PASSING NOTES.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 20592, 15 December 1928, Page 6

PASSING NOTES.

When we think of the King—of late we have thought of the King at all hours, more or less—it is with . a sense of an overhanging Fate, as though we were about to hear the ‘‘passing bell ” which in England tells .of a departing soul, and to see over every royal residence and on every King’s ship the banner of England at half-mast. It is idle to call these fears groundless.

The glories o£ our blood and state Arc shadows, not substantial things; There is no armour against fate; Death lays his icy hands on kings. Apprehension has been deepened by the manifest anxiety of the nation, by the hesitating tone of the medical authorities, by the hurried recall of the Prince of Wales. On the other hand we have not been shut up to the hopelessness of a malignant disease; nor is the King’s tenacity of life without significance; it speaks of a physical constitution unharmed by vice or excess. There is a mystery about the tie which binds the millions in sympathy and affection to the reigning house. Past explaining it may be, but here lies the secret of our national stability in times of restless change. Wo may thank Heaven that horn’s and days of storm and stress have not weakened the tie but have strengthened it.

A malady not usual in practising politicians seems to have give?) Sir Joseph Ward a turn. At the opening of Parliament he showed himself' touchy, hasty, inconsiderate; —“petulant” was the comment of one newspaper, “ too shrill, too provocative, too peremptory ” the diagnosis of another; ami the fussiness of his leadership was characterised in the House as “ the excitement of a child over a new toy.” All of# which points to hyperesthesia—a morbid sensitiveness of nerves. What else than nerves, norves, nerves would it be in. his challenge to Mr Coates—“ Let him get a ring outside and I .will go and settle him now”; or that merited more than once an admonition from the Chair !—c.g. Sir Joseph Ward’s explanation was so lengthy that Mr Speaker intervened.

Sir Joseph; Very well, Sir. It was a gross misrepresentation, and they ought to know it. Mr Speaker: Order! order! order! Or that incited him to demand an unnecessary and unreasonable division which left him in a minority, ill-omened and prophetic, of 33. to 48?* What was at the back of all this? Spleen some would call it—temper and sheer eussedness. I prefer to call it nerves. In charity, observe.

This hyperteathetic condition may be explained. The new Parliament at its opening was to be for Sir Joseph a scone of triumph—“ See the conquering hero comes, sound the trumpets, beat the drums.” And yet, as one editor unkindly remarks, emphasising what indeed is obvious, " the 1 Government over which Sir Joseph Ward will preside represents roughly only one-third nf the House,*' and will exist at the mercy of the other two-thirds. Mr Holland at the head of his Labour Party Ims already warned him"We hold the key of the position,” With more appropriate .metaphor he might have said: "We hold tile knife your throat.” A conquering nero in this plight can hardly count upon his nerves. Then when choosing Minis! era, picking a Cabinet, —do ycu suppose it was a Sultan flinging the handkerchief? Sir Joseph himself cannot have supposed that. Anyhow, it was something totally different. You cannot choose one without rejecting another—n dozen others; and the dozen others won’t love you the more. It may be necessary to placate with a portfolio a self-styled “ Independent” since votes are precious. It may seen necessary to gather in other outsiders, taking a mere quilldriver from countinghouse and office stool to manage a department ■ State. Four of Sir Joseph’s Ministers are strangers, to Parliament and mav even he strangers to each other. ‘"The best I could do.” he says, apologising. We accept the excuse. It was, probably, the best he could do. ■ But the result! Surveying bis motley crew Sir Joseph might borrow words from Hamlet, himself a hyperccsthetic:—the result is a thing of shreds and patches.

As Sir Joseph’s policy first and last is to bring more money into the country, we may expect a scramble. Indeed the scramble has already begun. A few thousands as Christmas Cheer for the unemployed we may not grudge, nor even perhaps another few thousands to tide them over "Now Year. But there is the hard case of our legislators. Some time ago their £SOO a year was cut down by £SO. At the present time they feel that they cannot do justice to the country on £450, even though it is supplemented by a railway pass, and they have mentioned that fact to Sir Joseph. For the result we are to wait and see. Personally, I dislike and distrust the Politician who lives hy his politics. Tire Pious Editor’s Creed,” recorded by Lowell, may in this country he more fitly recited by the legislator than by the journalist:—-

In short, T (Irmly du believe In Humbug generally, For it’s a thing that I perceive To hev a solid vally; This hath my faithful shepherd been. In pastures sweet heth led me, An this II keep the people green To feed as', they hev ted me. But the dialect shows these sentiments to be American, and I must apologise. Another apology will be necessary, and from Wellington, if wc see our legislators voting themselves an increase 0$ salary. The salaries paid to public servants in England are at a figure that puts our Aew Zealand scale to shame. May a Cabinet Munster be expected to subsist on £SOOO a year? On this question Dean n ge and Lord Birkenhead in debate have been enlivening the newspapers. Lord Birkenhead ho it known, has abandoned politics and £SOOO a yea r for the City and £15,000. ‘in justice to hi s family.” Whereupon Dean Inge: Personalty, I think that if a man is not content with £SOOO a year and the honour of helping to govern the country he was probably dear at £SOOO a year, and wo had better let nim SOLord Birkenhead in rejoinder cites the hard case of the judges on £SOOO a year: Our judges to-day, unless they have considerable private means, can hardly attoru to keep a motor car or to send n t their old schools . hhe inadequacy of judicial salaries is the greatest scandal of the day I made desperate attempts to correct i c was . Chancellor, but I was (leteated by the contemporary AntiWaste campaign. How much is the deanery worth ? On this question Lord Birkenhead betrays some curiosity, noting that the dean supplcments his inconio hy writing for the press and “ probably makes as much in one year as Dean Swift made in five.” On this point the dean maintains a discreet silence, merely remarking that in carher times 11 a. high official was expected to hvc with extreme pomposity; even Archbishop Howlcy, almost within living memory, kept about thirty menservants! ” Nevertheless he still’ pleads for plain living and high thinking; Even in the years before the war I was surprised by the extreme simplicity in which J found a worldfamous publicist living at Berlin. His wife could not conceal her scorn when I told her that wc had six servants, including a nursemaid. She had brought up seven children without any assistance! It is this example that may be commended to our lejislators in Wellington.

It is a far cry from English thousands to American millions. Here is a New York cable, November 22: “The late Mr Payne Whitney’s estate is of a net value of £36,ooo,ooo—the largest in history.” A later cable brackets the Ryan estate with the Whitney estate for bigness, the two together topping 60 millions sterling, which total, distributed Communistically, would give about half a guinea apiece all round. For wasting the money there could be no other way so effective, A week later, the millions would be gone and nobody a penny the better. How are ■we to picture the life of a multi-million-aire? Spend as he may upon private luxury, he can’t get rid of more than a million a year—house in town,, house-in the country, an army of servants, a fleet of motor cars, a pleasure yacht for ocean travel. Pile it. up as you will, a, million a year will cover it all. What docs he do with the. rest?. Certainly he doesn’t keep it, in a stocking. Every dollar is invested and earning other dollars. But it cannot earn other dollars without doing work, employing labour, paying wages. Think it out, and you will conclude that it matters little whether the Whitney and Ryan .millions are in the hands of Whitney and Ryan or in th G hands of the State. In cither case they must bq employed in the same way and to the same effect—the general good. Which is a comforting reflection.

At tlie approach of Christmas comes also the school examination season, Already whole pages or examination results are in the daily papers. How much of mental distress, not to say of torture, do these results represent? We have all writhed and wriggled under the examination harrow in our time. It is a pleasure to know that at the meeting of the British Association this year no less an authority than the Headmaster of Harrow lifted up his testimony against examinations. “ There was no method of reform save the abolition of so indefensible a system was his conclusion. In the paper on English set in New Zealand for the matriculation examination, 1928, there is a whole page of prose, rhetorical and flamboyant by the look of it, of which the examinee ia to ms ke a precis not exceeding one hundred words. What is the word ‘ precis " doing in an examination paper on English? Is there no English equivalent? But let that pass. The point is that the mere reading of this ipage of prose and the attempt to understand it would taka about half the time allowed for the whole examination. I notice with interest that at the .meeting of the British Association mentioned above a paper was read by a Cambridge man, Dr D. N, Buchanan, on the remarkable results attained by hypnotism applied to undergraduates before examination. Hypnotism ! How it works in the Cambridge examinee I don’t in the least understand ; but at a hazard T suggest the hypnotising of the New Zealand examiner. ■ Crvrs.