PASSING NOTES

Otago Daily Times, Issue 22568, 11 May 1935, Page 6

PASSING NOTES

All very well would if be, in an eloquent peroration which brings to a fitting close a stirring address or a moving sermon, to call Dunedin's Mayor " the elected arbiter of our civic destinies." To Mr Mayor Cox only would this apply. Before him, not a single Mayor have we ever had, since Dunedin Mayors first began, on whom such a task was laid. More or less comfortable majorities usually eased and smoothed their chairmanship job. Different and more difficult will be the duty that lies before our present Mayor. Seated round that horse-shoe council table will be six of one and half a dozen of the other, all alike as twelve horse-shoe nails in a shoe—except in colour. And this new City Council must faithfully mirror the views of its electors, being half red and half the other colour. As for Mr Mayor himself—now Speaker in his little House, and duly elected spokesman of his half red and half not fellow-citizens—his duty is as plain as the nose on any face before him. He must incline neither to Right nor Left. Like the worthy alderman of Oxford, returning thanks for his election, he must promise that "it will always be my earnest endeavour to administer justice without swerving to partiality on one side or impartiality on the other." That is, he must not leave that famous narrow path which lies between right and wrong. Like the oftquoted Mayor of , newly elected, he must " undertake to lay aside all political prepossessions, and be, like Caesar's wife, all things to all men." Nay, sincj a special election, held all for him, chose him for. the city's highest office, and gave him a minority vote, let him,, compassed about with so great a cloud of., witnesses, lay aside every weight and the sin that doth so easily beset him. Before the delicately poised equilibrium of the mechanism which he has been elected to manage, let him make impartiality his guiding star. The .injustice of a deliberative vote would cry to heaven. And a casting vote- would bring him sleepless nights. As he wooed his elusive slumber he would mutter: Slave ! I have set my life upon a cast, And I will stand the hazard of a die. .

Jubilee Messages from the four, corners of the globe, press messages from China to Peru, countless other tributes from home and abroad—from President and Fuhrer, from Pope and Archbishop, from Oriental potentate and colonial satraphave conveyed their measure of congratulation to the Court of St. James at Buckingham Palace. These are but natural. The occasion calls for them, and a world-wide empire has many neighbours. What is significant above all else in this chorus of well-wishinfr is the one dominant note—a eulogy of his Majesty as a "man." Says the Frankfurter Zeitung, " The King has lived up almost perfectly to the purpose of the British Crown." And Germania: "King George is a gentleman, a living symbol of the British national virtues." In the Kreuz Zeitung: "He is gifted with a sense of duty, natural dignity, and a fine common sense." The Archbishop of Canterbury preacLed to " his sincerity,". " his devotion to duty," " his bringing to all classes a personal touch." With a glow of pride have men of all ranks spoken of him as " having no exceptional qualities," referred to him as "just a typical Englishman, unassuming, unostentatious, unselfish." : and lauded him for "the triumph of his devotion to duty."' Surpassing all other tributes ; in - its. unconscious significance is that of. the crowds of scores of thousands which thronged round the iron palace gates—singing the National Anthem as a prayer for their King, "Rule Britannia" as a prayer for their country, and : " For, He's a Jolly Good Fellow" as a prayer for their honest fellow : citizen in a British democracy.

What qualities greater than these are wanted in a limited monarchy such as ours? Democracy has put quite out of court such gifts of mind and heart as, in actocratic days, gave the surname of " The Great" to the Alexanders and the Caesars, the Fredericks and the Louis. Since the days of Alfred no English king has borne it, and he scarcely deserved it. In " the peculiar limitations of the British Monarchy," as was put by Mr Page, the United States Ambassador, a superman king would break the Constitution asunder, split the realm in twain, and land us in troubles unending. A "limited monarch" has a definite job to do, and greatest is he who does it most conscientiously. Democracy, too, has democratised its ideal of monarchy, has taken it down from its Olympian throne to mingle with the people. A king must nowadays be almost a "primus inter pares." King Edward VII won a thousand-fold more popularity among his people than he lost among his aristocracy when he "hobnobbed with Lipton the grocer." For a British King should know neither class nor party, and show neither fear nor favour. The qualities that make a British King great are thus no longer a heaven-born statesmanship, no longer a military genius or a vaulting ambition. His field of battle.now is "the daily round, the common task." And royal genius has now become just common sense, human sympathy and a rigid sense of duty. For these gifts might King George almost be called "The Great." He may certainly be called " The Good." Every possible noteworthy and scandalous exception admitted, still you will find that the royal families of Europe have produced more really great men and women than any other series of interrelated families of which we have any record in the history of the world. Such is the conclusion come to recently by Dr Woods, biological expert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. And this after an exhaustive study of the careers and relationships of 832 kings and queens and their brothers and sisters and other connections. Says Dr Woods, an honest pro-republican in the American Republic: In the American "Who's Who," only one in 4000 is selected for mention. Yet among royalty, judged by the same standards of intellectual measurement, (he figures are one in 20. The tradition that the royal families of Europe are a run-out idiotic lot is a mere democratic pre-

judice, with nothing in it. True, he continues, a king lives in the limelight. But the limelight works both ways. The fierce light that beats upon a throne reveals failures as clearly as successes. And a royal "environment in early years is more often a handicap than an advantage. Frederick the Great, for example, the Hohenzollern born in 1712, owed nothing to his early upbringing. Quite the contrary —read Carlyle. He had his opportunities. But his brother Henry, without them, was probably a greater military and intellectual genius than Frederick. And his sisters? Amelia is described by historians as "of extraordinary intellect," and Louisa, mother of Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden, is known as " the queen who ruled her Parliament with a rod of iron." And so on goes Dr Woods, through a maze of great electors, great generals, distingished authors and statesmen, spreading out into . the Saxe-Coburg-Brunswick-Meiningen families from which have sprung half a dozen royal and stillruling families in Europe,to-day. Gather these 832 royal figures into one modern nation, and things would begin to move.

movement recorder. At last there is hope that sleep, the mysterious and elusive, may give up its secrets. Notorious have been its vicissitudes throughout the ages. Macbeth murdered it. Henry of Bolingb'roke lost it, searched for it, could not find it, and then saw it clinging to the ship-boy's eyelids on the high and giddy mast. To-day many a man loses it by night and finds it again by day. How often does it shun the cosy comfort of a bed to haunt the hard seat of a church pew! For it dotes on sermons. This wayward butterfly has now been pinned down to a laboratory bench, to be pored over and pawed over by. curious researchers. By the new machine, fastened scientifically to the bed we lie upon, our every movement is recorded. The researchers assert: We have found that the average person moves from ,10 to 12 distinct times each hour. Four to eight of these movements are fairly complete changes of position, euch as turning from the back to one side. Tlie soundest sleeper we have yet found moved four times an hour. The most restless sleeper we have studied moved nearly 20 times an hour, not only for one or two nights, but steadily night after night for a full month of observation. The sum of the' conclusions arrived at seems to be: Put a woollen blanket under the bottom sheet. Use a pillow of curled hair. The bed which is "hard" for a person of considerable weight is soft to the human skeleton. Try out the mattress you buy, try it out in the shop. Do not buv a mattress simply be-, cause it suits the salesman's curves. And remember that sleep has depth as well as length.

After all, a good method of inducing sice]) is to struggle not to sleep, or not to worry whether you sleep at all.

Why do we wear black for mourning? A query in "the correspondence columns of an English weekly has raised a blight discussion. Dr Brewer's easy explanation of the practice is too easy. " We use black," lie says, " to express the privation of light and joy, the midnight gloom of sorrow for the !oss sustained." What is this but a " lucus a non lucendo"? More satisfying is the derivation from ancient custom. Thus the Rev. S. Baring-Gould: The origin of the custom is the deeply-rooted belief in . ghosts of primitive "nan, who was always afraid of the spirit of a departed relative revisiting his old home. So, in order to make things as inconvenient as possible for the ghostly visitor, the surviving relatives clothed themselves in black to make recognition difficult. In still more remote times they blocked up the entrance of, the habitation which the dead man was accustomed to use.. In many parts of England and Wales, even in recent times, it is said, cottagers seldom use their front doors except to take out the coffin. Lord Stanley of Alderlcy used to say that he could not see why cottagers should have front as well as back doors, seeing that in ordinary circumstances they used the front one only for funerals. Dear "Civis,"— Could you tell me the origin of the word "hoodlum"? My _own dictionaries do not give it. Is it English or American or Australian?—l am, etc., Hoodlum. On the origin of " hoodlum " the Oxford Dictionary says:—"The word originated in San Francisco about 1870-72, and began to excite attention elsewhere in the U.S. about 1877, by which time its origin was lost, apd many fictitious stories, concocted to account for it, were current in The earliest citation* in the O.E.D; is from the Sacramento' Weekly Union of 1872: "All the boys to be trained as .■• •• . polite loafers, .street hounds, hoodlums, and bummers." , All these impolite appellations savour of German. A LowGerman form of the German "laufen " (to run) is suspected, of being.the ultimate origin of "loafer." "Bummer," likewise American slang, and generally accepted as being of German origin, is a Califbrnian product a few years older than " hoodlum." " Street-hounds " is at least a German-like product. This environment should discredit the fiction which derives " hoodlum " from " noodlum," and thence from "muldoon." In colloquial Bavarian the word " hodalump," with the meaning of " hoodlum," is said to be common, and affords a reasonable suggestion of the probable origin. Civis.