PASSING NOTES

Otago Daily Times, Issue 22114, 18 November 1933, Page 6

PASSING NOTES

Beyond all doubt democracy, conceived as government by parliamentary majorities, stands not where it did. “ Little by little,” “ line upon line,” with the inevitability of gradualness, a change is coming over the face of the sun. Democracy is in fact slipping. Its wheels are skidding. Its sanctity is challenged. Questioned and qualified, doubted and debated is it's longstanding claim to be the final end of political evolution, the ne plus ultra of human endeavour and the real philosopher’s stone. Need we wonder, and need wc droop our heads in melancholy surprise? The most astounding miracle of all miracles would it be were democracy to remain the one immutable thing in this world of universal movement and change. Suns and moons wither and die, flowers fade, poetry and religion and morality put on new forms and ceremonies, infinite space is expanding, and even you and I are no longer what we were. Evolution confines not its secular action to worms and insects and missing-links. And democracy is evolving to something better. Like other visible things democracy is but a symbol—or, according to Carlyle’s “ Philosophy of Clothes ” —but a garment or vestment that grows old with wear: All visible things and emblems. What thou seest is not. there on its own account. . . . The thing visible, nay, the thing imagined, the thing in any way conceived as visible, what is it but a garment, a clothing of the higher, celestial, invisible, unimaginable, formless, dark with excess of bright? The political world is due for a new suit of clothes. By patching and mending, pressing and sponging it may carry on for a season. But the Divine Tailor is waiting, and He alone can tell what new cut or design Or texture He has in store. Will it be of Hitler tweed, or of Mussolini worsted, or of Stalin home spun ? Absit omen. Signs and portents of the coming of the new era we have had in abundance. Even in its Golden Age faith in democracy had its doubting Thomases, “ A perfect democracy is the most shameful thing in the world,” said Burke. “ Democracy gives every man the right to be his own oppressor,” said James Russell Lowell. And democracy is defined by Oscar Wilde as “ the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people.” Yet who, fifty years ago, would have prophesied that half of Europe was on the verge of apostasy? Such a man would have had a touch of the sun—would not have known a hawk from a handsaw'. To Russia knouted by its Czars and Turkey bosphorused by its Sultans autocracy i's nothing new. Neither Russia nor Turkey finds the familiar either strange or irksome. Less safely predictable would have been a Hitlerite Germany or a Fascist Italy. But a monstrous freak of nature would have been a prophetic whisper of autocracy in Britain or America. In America a Democratic President by legislative enactment is empowered to do what he' d well likes for untold years. In England there are Mosleyite Fascists. And a new Battle of Hastings last month, waged on-the proposal to put the future Labour Prime Minister “in leading strings,” threatens to split in twain the British Labour Party.

The British Labour Conference at Hastings, “ remembering 1931,” discussed the proposals of a special committee—mostly of ex-Ministers. . . . Sir Stafford Cripps, ex-Attorney-general, moved on behalf of the Socialist League his five-point amendment. ... The first two clauses were the immediate abolition of the House of Lords and the immediate passing of an Emergency Powers Act giving the Government authority to put into force any measures the situation may require. Dictatorship thinly disguised! The whole countryside from the Yellow Sea to the Golden Gate is off to Dictatorship Fair. So Punch puts it: Sings Sir Stafford Cripps with hands outstretched: Frank Roosevelt, Prank Roosevelt, lend me thy grey mare All along, down along, out along Lee. For I want to go to Dictatorship Pair, Wl* Bill Stalin, Harry Hitler, Jan Dolfuss, Ben Musso, Bins Kemal, O’Duffy, old Uncle Tom, Mosley an’ all.

“The crinoline fashion was killed by t lie servant girl.” So says a writer on the Victorian Age. And in these words —cryptic, paradoxical, even absurd though they seem—is contained the whole theory and practice, the whole mechanism and method that govern the change of fashion. No implication is here made of the dictatorship of the servant girl in the matter of fashion. And no denigration of the servant girl is intended. But a symbolic statement is it of the fact that the most charming of fashions wilt and wither under the cold blast of over-popularity. Fashion is based on distinction. Why should Lady Violet in her Daimler dress like Maggie Blobbs in the penny bus? But this is only one chapter of the story. As sure as eggs is eggs, when Lady Violet’s fashion is copied by Maggie Blobbs, Maggie will overdo it. When Lady Violet shortens her skirts an inch, Maggie will take up an ell of a lot. In the ups and down and outs and ins of fashion Maggie is more quickly elevated and depressed, and shows less restraint in her constraints. True as this is in the case of women, among men it finds its true exemplifier. When coats tend to shorten, young suburbia demands a waistcoat. When trousers tend to widen, young suburbia demands a Jack Tar’s bags. Wider become his trousers than his hips can bear. And the suit that should be qn ornament becomes a fancy dress. The tailor, who rightly is supposed to make the man, finds that the man makes the tailor. With John Stuart Mill the unhappy tailor might say, “ The despotism of custom is everywhere the standing hindrance to human advancement.” But for “custom” the tailor would read, “ customers.”

A West African negro is said to have applied for a job, saying to his prospective English master, “ Me speak English. Me say ‘ God dam ’.” No worse is the untutored African than the Bombay father who christened his son “Damfool.” Detective genius is not required to trace the name to the military cantonment where the man’s business took him. The same Christian name might appropriately be applied—not as a term of endearment —to the New Zealand father who christened his helpless infant daughter “Tertia Deciina” (Thirteen). But much more interesting than the haphazard, father-given Christian name is the family surname. Most English surnames arc in origin nicknames. Thynno and Thycke, Brown and Black, Wolf and Lamb, Silley and Wise,,Salmon and Solo, Sparrow and Starling, Slater and Shearer and Butcher and Taylor make no mystery of their origin. Many Hindu surnames are likewise anglicised renderings of a man’s trade. In India a seller of bottles is called a “ bottle-wallah.” For most Indian dialects this is necessarily difficult to pronounce and appears in tho • corrupted form of “Botlivala.” A sackcloth seller likewise is “ Saklatvala.” And families of Botlivalas and of Saklatvalas are now as common in India as sands of the sea. But the nickname origin of surnames cannot cope in India with the passion for a name that rises above one’s base calling. So one finds Mintos and Curzons and Shakespeares and Talbots—and even Vere de Veres. Says one writer, “ It is disconcerting to have a card sent in announcing the desire of Mr Crichton Manners to see you,, and then to have ushered into your presence a cinnamon-coloured gentleman selling boots.”

No coals are being sent to Newcastle, no water brought to the Thames, no oil taken to the city of olives or owls to Athens when my friend of the Wine Trade Review sends me at intervals extracts from this trade journal. How otherwise would I know that “ America wants her cocktail barmen back”? Or that Chateau Canon is. not a champagne but a claret? Quoted with quite natural gusto—as if to say “ wc told you so ”■—• is the exposure of popular food fallacies by the Courtanld Professor of Biochemistry in the. University of London. For does he not say: “ Remember that a large whisky corresponds in food value to three boiled eggs”? Common beliefs exploded by this biochemist are that beef tea, oysters and lobsters are restorative; that soup which sets to a jelly is particularly nourishing; that. Turkish baths, warm baths, massage and exercise all reduce weight; that toast is less fattening than bread. Of beer, whisky and champagne—the all-important question—our scientist says: Let us assume that a person on a diet wishes to drink beer, but is determined that he will exercise sufficiently to work off all the additional energy so that he will not put on weight. For every pint of beer he drinks he will have to play squash racquets for half an hour. Or, supposing he is not capable of expending energy at this rate, he will have to exert himself for a longer period at a lower rate of energy expenditure, such as walking five miles at four miles an hour. A glass of champagne is equivalent to about ten minutes’ squash racquets, while a double whisky and soda would require the full half-hour To allow for the expenditure of the necessary amount of energy. Remember that a large whisky corresponds" in food value to three boiled eggs. Thus the professor, like a wise Cabinet Minister, ends on an optimistic note. But the man whose mind is centred on a “ large whisky ” will find his hopes dashed with a splash of cold water by the meddlesome comment of The Times, which will not let well alone: Let the fat man eat oysters like the Walrus and the Carpenter, he will need a long purse to be any fatter for them; but let him beware of brown bread and butter. Let not the'thin man despair because he cannot afford oysters to keep his strength up. There are more calories in one slice of brown bread and butter than in a dozen oysters. But. it is well to bear in mind-that Professor Dodds speaks only of calories, and not of vitamins; otherwise the light of the new gospel which he spreads might promote the growth of a fresh crop of heresies as numerous as the old errors it withers. When he tells us, for instance, that a large whisky is the equal of three boiled ' eggs, it is as a warning against taking the equivalent of six boiled eggs as a nightcap, not as advice to the man who has an appetite for sis eggs in the morning that he should breakfast on whisky instead. Verily the Times are out of joint. Or as Tom Paine once remarked: “ These are Times that try men’s souls.” For my part, I am now determined to stick to my eggs. A crop of literary and other anecdotes of merit are quoted in a London weekly from Arthur Compton-Rickett’s “ I Look Back.” In an embarrassment of choice I select three: Mr Bernard Shaw was once speaking at a political meeting. . . . He had none of the interruptions on which he thrives, and his speech was almost a fiasco. “Is there nobody here who disagrees with me? ” he asked pathetically. Then came a voice from the back: “Yes, Mr. Shaw, I think what you said about was blithering nonsense.” At once Shaw brightened up. All the old sparkle arid zest came back to him. He looked as if he could have thrown his arms round the man’s neck in utter thankfulness. The witty treasurer of the Fabian Society, Mr F. Lawson Dodd, had a tedious acquaintance who would hold forth in and out of season upon the hopes of reincarnation. “ In another life, ' Dodd,” he bleated, “ I might come back as an animal —for instance a horse, or even a sheep.” “My;,dear fellow,” said Dodd, “not again as a sheep! ” But match me if you can the following story of nerves of steel, of heart of lioness, of coolness of ice: During dinner at a country house party, Sir Hugh Fraser, the High Court judge, was sitting by a laay who, in the midst of an animated discussion, made a clutch at her leg. She continued, however, her conversation, and Fraser concluded -ahe must have been seized with sudden , cramp. During dessert she slipped away, but later in the evening she explained quite calmly to Sir Hugh what had happened. “A mouse ran up my leg, and I thought the best thing I could do was to clutch and envelop it in my skirt. I suppose 1 suffocated it. Anyway, when I was able to investigate it, it was dead.” Oms.