PASSING NOTES.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 19067, 12 January 1924, Page 6

PASSING NOTES.

The schoolboy who held that if throe | sides of a triangle are equal “the fourth side must be equal too, sir,” was not : more puzzle-headed than the new Parlia- j ment meeting this week at Westminster. It is an easy axiom that in any triangle two sides taken together are longer than the third side; but the Q.E.D. required at Westminster is that two sides taken together shall be shorter than the third side. Yes, political trigonometry, whether at Westminster or at Wellington, is a puzzle-headed business. The three-party system may give you a House of three minorities, one of which minorities must held sway and carry on though the other two taken together count more votes. In this posture of affairs at Westminster the Labourites alone, are cocksure and happy. Mr Ramsay MacDonald, greeted' as the “future Prime Minister” and up to his neck in business, is already allotting portfolios,—one of them to a lady. His followers proceed through the streets to Westminster with tumult and shouting, iu charabancs, with brass bands and the Red Flag. In the House they signalise their presence by the bootings and bowlings of football barrackers at a cup tie. Harmless eccentricities, you think, —and momentary at that, since no Labourite Government, being in a minority, can last. May be ; and so this ill-mannered hilarity the “crackling of thorns under a pot,” as Solomon says. But it is a crackling that will do the Labourites no good. Usually in the British House of Commons bad manners are bad tactics. Except for the privileged -classes — schoolmasters, university professors, and such like—the holidays are pretty well over and done. Whilst re-adjusting our neck to the collar, listen for a moment to a “Social Heretic”: Dear “Givis,”—ln this country, and for the multitude, midsummer holidays have poor excuse. Unless a man wants trout fishing, or long tramping—over to the West Coast, “the finest walk in the world”; or to visit friends in some distant town. But if it is mere holiday as release from work that is in question, wo have Sunday and Saturday all the year round; and the every-day hours of work arc short. In Dunedin we needn’t talk of going to the country and the seaside ; the country and the sea-side have come to us. Look at our parks and recreation grounds;—Dunedin is a Garden City. The Pacific Ocean and miles of beach arc ours for a threepenny tram ride. For most of us a holiday that runs to weeks is at best a luxury. But I suppose we can afford it. Doubtless we can afford it. And, in a way, we can afford the race meeting, and the totalisator, and the “drink bill” —which should include tea as well as alcoholics, —and the p : cture theatre, and the vaudeville, and the dress vagaries of our womankind. Not all luxury is waste. I detect no tendency to the pessimism, sensuous and lazy, of Omar Khayyam; Ah, my Beloved, fill the cup that clears To-day of past Regrets and Future Fears: To-morrow! —why, to-morrow I may be Myself witli yesterday’s sev’n thousand years! For some we loved, the loveliest and the beat That from his vintage rolling Time hath prest, Have drunk their cup a round or two before And one by one crept silently to rest! At the opposite pole and equally odious is the American hustler. Our place is betwixt and between. Medio tutissimus ibis. “Pussyfoot in Scotland” is the heading of a paragraph m the Saturday Review of November 10. So the reproach of using this term “Pussyfoot” is not exclusively ours; it is shared by the English press. “Reproach” did I say?— Quite a mistake; “Pussyfoot” is the happiest of happy inventions. - It suggests a stealthy approach, a velvet paw, and the sudden unsheathing of the talons of a wild cat. Such and no other has been the story of Pussyfoot in America. But in Scotland so far says the Saturday Review—“the Pussyfoots have gained little. The earlier voting results”—unde, a local option system —“showed an increase of about ten per cent, among their supporters, but of nearly twenty cent, in the number of their opponents.” Nevertheless wo predict considerable success for Pussyfoot even in Scotland. For nine-tenths'of the Prohibitionists are people eager to work for thencause ; whereas nine-tenths of the anliProhibitionists , ar e merely passive resistors to Pussyfoot. Quite naturally. And if Pussyfoot reached out his velvet paw for our tobacco pipe,—as yet he may—we should think the attempt a playful* absurdity and offer only passive resistance. I do not agree with the Saturday Review in thinking that “we may yet see a dry Scotland and some laureate of mineral waters in place of Burns.” If that calamity befell, the authentic Burns of “Scots wha hae and “Take aff your dram” would rise from his grave. Education -results in India; —A missionary •in Travancore, Southern India, writes;—“One morning as I was going out, a man stepped forward, and handed me a neatly folded sheet of foolscap. Not that there* was! anything remarkable in that. It was ah almost daily occurrence. If any one has a grievance to be redressed or a request to make, ho presents a petition. I glanced at the petitioner—a hefty young chap he looked. His petition, endorsed by a teacher —‘All what petitioner says is true’—set forth that tie was an .orphan . (a claim to - compassion sometimes made by petitioners of 50 or 60), that he had recently become a widower, that he had a little girl of six, that his elder brother refused to feed them any longer, that there was no other member of the family who could support them, and that therefore they were m great distress and needed help.” “But why don’t you go to work?” was the obvious question. “I am an educated man,” was his reply. Final and conclusive. He had attended the Mission School, had reached the fourth standard, and therefore could never work. He had lived' on what his young wife earned bv ' field-work, but she was now dead, and' the child was still too small to earn anything. So they were starving. What the missionary ought to have said, hut didn’t,'was (as he admits): “You lazy young' vagabond, go off and work with your fellows in the fields!’ Yet that w‘oiild never have done. In India no “educated man” can work with his hands. We have bestowed a world of good things upon India—says Lord Northdiffo in his travel book—and are repaid by ingratitude. Hurrying through the country, he was glad to get away from “this ungrateful people.” But the people of India are over 300 millions, mostly villagers, reasonably contented, uneducated and unvocal. The ungrateful people, makers of what the newspapers call ■“lndian Unrest,” are city dwellers—a handful of half-educated baboos, clerks in the Civil Service, lawyers, vernacular journalists. And it is we who, in our Quixotism, have half-educated them. Exceptional are the natives of India who go to the English universities; about the measure of their ingratitude and discontent I know nothing;—it is the home staying baboo that makes trouble. Samples of his half-education and general mental equipment have been published for our amusement, here is one of the newest—a mild specimen—from the official letter of a railway clerk: I wish to report the vile manner in winch Driver carried out shunting duties at the station. This Driver is not in favour of the pointsman’s flag nor will ho view the shunter’s signals, but remains murmuring within himself. He then furiously charge the waggons with gravity of his ill-will to do so until content® palm pots were reduced to entire emptiness. I trust T.M. will kindle some warm instructions in the bosom of this Driver! There are fighting tribes in India; the 1 baboo is not among them. If it comes to push of pike the baboo will not be found in the battle-front.

Apropos of Waterloo, incidentally mentioned in this column last week, a correspondent asks whether the “Up Guards and at ’em: ' story holds gone). Wellington was a cool hand, not given to excited exclamations; and yet he might very naturally have flung those words to the men of the square he happened to be near at the moment. And it may be none the less true that when, in the final crisis, he saw Napoleon's Old Guard broken and in flight “he shut his telescope suddenly and exclaimed to ‘the officers about him, ‘Now every man must advance’ ” ; and then, “riding to the edge of the ridge, he stood clear of the smoko, and, hat in hand pointing torward,” he put the whole line in motion. Or at least the whole line of his centre and right. What happened on the left of his far-flung battle front is told by Sir Harry Smith (after whose wife was named at a later day our South African Lady smith) : The enemy had made his last effort on our centre, and the field was so enveloped in smoko that nothing was discernible. The tiring ceased on both sides, and wo on the loft knew that one party or the other was beaten. This was' the most anxious moment of my life. In a few seconds we saw the redcoats in the centre as stiff as rocks, and the French columns retiring rapidly, and there was such a British shout as rent the. air. We all felt then to whom the day belonged. At this moment I saw the Duke, with only one staff officer remaining, galloping furiously to the left. 1 rode out to meet him. “Who commands hero I” “Generals Kempt and Lambert, my lord.” “Desire them to a-et into a column of companies of battalions, and move on immediately.” I said, “In what direction. my lord?” ■‘Right ahead, to be sure.” I never saw his Grace so animated. After a century and more this is still a story to stir the blood. Even the hidebound pacifist must confess to a. thrill. Modern criticism, which has made havoc of so many Bible stories —resolving Samson (“whom the Germans call Simpson, say de Quincey) into a sun myth, and the like—has been equally ruthless in other fields. It comes as a painful shook to read in the Spectator that Julius Caesar, when reporting to the Roman Senate his rapid victory over Pharnaces in Pontus, did not write, “Veni, vidi, vici”—-1 came, I saw, I conquered. Then what did ho write ? Let some reader of this column tell us. At this holiday time books are beyond my reach. If the words “Veni, vidi, vici” that have come down the ages were not in Caesar s despatch they may have been inscribed on the banners of his triumph at Rome. Then there is the historic meeting of Wellington and Blucher on the field of Waterloo, the battle over, the great pursuit now to begin. The transition from Julius Csesar to this is not difficult. According to one version Blucher s first word was, “Am I in time?” According to another he embraced and kissed Wellington, exclaiming, “Mein lieber Kamarade!" and then "Quelle affaire!” which, says Wellington, “was about all the French he knew.” But the further away from the facts the freer scope has the modern rationaliser. What Blucher actually said to Wellington when he arrived in the fateful twilight on the field of Waterloo was not “Am I in time?” but “Excuse me, I’ve taken a blue pill,”‘the rest of his remarks being so Prussian as to be unprintable. Blucher had been unhorsed and ridden over in a cavalry charge two days before. One doesn’t see what he would want with a blue pill. But that was his own affair. Blucher is dead, and I don’t want to say that for that reason he is “a good German.”- Indeed I rather regret tha* the modernisers and rationalisers exhibit him in a ridiculous light. Dear “Civis,” —Quite recently you had a paragraph about absent-mindedness in reference to a student who took away a book from each of two shops, but I have better stories to tell of absentmindedness concerning three old friends of mine, who are among the leading residents in their districts, and are a pattern to the community. The first one walked to the scrub a couple of miles away to cut some firewood with a spade on his shoulder. Half way therelie sat down to rest, and then walked on still with the spade. The face reader told him that if anyone sent him outside for the tomahawk he would bring in the frying-pan. Another friend rode a mile away to a neighbouring farmer to see his daughter, and then two men sat. round the farmer’s hospitable fire with their boots off. Next morning the visitor departed on foot, forgetting his horse, and moreover had put on the old man’s boots instead of his own. Mj' other friend drove in his gig to see the school ma’am one and a-half miles way, tied the horse to the school fence, and there left it, — walking home, preoccupied all the time, thinking of the school ma’am, and talking to her ns if she were present. Examples might be multiplied- It must have been in absence of mind that the Clerk of Ellesmere County Council, Canterbury, phrased an advertisement (Christchurch Sun, December 31) calling a special meeting of the council to appoint the day of the week: on which the Saturday half-holiday will be held.” Then there is a well-known whisky advertisement, incidentally a pictorial example of Scottish humour; Host, pouring into Sandy's tumbler, “Say when.” But Sandy, with averted head and abstracted gaze, says nothing. Absence of mind. Cms.