PASSING NOTES.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 20418, 26 May 1928, Page 6

PASSING NOTES.

Mr Kellogg at Washington and his opposite number at Westminster,. Sir Austen Chamberlain, need not be kindred spirits. It is not necessary that they should think alike on the subject of war debts, for instance, and, they don’t.. But they entirely agree about beating swords into ploughshares ; and spears into pruning hooks. The work has begun; both of them are ak it; there is a cheerful clang of hammering; whilst sympathetic newspapers, reporting daily, proclaim to all the ends of the earth “ Renunciation of War! ” A brave word, welcomed by everybody, except perhaps the conscientious objector, loth to lose his crown.. We renounce war as we renounce the devil and all his works in the church catechism; —we speak for ourselves. What the devil has to say about it is another matter. Dees this spirit of renunciation extend to the devil? His answer would be three words and an exclamation mark. I decline to quote. Be it- noted that the renunciation of swOrd and spear is not the renunciation of war. The nations might fight with bows and arrows, if so disposed. And at considerably less expense. .Economy, yes; that is a main point. Disarmament—so far as we dare —by all xheans, in the interest of economy. Bows and arrows would cost less than shot and shell, yet might be quite as deadly. Phoebus Apollo, sniping at the siege of Troy, decimated the Greek host by; shafts from his single bow. But we are committed to i>ur present lethal ■jveapons and show , no indisposition' to \lso them. America has landed marines in Nicaragua, to kilt l&dSjjbe kilted. Britain’s minatory gesture; in ordering warships to Egypt hinted the possibility of shot and shell to follow. Renunciation of war, forsooth! —look at things in the Ear East—China tearing herself to pieces in civil strife, meaningless, unintelligible; Japan oil the pounce, landing troops in Manchuria. But the nations are to renounce war by agreement ;---even so, an agreement will last till it happens that they disagree. But, again, war is to be “ outlawed ”; —as if war was not already and always an outlaw, necessarily and by profession- Inter arma, silent leges. I have some respect for Mr Kellogg, and more for Sir Austen Chamberlain. But what the nations want is a course of Moody and Sankey, with a top-dressing of Gipsy Smith. The Russian Soviet and the Italian Soviet have not jet that ill-omened name in common. But they have much else. Both have supeiseded democracy by dictatorship, in Russia many-headed —an oligarchy of, say, a couple of hundred political scoundrels; in Italy an individual despot, and, because ah individual, more easily of, one would think. Was it not Caligula who regretted that the Roman people had not one neck to be severed at a blow? The Italian dictator’s neck is not likely to be severed, it would seem; —indeed'all Europe would resent the crime. Clearly Mussolini has a sufficient following among the 40,000,000 Italians, or ■ he would not last a week. Endlessly original, he has' persuaded or constrained the Legislative Upper Chamber to commit hara-kiri. There are too many lawmakers, too many laws. Moses on Sinai —probably he thinks “ Mussolini ” is “ Moses” Italianised needed no legislative helpers, to produce his Ten Words—the all-suffic-ing Decalogue which endures for ever. This is Mussolini’s latest achievement, but not his last. Sincerely may we hopfe that the Italian Soviet will outlive the Russian. Movipg among the “Wonders of the Universe ’* as displayed in an extract article in the Daily Times this week, you walk by faith if you walk at all. By his , facts and figures, especially his figures, the modern astronomer overwhelms you; it is well if you escape imbecility. . So numerous are the stars in the universe that the same number of grains of sand spread over England would make a layer hundreds of yards in depth. Our earth'is one millionth part of one such grain. of sand." , . . The annihilation of a pound of coal a week would produce as much energy as the combustion of the 5,000,000 tons a week which are mined in the British Isles. A single drop of oil would take the Mauritania across the. Atlantic. . . . A million million years hence, so far as we can foresee, the sun will still be much as now, and the earth will be revolving round it much as now. Yet, radiation of energy is annihilating the sun’s mass at the rate of 250,000,000 tons a minute. As the sun has no source of replenishment it must weigh 360,000,000,000 tons less to-day than it did yesterddy. And so on, till, depsairing, you bethink you of George Bernard Shaw and his audacities. Mr G. K. Chesterton, wlio has written a book about him, tells of Shaw’s revolt against “ the authority of scientific men”; how that he “gazed for a ■ few moments at this new authority, the veiled god of Huxley and Tyndall, and then with the greatest placidity and precision kicked it in the stomach.” (What elegance! G. K. C. and G. B. S. are a pair.) Proceeding, Shaw “declared to the astounded progressives. around him that physical science was a mystical fake like sacerdotalism; that scientists, like priests, spoke with authority because they could not speak with proof or reason; that the wonders of science were mostly lies. ‘ When astronomers tell me that a star is so far off. that its light takes a thousand years to reach us, the magnitude of the lie seems to me inartistic.’” So far good. He might have added: “ Even if they have found out the distance of the stars, how are we to believe that they have found out their names?” Their science gropes from star to star, But than itself finds nothing greater. What matter? —In a Leyden jar They’ve bottle the Creator. Thus Alexander Smith, Scottish poet and essayist, assailing from another angle the Huxleys and the Tyndalls on the score of tffeir supposed tendency to atheism. “ In a Leyden jar they’ve bottled the Creator ” —electricity, to wit! Attacks on science from the side of theology did not interest Bernard Shaw, his own theology being of the crudest. To-day, if he could get astronomy out of his head, he might be at peace with science; for the science of to-day offers him no less a wonder than milk from grass; not sunbeams from cucumbers, as in Laputa,—that may come later; but milk distilled from grass of the field without passing through the animated laboratory we call a cow. Conceivably a vegetarian might put himself out to graze, like Nebuchadnezzar. And Mr Shaw is a vegetarian of “ of fifty years standing.” Nowadays we are vegetarians in a sense unknown to o.ur fathers. In Gilbert White’s “ Natural History of Selborne,” a neglected English classic, we read under the date 1778 that potatoes were only then coming into general use: —“Potatoes have prevailed in this district, by means of premiums, within these twenty years only; and are much esteemed now by the poor, who would scarce have ventured to taste them in the last reign.” Celery was a new' thing, introduced from Italy;’ “the voung shoots whereof, with a little of the head of the root cut off, they ate raw with oil and popper.” . In winter time, fresh meat being scarce, the fare was salted fish and salted flesh, unqualified by green vegetables,—the kitchen garden a rarity. Result, leprosy. There were leper houses in London; Lincoln,Durham, and elsewhere, throughout the

country. Such was 'Gilbert White’s England, in the time, say, of your greatgrandfather. Blessed be the age we live in! “Any Girl. Can be Good-looking”:— she can, and for one dollar fifty cents an advertising New York expert will tell you how. Dollars apart, I can tell you how myself. With good health, good sense, good principles, good thoughts in her head, any young girl will be goodlooking; hair, betraying no sloven; dress, neat, npt gaudy; skirt, not half-an-inch shorter than it oughter; carriage and gait, entering a room or leaving it, may be, might be, ought to be, that of the goddess, in Virgil—vera incessu patuit dea. The New York expert (at one dollar fifty) prescribes, in detail:— - Exercise I.—Open the mouth in a , wide yawn. Do this only three or four times a day. Exercise 2.—Holding the jaws open, try to pull the lips together. , Relax and repeat twice. Exercise 3.—Purse the lips,, making . them protrude as far, out as possible. ; Next, stretch the mouth oyer towards the right, then front to the left, n keeping the lips firmly together. Re- - peat twice. During the sideways movement you will feel the tendons of your neck stand out. Exercise 4. —Keeping your lips ■ closed tightly, pull down and outward the corners of your mouth as far as they will go. It is splendid for curing fat or flabby chins. Repeat several times. Exercise 5. —Follow the above exercise by an exaggerated smiling, exercise that brings the corners oUthe mouth upward. Repeat six times. Away with all this! The young gjrl who is to be good-looking heeds not' to make faces, at herself in the glass, nor ho, dislocate her jaw by,/ exaggerated /yawning. ' Be good, dear child, and let. who will be clever. For the right man when he comes your looks will take care of themselves. Some fragments of correspondence:— Dear Civis, —Will you please assist us to arrive at a consistent conclusion regarding Acts 1, 18, where it says, Judas purchased a field, and Matt. 27, 7, where it says the chief priests bought a field? Were two fields bought, and who paid for what was bought? Also, in the case of the hanging; Di> he depart with the intention of hanging himself and fall headlong on the way? Wrongly addressed. Should have been sent to the Council of Christian Congregations. So also a screed of verses, mainly theological, by “A Pussyfoot”:— “ Civis,” outside Peter’s gate, Hears the cry “Too latef Too Late! ” A kindly prediction. In a spirit of reciprocity I print a London post-card from a Dunedin citizen on his travels: — Great trip across. Canada and . U.SA. Prohibition a screaming joke. Liquor everywhere for everyone. Visited fully-stocked secret bar few yards off Broadway. Saw, more drunks in two days in New York than in two weeks in London.» Police condemn State Control in Canada. An equal space available here, for the other side. I lean neither to partiality nor impartiality. Civis.