PASSING NOTES.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 19276, 13 September 1924, Page 6

PASSING NOTES.

Snubs and thwarting are the natural portion of a Minority Government. It exists on sufferance. To be or not to bo rests with its enemies and its rivals, who, from time to time, administer a minatory tap on this cheek or that after the manner of a cat playing with a mouse before devouring it. But neither dishonour nor discouragement does Mr Ramsay MacDonald admit, saying to himself as the poet says-r-Ilonour ind shame from no condition rise; Act well your part, there all the honour lies. “ No other Government can boast of ten defeats ’ ’; —and he parades the record as a decoration. “Act well your part’’ carries him to Geneva and the League of Nations, where in a line-out for the photographer (see Otago Witness, September 2) the central figure is of course Great Britain, and Great Britain is of course Mr Ramsay MacDonald. Blanked by another prectfrious Premier, M. Herriot of France, ho looks well, —that 1 am bound to say. And when this precarious pair leave again for Paris they receive “an ovation.” Chiefly perhaps because of Mr Ramsay MacDonald’s new idea, which is as old as the hills, that by arbitration might disputes leading to war be settled. Compulsory arbitration ; —ay, there’s ' the rub. Who is to apply the compulsion? Precisely this is a crux with the League of Nations itself, —who is to apply the compulsion? When Italy, being a member of the League, bombarded Corfu, and declined the kind offices of the League as arbitrator, it became the duty of Great Britain and France, with the five-and-forty other members great and small, to make war on Italy. Is there any one of them that would have done it? And is •there any one of the Great Powers that would not have decided as Italy decided? Listen to an anti-League critic in one of the English' magazines: On whom did the burden fall of preventing Gorman domination of the world ? On the Great Entente Powers. In those days we used to say, and rightly, that a sacred mission hail been entrusted to us. In saving ourselves we were saving the world. Does anybody assert that during those terrible years our responsibility was the same as that of those Neutral Powers who battened on the necessities, the afflictions, and the ruin of their neighbours? And yet no sooner is the war ended than we cast this burden from us and declare that Holland, Sweden, Denmark, 6 and Switzerland have an equal right to settle the affairs of the world as we who saved civilisation while they looked on and grew fat at our expense. The drift of which is that the Great Powers who fought the war against Germany should accept the responsibility of maintaining peace. The League of Nations is a preaching agency. By all means and with unction let it., preach peace and goodwill. But, as with most preaching agencies, its “ secular arm ” is weak. The Germans, it seems, are about to “repudiate responsibility for the / war.” Nothing surprising in that. After committing his crime it is usual in the criminal to repudiate it. But in this case the effect is a real surprise: In connection with the question of Germany’s war guilt, the Geneva correspondent of Vorwarts states that the nows that the Gorman Government intended to send to the Allies a repudiation of Germany’s guilt caused general stupefaction. Mr MacDonald telegraphed warning tho German Government against committing such an act of folly. M. Branting (Sweden) and Dr Nansen (Norway) acted similarly. A high British personage declared that if Germany did this, then everything was finished Actum est de Balbo, apparently. I don’t see it. Germany’s denial of war guilt is as old as the war itself. In any case, denial will alter neither the facts nor the world’s opinion. But at this point a “ Loyal Britisher ” supplies me with the opinion of 'the Tablet; —ah, the Tablet! An ounce of civet, good apothecary, To sweeten my imagination. In the vicinity of the Tablet I and sniff, —an escape of gas, is it? The following is an exact copy of an answer to a correspondent appearing in the N.Z. Tablet of September 3, 1924; page 26: “J. J. —The Germans did not bombard Rheims Cathedral. The Gormans did not murder priests in Belgium, but the English did in Ireland. We held from tho first that Lord .Grey was the man most responsible for tho Great War, and a great many writers are beginning to have the courage now to say so. The campaign of British calumny during the five vears was one of the ro' 'nineful things in history. Th , < of the daily papers lent then ' to it as though lying was an honourable thing.” What a delirious world of phantoms this unfortunate man inhabits! —a world of gorgons, hydras, and chimeras dire. Talk of delusions!—lt was not the Germans that shattered by gun fire Rheims Cathedral; it was its owners, the Trench. It was not the Germans that murdered Miss Cavell; it was her friends the Belgians. It was not the Germans that sank British hospital ships and drowned the passengers of the Lusitania; fit was the British. And he probably believes all that he says;—which is for him an added woe. There could hardly be a worse. Pussyfoot, making sport for the Philistines, 'occasionally masquerades in the correspondence columns of the Daily Times under the ironic name of “Liberty (see the Times of Tuesday). Pussyfoot’s idea of liberty is liberty to take his neighbour by the throat. 0 the joy of it! Naturally his neighbour would put up a fight—as in America; but that would only heighten the fun. If a poll of the people gave Pussyfoot a majority—which may heaven forfend! —there would be in New Zealand such liberty as never was, one half the community throttling the other half. Pussyfoot’s majority might be the merest handful of votes; no matter! —the law, the magistrates, the police, with an army of spies and informers, would be at his service, and nothing would be left to tho rest of us but to kick against the pricks. Wine that maketh glad the bcarft of man may or may not be good for him; but in either case tyranny is tyranny, and tyranny is no man. Dear “Givis.”—Of lato there lias been mention in tho papers of Thomas Bracken’s musical contribution to a debate in the House of Representatives. According to “Givis,” who of course put, his oar in, the whole House was in morry mood. “ Though sure to please” was somebody’s “wheeze,” and somebody else's “twanging cacophone”; “though soft the silken sibilants of M. W. G.”—a Baptist minister then in the House, Those pleasures pall, We waive them all; Let Bracken strike the string! Arise, dear boy, Enlarge our joy, Sing, modest minstrel, sing! Whereupon the modest minstrel arose and sang “ Behave yoursel’ afore folk.” According to the veracious "Civis” other members followed. Perhaps you could turn up your files. Turn tip the files! —that would he a work of hours, unless you gave the date. All that I remember of the affair is Mr H. S. Fish, of civic fame, in a parody of Gilbert and Sullivan : H. S. F.; I am the member for Dunedin South. Chorus; And a right good member, loo! H. S. F.: You’re very very good, and bo it understood I’ve a little Bill to do. 'Tis to bone another loan for the Harbour that we own And improve with ©con-o-mee; Though thousands have been lent \Ve have all those thousands spent, But we never throw the money in the Deal Chorus: What never? H. S. P.: No, never! Chorus: What never? ju. S. F.: Hardly ever!

Choruai They hardly ever throw the money in the sea! Then vote this loan, this one loan more, And let them spend as they spent before! . . . This must be far back in the history of the Dunedin Harbour Board. Does the “Hardly ever’’ still hold?

I am deservedly taken to task for “a remarkable error.’’ Quoting from “Pinafore,’’! confounded two of the leading personages in that classic, attributing to one of them words spoken by the other. The correspondent who—with pain—convicts me of this enormity would deal tenderly if he could, —“knowing your usual accuracy,” he says, and adds (rubbing it in) “I might say your infallibility, for so it is commonly held.” But what is the good of a usual accuracy and a reputed infallibility if you neglect to verify your references? I reflect with a gasp upon possibilities. Ananias and Sapphira it was that were man and wife, not Sodom and Gomorrah; and Esau sold his birthright for a mess of pottage, not for a pot of message. Shocking to have got wrong on these facts. The historian Gibbon, as he moves through the story of the centuries, quotes authorities incessantly, burdening every page with a retinue of footnotes, and in them, it is said, was never caught tripping. Gibbon verified his references. It is plain that the presiding genius of this column should not do less.

“If you offer a boy of to-day Marryat’s ‘Midshipman Easy’, he will throw it at you,” says a Melbourne bookseller of wide experience. Then there is something radically wrong with the boy of to-day. Dickens is still read —thanks to “Pickwick” I suspect; but Thackeray is not in request, and an attempt to revive Anthony Trollope by a cheap issue had failed. Among Australian readers generally the sex novel was chiefly in vogue; what is chiefly in vogue among Australian youth the Melbourne bookseller did not say. If it is not Marryat, still less will it be Fenimore Cooper or Walter Scott. I blame this degeneracy on the American picture film. Devotees at that shrine do not know what literature is, and will never know. The other day I came upon an American critic whose word for the Tennyson poetry—in particular for “Maud” and “The Princess”—was “tosh.” What should bo the woi'd for the specimen of American poetry I give below? Admittedly it is the New Poetry, but the New Poetry seems little newer in America than anywhere else, weazened Irrefutable- unastonished j two, countenances seated in arranging; sunlight with-ered unapea-king; tWeNtY, fingers, large four gnarled lips totter Therefore, approaching my twentysix selves bulging in immortal Spring express » cry of How do you find the sun, ladies? (gradually verygradually “there is not enough of it’’ their, hands minutely answered. No, —this is not the linotype in a fit. It is a poem by E. E. Cummings, one of four thought worthy of publication by the Transatlantic Review. It is the best of the four, because it is the shortest. Civis.