PASSING NOTES.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 18198, 19 March 1921, Page 4

PASSING NOTES.

The meteoric transits of the Rev. Howard Elliott come upon us with a flash, as the manner of meteors is; also, as the manner of meteors is, they leave behind a darkness thicker than before. Reading in Monday’s Daily Times a report of Mr Howard Elliott's latest meeting, we move about in worlds not realised. The Borgias are still at the Vatican; for wanting to stop the war Pope Pius X is smothered in his own room by German poison gas; for assisting in the Pope’s policv a cardinal Secretary of State is assisted to follow him out of the world by ground glass put into his sugar; we are back in the Middle Ages! Against Catholics as Roman Catholics, I should say let not so much as a dog move his tongue. The recent Jubilee at St. Joseph’s, the record of the Christian Brothers and the nuns, together with the enthusiasm of the people and the bigness of the ex veto cheques, moved me to sympathy and admiration. But if the Roman Catholic hierarchy are in league with Red Feds and other anarchists to promote revolution and burst up the British Empire, I am with Mr Howard Elliott every time and all the time. It would be easier to discredit him if the Roman hierarchy ceased to discredit themselves bv countenancing the treasonable futilities of their own denominational press. What the average New Zealand citizen says to the R.C. religionist he repeats with emphasis to the labour unionist:—Keep within your own bailiwick. Religion is good, unionism is good—always provided the name be not a cloak of hypocrisy for revolutionary politics. Nobody wants to see wigs oh the green; at least I don’t. Unwilling to promote sectarian strife, I have always been cold towards Mr Howard Elliott. But now that he has taken up his parable against the Red Feds I am coming round. Said Mr Massey in the House the other night; “There are people who would sell their immortal souls to see the Empirq dismembered” ; —and, with his mind’s eye, if not through his glittering official spectacles, he glanced at the Labour corner opposite. In the Daily Times a dreary correspondence, on which the editor, after much long-suffering, has just clapped a stopper, went to show that classes in economics for behoof of that sacred effigy “the worker” fail to satisfy him unless they teach Karl Marx and communism. The “ worker,” as we know him, desires to do as little work as majA be, and to lessen that little by no-slow, stop-work meetings, and strikes. Karl Marx, as seen by Mr H. G. Wells —(I quoted the passage a week or two back) — 4 is "a Bore of the extremest sort”; his book “a monument of pretentious pedantry.” I should deliver up Karl Marx to the “worker,” and the “worker” to Karl Marx. Neither could do the other much harm. Colonel John Ward, of the 25th Middlesex Regiment, sits in Parliament as Labour member for Stoke on Trent. He has to his credit the raising of five Labour battalions for service in the war. Writing in the Nineteenth Century for January, Colonel Ward has some remarks worth quoting apropos of an item of Irish news this week—the hanging of six murderers, in sympathy with whom Dublin went into mourning and made processions in the streets:— On Sunday, the 21st of November, 14 British officers were massacred, some . before their wives, with the most revolting brutality. within a short radius some thousands of police and military auxiliaries, and 5000 British soldiers were bivouacked. Had such an appalling crime been committed against the officers of any other army in the world, vengeance would have been swift and certain. The tale of slaughter would have been such that one gasps at the . very idea of it. But vengeance has no place in the make-up of a British ■ soldier; —the ghouls who mutilated the officers’ bodies before their women knew that. No return massacre took place. “After this example of British discipline”—says Colonel Ward—“who would dare to accuse the British soldier of wanton, undisciplined destruction of life and property?” Who would dare? In the way of slander, the friends oi every country but their own would dare anything. We could adduce some very efficient slanderers in New Zealand. It will be grief and pain to them that at last, months after the crime, a modicum of justice has been done. But, adds Colonel Ward : — The iron discipline of the Army would be entirely undermined if the men could not rely on justice being meted out to those who have so treacherously destroyed their comrades. Vindictiveness is not an element in the character of the British soldier, but the Army has a religious veneration for the memory of its heroic dead. Apropos, again;—it was about these November murders that Father Dominic, who ministered to the Lord Mayor of Cork during his protracted suicide, wrote: “Sunday was a terrible but a wonderful day. The boys got the leaders of the B. and T. reprisals. One of them squealed like a rat.” Nice man, this, for a priest. . From Oamaru: Dear “Civis,” —Your reference to linotype operators earning £6OO to £IOOO a year interests me, as one of the tribe. Don’t you think we are worth it? What would “Punch” do without us? Why, the groat comic journal would lose half its fun. And don’t they furnish “Civis” with some gems of purest rays serene? I pass a mistake of my own on for you. Setting up the church notices the subject of one clergyman’s address was a passage from St. Paul: “Seeing through a glass darkly.” On looking up his “ad.” and finding the text of his discourse “Seeing through a glass darky,” I don't know what the parson said, but I exclaimed when I saw it: “Oh, T!” Yes, —when in his humorous moods, the linotyper, backed up by the proof-reader, can be amusing. A correspondent sends mo a southern paper in which the editor is made to say that the Crusades were led by “Peter and Hermit, who shook Europe by crying, ‘God will it!’” In “Passing Notes” the other week a “palmist” became a “psalmist”—twice lyithin three ridiculous lines “psalmist” for “ palmist ” ! 0 yesas Artemus Ward would say, the linotyper (assisted by the proof-reader) is “an amoosin’ cuss.” On this side of the world, probably his pay has not yet touched the £IOOO a year mark. But whatever he gets he deserves it all.

A drop, sudden and deep, in the price of some staple product—wool, for example—why it comes about and how, who can tell? Wool is not less essential to-day than heretofore; the winters will be not less cold, the limbs and members of shivering populations not leas sensitive. And if the demand for wool is not less, the sale of wool should bring nob less money. It is a logical inference. So much the worse for logic. Things are as they are, and the wiseacre economists not only cannot make them other than they are but cannot even explain why they are as they arc. Mr Massey, from hia coign of . vantage on the Government benches, prophesies that the sheep farmer “ will do well yet.” I could have guessed as much myself; but there is a good deal of vagueness in the “yet,” Meanwhile I wish to ask whether the drop in wool—and coincidentally in meat—will be passed on to the consumer. Are we to expect a sympathetic drop in other things—in motor cars and fur coats, say ? The thing to pray for, say some, is a breakneck competitive rush down of all prices, wages included. We should be none the poorer, really, they say, possibly much the happief. Money is an illusion, coins are but. counters, commodities alone have v'alue, and in the simple life you need only to exchange commodity for commodity. Escaping from these bewilderments, I bring in a cutting from a London paper by the mail: The following colloquy is reported to have passed between two Scots over a deal in woollen cloth: Buyer: “’Oo?” ’• Seller; ‘‘Ay, ’oo.” Buyer: " A”oo?” Seller: “Ay, a’ ’oo.” Buyer: "A* a’oo?” Seller: “Ay, a’ a ’oo ” which being interpreted is: “Wool?” “Yes. wool.” “All wool?” —“Yes, all wool.” “All one wool?”—“Yes, all one tjpoL”

Though this has nothing to say to the drop in prices it is a’ about ’oo, and will be less a curiosity in Otago than it seems to be in London. Dear “ Civis,” —An acid test of patriotism is the National Anthem. Singing it, on© doesn’t think of the King as a person, but as personifying the nation, what it is, and has been, and will be. Get that idea, and singing the National Anthem stirs one’s pride. 'Tis a glorious charter, deny it who can, That’s contained in the words—l’m an Englishman. Haying the fear of the Burns Club before my eyes, I would change the second lin© to——contained in the words —I’m a British man. That reads better. On this subject our well-paid legislators set a bad style: Mr Massey : There is no one in this House who can make a better patriotic speech ’ than Mr Craigie. Mr Vigor Brown: And he can sing “ God Save the King,” too, 1 Mr Massey: Yes. Mr Holland: Any old profiteer will sing it when it suits him. Childish talk; and childish was the whole debate, —a debate on a foregone conclusion. What do you think of tho Christchurch Councillors who when the rest rose to sing the National Anthem remained offensively seated —three of them? Silly asses. Tho chairman followed with a toast: “The health of the King, and to hell with all his enemies.” I take off my hat to that chairman. Exes Eight! I agree that in singing the National Anthem we express our national unity. For that same reason it is that schismatics refuse to sing it. Of “ Kule Britannia,” in itself a poor ditty, *tho same may be said. The Prince of Wales, too; —wherever throughout the Empire the Prince showed his honest face the sentiment of patriotism awoke; he was tho summing up of all British history and all British hope. Then there is the flag, surely the noblest among national emblems. Every political malignant hates the flag. In the French upheaval of 1848 the tricolor was saved to France by a speech of Lamartine’s. He was addressing a Paris revolutionary mob. “The tricolor”—he said—“has made the round of the capitals of Europe; the red flag (le drapeau rouge) has made the round of the Champ de Mars.” That antithesis settled it. But in this matter the French are less favoured than their neighbours, Whoso flag has braved a thousand years Tho battle and the breeze. The flag of the three colours cannot compare with the flag that unites the three sacrificial crosses, the cross of St. George, the cross of - St. Andrew, and the cross of St. Patrick. As it chances lam writing on St. Patrick’s Day, St. Patrick was a gentleman, and there are Irish gentlemen, but St. Patrick was not an Irishman. Any more than De Valera is an Irishman. De Valera was born in New York, his father a Spaniard. And St. Patrick was born in Scotland, his father a deacon of the church, his grandfather a priest. So say the books. Be that as it may, however I shall none the less sport a sprig of shamrock in his honour. Dear “Oivis,” —This paragraph is from Wednesday’s Times.: A penny-pieoe was found in an egg laid by a hen at Stretford Bridge, Herefordshire. The coin was bright, but the yolk of the egg was discoloured. Please could you explain how the penny came to be in the egg? It is for the hen to explain. Why submit this cqnundrum to me? I have investigated the anatomy of the hen by help of a carving knife, and I have learned bo decapitate an egg at the breakfast table; beyond that my acquaintance with the subject does not go f If it be thought remarkable that a penny should come out of an egg, it should remarkable that a hen should « t of an egg. And since there can be ..'/"lien without a preceding egg, and no egg without a preceding hen, the question arises—and it is a question for the biologists—which at the beginning of Tilings was first, the hen or the egg. Connected with eggs are many mysteries, beyond the price in the market. There is the classification adopted by some grocers—New Laid Eggs, Fresh Eggs, Eggs (simply), and—-painful suggestion—Our Own Selected. There is a problem that crops up periodically, and was sent to me for the five-and-fortieth time last week: “If a hen and a half lay' an egg and a half in a day and a half”— etc., apparently never yet solved. Also there is the problem of the hen (or the duck, it is the same thing) in, Canterbury that has laid 350 eggs in less than 350 days. If there could be developed a breed of hens capable of laying eggs with pennies in them, such a breed of hens would sweep tho field. That is so, as sure as eggs is eggs. Civis.