PASSING NOTES.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 17324, 25 May 1918, Page 4

PASSING NOTES.

T.evelations mid anticipations of the furious offensive that is to hurst upon us I presently may be summed up in the one word Propaganda.. By way of Switzerland, by way <>l Amsterdam, it is all one, —tliev are of (lonnan origin and German editing. Hiey are meant to frighten us. New poison gases invented (in the cables) are disguised or commended (to tlie recipient) by the fruit, scent:; they imitate, apples, oranges, pear:?, plume (a specimen this of Herman humour). Machine guns move to the front -in troops and battalions, make th<i live air thick with flying lead. Mackensen, fetched from the eastern backyards of the war, has come west and holds in leash an army of mantEuvre " which will be flung into any opening which Hindenburg may make when the offensive is renewed. Hindenburg h;i now probably over a hundred shock divisions awaiting* orders, about 40 of which are entirely fresh." Thus and thus, in details awesome and gruesome; in short— 11AYV-HEAD AMD BLOODY-BONES at sight of which we are to take fright and run away. As it was in the beginning! the British tone and temper are a sealed book. Spite of kultur, perhaps by reason of it, the Germans understand nothing of the spiritual forces they are up against. Butchering they understand, — mischievous cruelties, as of an obscene and active ape; what a baboon or gorilla would do among the unarmed and helpless the German does as if to the manner born. From comprehending the mind and motive of the Quixotes who have risen \ip to put him down he is worlds asunder. Don Quixotes they are to him, at the best, —non-understandable, but certainly poisonable and shootable. As a preliminary to poisoning and shooting he thinks to break their nerve. An intelligent animal, the Hun. Apropos of British nerve, a. typical story is retold in " Hie End of the Chapter," by Shane Leslie, a gossipping and highly commendable autobiography lately published. It is the story of the Sayers and Heenan prize-fight—the climax and end of ; the old English boxing without gloves," a contest "•which roused more real feeling between England and America than the ' Alabama.' " For Heenan was an American—the "Benicia Boy." Sayers was "the champion of England," and'the champion of England " was, after the Archbishop of Canterbury, unofficially the second person in the realm." A light Sussex man, sft Bin, . Sayers faced his rival, a Colossus, 6ft iin, " like a polopony against a dray-horse, and though his right arm was soon put out of action fought 30 rounds with his left' until Heenan's face was a red mask. Unfortunately. Sayers's backers broke the ring rather than lose their money, and the fight was declared drawn." Break the ring is precisely what our white-flag pacifists would so. the "peace by negotiation" intermeddlers, with Lord Lansdowne at their head. Whilst waiting for Fritz in his next phase, we may with profit hark back to earlier struggles and note how handsomely the pacifists, the croakers, and other marplots were brought to confusion. Six years we made war in the Peninsula, 18081814, and the sixth year brought triumph. But at many a- point between start and finish the All-is-losts were shrieking Up to near the end their note was .this :— The impossibility of defending Portugal with an English army supported by Portuguese levies is so self-evident that T to reason upon it further would be worse than ridiculous. Before six months aro over, if our troops do not escape on board ship, the onlv English soldiers left in the Peninsula will bo prisoners. But then as now there were stout hearts in the field; there were stout hearts at home. And the war was won. Less known to British people, or forgotten, are the ups and downs of the American Civil War, 1861-1865. In July, 1864, the Secession armies were "within an ace of capturing Washington; fighting came within sight and sound from the city. In August, . Horace Greeley, editor of the New York Tribune, wrote thus to President Lincoln : I know that nine-tenths of the wholo American people, North and South, are anxious for peace—peace on almost any terms —and utterly sick of human slaughter and' devastation. I know that to the general eye it now seems that the rebels are anxious to negotiate and that wo repulse their advances. . . . The cry has steadily been, No truce! No armistice ! No negotiation ! No mediation! Nothing but surrender at discretion ! I never heard of suchjfatuiw before. There is nothing like it in history. It must result in disaster, or all experience is delusive. How well we know this note! "Verily there is nothing new under the sun. It only remains to add that within six months the Secession armies had capitulated, and the Union was restored. I cite these things by way of first aid to Faintheart and Feebleguts, as the National Review would say. Next to President Wilson, the most Eowerful man in tho world to-day is is son-in-law, William Gibbs M'Adoo. —Editor Collier's Weekly. After this prodigious " gape," as Horace would call it, we naturally ask for a justification. And a justification is duly supplied. President Wilson is the choice of a hundred millions of free people who do as he says and permit him to say what he will. That is pretty much what it comes to. The millions subject to King George, if subject is the word, are to President Wilson's millions as five to one, or nearly; but under King George a dozen Parliaments come between governor and governed, some of them—the Australian variety, for instance—gey ill to live with. Remains that mighty man the Kaiser; but, strictly, the Kaiser is not in this comparison ; liis subject millions—dumb-driven cattle, cannon-fodder—have no such thing as a free democrat among them, not one. We are not talking about slave-drivers; wo are talking about the rulers of the free. And so this analysis, duly panned out, leaves President Wilson cock of the walk—the most powerful man in the world. I delight to think so. If there is one man who more than another is out to smash the Kaiser and his hell-born system of things, President Wilson is that man —the most -powerful man in the world. Our half-baked democrats in New Zealand and Australia may note that the consummate flower of democracy is not a labour federation plotting behind closed doors, nor any kind of invisible caucus at the back of ail, but, once again, a man, out in the open—a man with a will and a strong right hand. Second in power and might to the President, but to the President only, is the President's son-in-law, William Gibbs M'Adoo. William Gibbs M'Adoo is Secretary to the Treasury—at a time when the richest country in the world is spending ten to twenty times as much money per year as it ever spent before. Mr M'Adoo is Director-general of the railways of the United States—the active managing head of the greatest railway empire in the world, now united for the first time in a single national system. And Mr M'Adoo is so much more likely a candidate for the Presidency than any other member of the Democratic party that only a, conspiracy of circumstances can prevent his running in the next election if he wishes. The Public Finance of the United States is a big job; the railways of the United States are a big job—the biggest on this planet barring the command of armies;— Mr M'Adoo shoulders both. The main business of the Government is kept within the family, it seems; yet nobody accuses the President of nepotism. Strange, indeed ! We are always learning something new in American democracy. It was an eminently democratic thing to take over for the duration of the war the railway system ; but only a high-handed autocrat could have done it. The working agencies from director to engine-driver remain; but at top sits William Gibbs M'Adoo, — no sleeping Buddha, no graven figurehead, not a bit! This is how he talks to them: If during the poriod of Government control tho railroads are at all well managed and show a marked improvement over the old system., the American public would not want the roads to go back to private management.

But if, as some peoolo have snjjgesled io 11:0, 'the roads arc.ill man- L aged—thai is, if attempt*. arc made by _ railway officials to to run the roads V. that ( iowinnuMifc control is shown in a ! poor ligl>' -do they suppose l I won't I | liavo sense enough to sou it or ea.nd enough to change them, as well as the conditions?—Wjm.iam G. M'Adoo. More power to his el how 1 There is a fund of comfort in knowing that this uncompromising hustler is 110 whit behind ai the head of the house in determination to tl "make the world safe for democracy," li' and with that intent to lay low the llohenzolleni. " w Under the heading '' Pot Pourri " — which is French for "Rotten Pot," and in its bent-known utc denotes a receptacle for spices and decayed rose leaves—Father Coffov maunders amiably thruugh half a column of Tuesday's l)aily Times, —his theme "Civis," Howard Elliott, and C other disturbers of the ecclesiastical ' peace. Whoever has snifled at a ripe and well-compounded pol pourri will remember its Sabean odour, delicate, faint, and sweet, — A spicy srent Of cinnamon and sandal blent, Like the soft aromatic gales That meet the mariner who sails Through the Moluccas, and the seas That wash the shore of Celebes. " "Pot Pourri," forsooth!—the Rev. Father £ was flattered. However, for all the s , flourish of his start, he lapses presently ' into a, simile, illustration, comparison, j ( that is fragrant in the inverse way : — £, Spread a report that a dead whalo I has been stranded on the beach, close a to one of our laxge cities, and at once you create a harvest for the tram com- _ panics. Iho more the carcase smells ' the larger the crowds who desire to regale their olfactory* nerves with the 8 rotten odours. On the same principle I of human philosophy, start a heresy t hunt, and all the harriers join in the t; chase until the howl they sot up tor- c ments and sickens decent people. It t has been known before now that the — harriers, finding they were deceived, turned and rent to pieces *the deceiver. The game will happen again. Which things are an allegory. For the kej', we have to ask who or what is the dead whale? It can't be "Civis";— "Civis " is alive and writing this Note; it can't be Howard Elliott; —Howard Elliott is no whale. Respect for the cloth forbids us to think of the Rev. Father himself. I give it up. Let us all give it up. Tli ere is no harm in Father Coffey. I could _,spend an evening with Father Coffey (after the manner of Father Tom and the Pope) as comfortably as with another man, and better than with most. But, when he writes to the Times, it is a pity that after beginning with attar of roses he should end among the obscene stenches of a dead whale. 1 A truce, however, to banter. I have here a correspondent who assures me that I have failed to estimate aright the body of honest opinion behind the P.P.A. movement—the length and the breadth and the strength of it. Dear "Civis."—l am in so general agreement with * you on questions of theology, religion, and politics, that I am always afraid when you differ from me that you are right and I am wrong. I know in any case that you aro always fair-minded, courageous, and true to the truth as you see it. We aro in substantial agreement, I think, on the P.P.A. But I do not think you have quite fathomed the nature and extent of the feeling in our midst against the Roman Church, or seen the justification for it. You might have seen the essential unseosonableness of the Roman attitude in their wild onslaughts on your column, and their utter inability to understand how they must appear to fair-minded outsiders with no natural animus against them, among whom I certainly reckon mys n lf. ... If you make use at all of what T am writing. I shall at least have the satisfaction that I have put my point of view before a leader of public opinion in Otago whose judgment and written word I value very highly. First, then, Ido not think that the explanation of Howard Elliott's triumphal procession is to bo found in the froth of the Tablet and the Green Ray. It seems to me and I am sure to many others (some of us unable to support Howard Elliott in any way) that the Tablet and Green Ray are merely symptomatic, and that the vast mass of articulate and inarticulate Romanist feeling and conviction is behind them. The Roman clergy homologated the attitude of the Tnblet as emphatically as they could ; and l there has been no word of protest from anv representative Romanist layman or body of such. So far as one can judge, the Tablet has its Church behind it. as neither the Church Envoy nor th°- Outlook has. Of course the Green Rav is not a Church paper. But it is written bv Romanists for Romanists, is representative of a considerable bodv of Romanist opinion, and is of no interest to anybody else. (Roman-st is a good word. It is used by Maeaulay, Pater. and Ruskin. among others. See Oxford' dictionary.) Hereupon follows an indictment running into many folios and far exceeding my limit. I recognise'in the writer a serious :ritic, a student to boot, an intelligent ind unimpassioned observer whose opinion is entitled to be heard. For this week we may le-ave it at that. "Where do they get these things from?" inquires a contributor of grammatical snares and strange turns of speech. Why do we say " a friendly game of cricket," as though there might otherwise be a lurking suspicion that a measure of ferocity was imported into the game? Why is it written that " visitors are kindly requested " to do such and such a thing? Where does the kindness come in? The kindness is on the part of the visitor perchance. He may keep off the gra6s as he is invited to do. Or maybe the kindness lies in the endeavour of authority to soften the asperity of its mandate. Read the instruction for the stopping of a city tram-car, and see how affability triumphs over curtness. The correspondents who delight to say that the slaughter was terrific and " the advancing horde -was completely decimated,' possibly -conceive that they are implying that only one man in ten was spared. But as an example of befuddled expression take the following, to which another correspondent begs my attention : After having made immense sacrifices for its defence, Germany wants to be sure that the next war will find her better prepared to repel the aggression which we may bo certain will be made as soon as Franco will have prepared her forces and found allies. That alone is the deplorable consideration, and not a desire to enlarge our country, of which the territory is big enough, which obliges me to insist 011 the cession of territories, which has no other object but to make more remote the point of departure of the. French armies, which iu future will come to attack us. It is some consolation to lenow that thfe origin of this, with its jostling array of " which's," is Teutonic, and that in fact it is an extract from a letter written to the ex-Empress Eugenie in 1870 by the grandfather of Wilhelm 11. It was recently quoted by the French Minister of Foreign Affairs. After all, the form and the substance are worthy of each other. Civis.