeing Latin taken, and the Rev. A. Cameron do the same though he valued Latin and its discipline very highly, the Chancellor's memory might again have come to his relief: — Mr Leach made a speech Angry, neat, but wrong; Mr' Hart, on the other part, Was heavy, dull, and long. Mr Parker made the case darker, Which was dark enough without; Mr Cook cited Irs book. And the Chancellor said—"l dw'bk."

Brat the last lino needs mending. In matters senatorial our Chancellor never doubts, save as respects the utility of the Board of Studies and the common sense of certain professors who luxuriate therein. When it came to count of heads, the Get-Rich-Quick .senators (anti-Latin) numbered eleven; their opponents, who hold that mail doth not live by bread alone, numbered no more. Result, paralysis,—nothing done. Hut Latin's goose is cooked, all the same. Prom a " Country Bumpkin," North Canterbury, Christmas Day, 1917: — Dear " Civis,"—While sending to yon my annual greeting, J would say that I havo found 1 your cheeriness a fiite. stimulus during-' the awful months and year-s of this great war. Jvecp bravely on with your cyo on our goal—tho defeat and binding-down of, the barbarous Hun.

Wo rely upon the steel, tho guns wheel to wheel, And our men behind the steel and tho guns; And trust the Higher Power, Who hath fixed their day and hour, And is master oi' the overmastering Huns. I would like to hear of a little more patriotism. in our public schools. Every (fay tho liiuis drum it into their small fry that they are defeating those perfidious English. Every now and then they are flag-waving and celebrating imaginary victories , over us, while wo g'o-a.bout pulling lofig faces and saying, " We can't beat those Germans." Courage, brother! do not falter; —spite of Dismal Jerries in school or out we shall pull through all right. Let mo commend as a New Year pick-me-up for anybody who can get at it Mr Gerard's book, "My Four Years in Germany." Next to tho President himself, the President's ExAmbassador to Germany is the most potent war-influence in America. Between them they will keep the American peoplf up to the mark.

What the mark is as the Americans see it wo may learn from a sentence or two in which Mr Gerard traces the war to its causes and predicts the nature of its ending:— '

It is because in the dark- cold, northern plains of Germany there exists an autocracy, deceiving a great people, poisoning- their minds from one generation to another, and preaching the virtue and necessity of war; and until that autocracy is either wiped out or made powerless there can bo no pcace on earth. . . . And there must be no German peace. The old regime, left in control of Germany, of Bulgaria, of Turkey, would only seek a favourable moment to renew the war, to strive n.gu.in for the mastery of tho •world. Fortunately America, bars the wnv —-America, led by a fighting President who 'will allow no, compronjise with bputal autocracy.

That is the American note. And to it the British note answers well: — '

If Gcimany had conquered all Europe and wo and the Americans had 1 to fight her alono with our sea-power and our economic weapons we should ;<till hold on and beat her in tho end. While wo command the sra sho will not get the supplies 011 which her industry depends, and by which alone her population can recover, and with this immenso \Veapon in our hands, we arc undismayed by tho latest as by the earliest manifestations of Prussian might.

From " Letters to the Antipodes," by the editor of the democratic Westminster Gazette.

Mr Massey holds that King George the Fifth is a lineal descendant of King David. In reply to remarks thereanent in this colnmn comes to me a letter: — Dear "Civis," —l remember yours ago you said that your work was to shoot - folly on tho wmg,. and I!m with you there; but I have been forced to the conclusion that, you are not absolutely infallible in your judgment as to what is folly, or that you have a little of the larrikin element m you and now and

again take a ping at a tamo duck just

for fun. This is preface to an argument in support of the doctrine (snufied out by anthropologists as " abject nonsense ") that the British people are the Lost Tribes of Israel. The argument (ten pages long, no less! and. for that reason doomed) is supplemented by a list of names, —a dozen clergy or so, a score or two of laymen headed by the Right Hon.. the Earl of Dysart, all true believers. I dare say as good a showing could be made for the doctrine that the earth is fiat. In argument, certainly. There exists a book that flattens out this terraqueous globe by argument, if argument can do it, —a book crammed .with logic and mathematical formulae. Its author, hiding his light under a bushel, styles himself " Parallax." Anybody curious on the subject may inquire at the second-hand book 6hops.

The argument of my British-Israel friend does not avail itself, as it might, of the Jonah story. The prophet Jonah, mystically regarded, is the people of Israel. Enslaved by race prejudice—an age-long >vice of his countrymen—Jonah disobeyed a divine command to mission the Gentiles; in punishment he was swallowed by a whale. Which is to say that for the same offonce tho people of Israel were engulfed and lost amongst the Gentile nations. If we, the British, are Israel, it follows that we, the British, were once in the whale's belly. Indeed it can be by no means certain that we are not there still. Tho story goes of a preacher who—possibly when expounding this theory of Jonah, made in Germany— said inadvertently " bale's whelly " instead of " whale's belly." Correcting himself, he got it "bell's whalev," and then collapsed. The only consolation left him was that he had preached at least one sermon which the hearers of it would never forget. This story is not necessarily a fact; it is an anecdote. Some time ago the Argus reported a discussion in the Melbourne Presbytery on a proposal to use written prayers. Said one opponent (and this is a fact): " Where would Jonah have been, when in the whale's belly, if he had had to use a written prayer?" Upon this a contemporary commentator remarks:

Where would Jonah have been? I should say he would have been in the wh,ale's belly- However, that is neither here nor there. Tho point- oi the illustration was that a writ-tew prayer would not liavo been suitable in tho oiroumstances—probably for want of a hVlit. Tho other, side might have replied that it was not proposed to use written prayers in whales' bellies, With eeiual prtrtinence. also, they might have asked whether Jonah would not. have found it qnito as difficult to sing a Scotch

psalm. * Story for story, I must needs cap 'this with another. An American paper, out Wetet, rennrts the Rev. Arthur Anniceseed, of Utica, whose preaching is " very delicate." " Last Sunday he read a portion of Sacred Writ detailing a rehearsal of Jonah's submarine adventures. 'We come now to Jonah,' said Arthur, ' who passed three days and three- nights in the whale's—ahem—society.' " Cms.