PASSING NOTES.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 19282, 20 September 1924, Page 6

PASSING NOTES.

Councillor .MacManus again as a man of principle. When Lord Jellicoo makes his farewell visit next month and the Dunedin citizens would worthily speed the parting guest. Councillor MacManus will be the chip in porridge—on principle. Thus, at the last meeting of the City Council— Cr MacManus: I must take up an attitude which requires a little delicacy. On principle the movement that I am representing is opposed to Governors of any kind at all. Whenever they get into power they have always sought to remove the Governor, as they have done in Queensland. Cr Begg asked what party Cr MaoManus referred to. . Or MacManus: lam representing the Labour organisations of the city. At least I was their official candidate, and was elected upon their principles. In charity we must suppose that Mr MacManus is not the anarchist he would make himself out to be. “ Opposed to Governors of any kind at all ” —then although a City Councillor he must be opposed to his Worship the Mayorawful thought! Especially to his Worship when arrayed in robes of office as lately renewed: The robe is made of the finest corded silk. Violet blue bands of velvet embellish the edges, cape, sleeves, neck, and shoulders, and the same material is used to cover wide side panels. The backs and side "panels and facings are lined with satin of the same colour, while the bottom edges of the panels and cape sleeves are trimmed with gold fringe. A broad ' band of ermine encircles the bottom of the robe, and a narrower strip of the same fur is run round the edges of the neck parallel with the bands of velvet. Three short gold chains are fitted for holding the Mayorai chain in position. His Worship will wear a new hat of the conventional three-corner design. If Councillor MacManus is really the dangerous anarchist we would gladly think him not to be, it is his plain duty to shake off from his feet the dust of the Council chamber, doffing his honorific titles of “ Councillor ” and “Mister,” that he may parade the streets in a red nightcap as “ Citizen MacManus ” —on principle. In opposing on principle Governors “ of any kind at all” Mr MacManus, if we may believe him, represents “ the Labour organisations of this city.” Well, I for one do not believe him. The fanatics who would break up the Empire are few. They exist, and their doctrine is that Ireland and India should be independent, that Canada, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand shonld send the King’s representative packing and declare a Republic, which in New Zealand might be a comfortable little family affair with perhaps Mr Holland at the head of it, and wiseacres like Citizen MacManus to advise him. A comfortable little family arrangement—the labour unions, in their own elegant phrase, to “ boss the show.” The fanatics who dream thus are few, and they are arrant fools. . One of them in the House the other day, arguing against the need of military or naval defence, delivered himself of this sublime ineptitude: I am one of those who believe that our best defence is our population, a healthy population, a well-housed population, and as far as is humanly possible the development of New Zealand industries. I bethink me of a Somerset folk song—- “ There was an old fox and he had a loving wife, and he went out one moonshiny night thinking to get something very very nice before he lay down in his den, 01 ” He went on till he came to a yard Where there were fat ducks and geese to bo had; He swore that the fattest should grease his beard Before he lay down in his den, 01 He took the grey goose by the neck. And up he threw her across his back, And as he went along she went “Quack, quack,’’ And her legs hung dangling down, O! According to our New Zealand Solon the goose’s defence against the midnight fox was to grow fat and ever fatter. But the Dunedin labour unions are hardly such geese as to believe him. My friend Pussyfoot when arguing in the newspapers has two things to remember, if he ever knew them, which I doubt;—two things, paradoxes both. One, that there is nothing so deceptive as facts, except figures. The other, that there are three grades in mendacity—lies, big-big-D lies, and statistics, positive, comparative, and superlative. Our Dunedin Pussyfoot revels in statistics, which, for the most part, must have been evolved by some other Pussyfoot elsewhere from his moral consciousness, as the German evolved the camel. Thus: “ To show how State Control operates I may mention,” he says, “that in Quebec city there were 12,000 drunks arrested in one year.” That is 1000 a month, say 250 a week, or 30 odd a day. A Pussyfoot gobemouche may believe this; nobody else will. Mr Louis A. Taschereau, Premier of the Province of Quebec, says that under “bone dry,” of which blessedness Quebec had a two years’ experience, “ adulterated alcohol flooded the Province and the people were being poisoned. We did all in our power to stem the evil, hut in vain. Those who carried on this illicit trade, with their appetite whetted by the enormous profits, stopped at nothing. Many of our officers were victims of their manceuvres. This state of affairs was daily becoming worse.” There is not a man of good faith who will not admit that it (the ‘ bone dry ” regime) was disastrous —disastrous from the point of view of temperance and disastrous from the point of view of public morals. Driven to intervene, the Taschereau administration introduced a form of State control. The new law is a success from a moral point of view. Under the old system we had discontent, lawlessness, disregard for authority; now we have satisfaction, quiet, and obedience to authority. Never has a liquor law been respected as well as the present law It represents the will of the people—you can have no other law that works. This is the Hon. Louis A. Taschereau, Premier of the Province of Quebec. But what is he as an authority on Quebec affairs in comparison with a Dunedin Pussyfoot? Statistics—yes, here is an example from the “ Vanguard,” Pussyfoot organ, of September 13: A Local Option Experiment at Wall-send-on-Tyne. . . The voting took place on Thursday, 19th June, between the hours of 10 a.m. and 8 p.m., and resulted as follows: — Intoxicating liquors not to bo hold 499 Intoxicating liquors not to> be sold 499 Majority 367 The result is surely a great encouragement to Temperance workers to press for Local Option. Encouraging and more than encouraging, —conclusive indeed. And a serviceable illustration of Pussyfoot’s happy-go-lucky handling of facts and figures.

Dear “ Civis,” —In a volume of “ Social and Diplomatic Memories ” by Sir James Ronnell Rodd there is a good deal about Kitchener during his early time in Egypt, both before and after the Soudan campaign. Lord Cromer ■was then our Agent and ConsulGeneral in Egypt —virtually its ruler—with Sir James Rodd as second in command. In 1896 Kitchener Pasha, com-mander-in-chief of the Egyptian army, was up the Nile preparing for his advance upon the Soudan—organising, railway making, and occasionally scrapping with the desert tribes. Sir James Rodd says: " K. writes to me—- ‘ The thing that has given mo the greatest satisfaction during all this business has been (he kindly support I have received from the Lord. 1 never was so well done in my life, and I can tell you when one has a good deal on one’s shoulders the confidence it gives one to feel thoroughly strong support at one’s back is a comfort.’ ” It could not be Lord Cromer that is meant by “ the Lord ” ; nobody would talk in that way. Yet if read in a religious sense the sentence is very curious. Had Lord Kitchener an evangelical upbringing? Not unlikely. He came of a military

family, and at one time there was a good deal of simple-minded piety amongst military officers, in the Indian army especially. Later, when K. of K. and commanding in South Africa, he replied to the telegram of a chaplain in one of the camps suggesting that as the Boers seemed on the point of giving in the hymn “Peace, Perfect Peace’’ should be sung at the military services on the following Sunday : “ A very good hymn; but how about ‘Onward Christian soldiers’? Kitchener knew about hymns; —a com-mander-in-ohief must know _ something about everything. In my opinion, ail the -same, when writing of his indebtedness to “ the Lord ” he must have meant Lord Cromer and no other.

Professor Leacock, who teaches economics in a Canadian university, occasionally escapes from his own subject—a dry and thirsty land where no water is—into the pleasant fields of humour. Quacks and quackery furnish the theme with which in his latest book he amuses himself. Food quacks, who, on application in response’to advertisement will prescribe a diet, —e.g., Breakfast menu for an adult: 100 calories of nitrogen dioxide 100 calories (ten pounds) of pop corn 100 calories (one packet) of Bird seed. Next, a “ success in life ” course awaits you, in which (at the cost of one dollar fifty) you learn how to obtain a large increase of salary by “ developing personality in yourself.” First thing needed for acquiring Personality— Get into harmony with yourself. A bit difficult, but practice will show yon how. Next, make the effort so far as you can to set up— A bilateral harmony between your inner and your outer ©go. This done, start and see what you can do to— Extend yourself in all directions. As soon as yon begin to feel that you are doing it, try, gently at first but with increasing emphasis, to — Revolve about your own axis. When yon have got. this nicely, slowly and carefully at first— Lift yourself to a new lervel of thinking— “ and when you have got up there, hold on!” Is this Pelmanism? What Pelmauism may be, and who the hypothetical Pelman that invented it may have been, I have long wondered. Once I asked a student of this much advertised cult. “ 0," said he, “ I didn’t go very far,” “But what is Pelmanism?” I persisted. “ Well you know,” said he, “ I could hardly say; of course, there’s a lot in it; but I gave it up.” Further than this my curiosity could not get.

From Manaia: —a correction: Dear “Givis,” —In my note on the “ Scottish Honours ” by an overlook on my part it is made to. appear that the attempt to remove the “ Honours ” was in the time of Edward, when the “ Stone of Destiny ” was taken away. Such, however, is not the case. It was at the time of the Union with England that the Minister's wife took the Honours from the custody of the “ Lords of the Congregation ” as mentioned in my note.

Since we are correcting, I may bring in a correction of my own. Last week, on the subject of American New Poetry, I said that “ in America the New Poetry seems a little newer than anywhere else.” Somehow the “ a ” dropped out, making “a little newer” into “little newer,” and reversing the sense. To show how far this newness goes I permit myself one tther eexhibit—just one, a Poem by E. E. Cummings: impossibly

motivated by midnight the flyspecked abdominous female indubitably tellurian strolls emitting minute grins each an intaglio. Nothing has also carved upon her much too white forehead a pair of eyes which mutter thickly (as one merely terriculous American an instant doubts the authenticity of these antiquities—relaxing hurries elsewhere; to blow incredible wampum' Not a fragment, this, a poem complete as it stands, and published in good faith as “Poetry” by the Transatlantic Review. V Cms.