PASSING NOTES

Otago Daily Times, Issue 22718, 2 November 1935, Page 6

PASSING NOTES

The miscreant who introduced into fair New Zealand the first pair of rabbits has now a companion, a particeps criminis, a fellow imp of Satan or hound of hell —the man who introduced the first pair of deer. The offence of both is rank; it smells to heaven; it hath the "primal eldest curse" upon it. And those of us whose words are inadequate to express their feelings may do as Mark Twain once did —hire an artist by the week to curse them. The rabbit plague has been long with us. Now we have a second, the menace of the deer, red and brown —the wapiti, the moose, the chamois with their associates in evil the wild goat, the wild cattle, the wild pig and the thar. We can have rabbits or grass. Not both. And deer and forests are likewise mutually exclusive. The deer-infested mountains and hills of New Zealand, clothed in verdant beauty up to the snow line, will in time be as bare as Mount Sinai in the desert. Goodbye then to the water supply of our agricultural lowlands! Erosion will follow, and dust storms will bury our farm homesteads up to the window sills as tlicy have done in the American Middle West. Our hydro-electric installations, built up on twenty millions of Reserve Bank pound notes, will be a mere study in archaeology. No fewer than 500,000 deer at present roam our forests, damaging the old trees and destroying the new. And the natural increase of those vermin is from 150,000 to 200,000 a year. At this appalling rate, by geometrical progression, the deer will be as numerous as the trees, and our uplands will be stiff with them. Said Mr A. L. Hunt, representing the Royal Society of New Zealand, at last week's deputation to the Minister on the subject: Unless the present menace is checked, the future historian of New Zealand will be compelled to write the people of the Dominion down as a race of callous vandals, and those who come after us will curse us for our apathy. '

"A good name is better than precious ointment," says the man in Ecclesiastes. Like ointment, too, a name, good or bad, will stick. You cannot get rid of it. It sticketh closer than a brother or a schoolboy's nickname. What would one not give sometimes for a change of name? Says Byron:

Oh, Amos Cottle! Phoebus ! What a name To fill the Bpenking trump of future fame! Or as Thomas Hood writes, on the christening of Miss Kilmansegg:

A name? If the party had a choice What mortal man would bo a Bugg for choice? Or a Hogg, a Grubb, or a Chubb for • choice? Or any such nauseous blazon? What is true of surnames is true of political party names. What " nauseous blazons" many of them are! How many of them have outlived their meaning! Conceived as triumphant slogans, they have sunk to. the level of luggage labels. A political party name is a doublebarrelled weapon." It gives and it takes away, all in one breath. It is both positive and negative. It says what the party hopes to be, and what all other parties are not. An "Honest Party" ipso facto would declarp itself honest, and its opponents dishonest. A " Reform Party" presupposes the existence of abuses, with reforming crusaders on this side and unreformed degenerates on that. A "Liberal Party" makes a boast of liberality and a charge of illiberality. A "Democrat Party" claims to be a lonely island of democracy amid a roaring sea of dictators. And a "Labour Party" arrogates to itself the representation of those who labour, and relegates all others to the category of those who "toil not, neither do they spin." Thus in politics does pretentious pretence run riot.

If English proverbs and popular sayings express the concentrated wisdom of the race, then this same wisdom at times resembles " nonsense varnished with the charms of sound." And strange indeed would be a system of philosophy erected upon r' ra. Every proverb has a fellowproverb contradicting it. " Faint heart never won fair lady " is at variance with " Grasp all, lose . all." The lesson of patience taught by, " Everything comes to him who waits' unteaches the bustling pushfulness of "First come, first served." And the " outsider that sees most of the game" cannot be the same man to whom " distance lends enchantment to the view." A test of the lastquoted pair of proverbs may be seen in a recent article on New Zealand by an American journalist, in which things we know quite well sit cheek by jowl with things we did not know before. We are, says the writer, Victorian in our leve of respectability. England to us is " Home," and the greatest ambition of every one of us is to make at least one pilgrimage there. We are becoming increasingly conservative. We are of all Englishspeaking people the most forbearing, the most tolerant, the most patient under tribulation. At one time we were noted throughout the world as politically daring almost to the verge of actual Socialism: Government ownership of public services came earlier in New Zealand than in the case of most other countries. Old age pensions, child-labour laws, liberal and advanced land ordinances, and, above all, compulsory arbitration of labour disputes, attracted the attention of the world and gave New Zealand the reputation of having either a model government or a recklessly socialistic one. The tolerance of New Zealanders — continues the American long-distant observer—is all that remains of the free-dom-loving spirit of its early pioneers. While it is by no means the tolerance of spinelcssness and indifference, it prevents the adoption ot new and untried courses: With the coming of the economic crisis a Coalition Government was _ formed, a consolidation of parties led in the one case by a sturdy ultra-conservative Scots farmer, in the other by a typical British Tory representative of the business interests. The Government has now been in power for four years, and faces an election at the end of 1935. His Majesty's Opposition in New Zealand is composed only of the Labour Party, small if articulate, indifferently led, and enjoying too little confidence generally to have any chance of gaining office. New Zealand has grown too conservative for that. But the face of New Zealand society is slowly undergoing a change. Once the most thoroughly Anglo-Saxon of the British colonies, it is now assuming a cosmopolitan air: Prolific Germans, Italians, and Central Europeans trickle through the immigration stations. Then, too, there •is a large group of Chinese who raise fruit and vegetables. They own more than 500 retail shops throughout the country, and as many laundries. Intermarriage of Chinese with Europeans is fairly common, despite the colour prejudice. Which shows that the two proverbs may be combined into one: " Distance lends ' colour' to the view of which the outside sees most of the enchantment of the game."

If a thoughtless generation will but leave our New Zealand place-names untouched by a predatory hand, our future historians will find in them a wealth of information and poetry. There is poetry in Falling Leaf, in Candle Light, in the Roaring Meg and the Gentle Annie. There is information in Devil's Elbow, in Hell's Gate, in Irishtown, in Mount Misery. But the abundant poetry lurking in our Maori names is locked away from the pakeha. A writer in the Railways Magazine gives some information which only whets the appetite for more:

" Pokeno" means the underworld, the night of death. " Taupiri " means closely-clinging, a lover. " Horotiu " —swiftly flowing—applied to the Waikato above its junction with the Waipa, where its current, as the Maoris ascended the river in their canoes, became strong and swift.

"Ngaruawahia " —the food-stores (rua) forced open. The name is derived from an incident of olden days when the chief of the place, entertaining a large party of visitors, directed his men to "wahia" (or break open) the stores of kumara already harvested. "Te Aroha " —the affections. The two mountain peaks of Te Aroha were so named by the old Maori explorers because of their love and regret for their distant friends. Ihenga, of the Arawa people, and Rakataura, the priest of the Tainui, each ascended the mountain and, looking towards the distant lands of their tribes, chanted songs expressing their longing for them. They named the peaks Aroha-ki-tai (" Love landwards") and Aroha-ki-uta (" Love seaward ").

Such is what names should be. W. H. Hudson, the famous naturalist, tells how he once asked a country farm worker the name of a hill. " I have never heard it had a name," was the reply. " But all hills have names," said Hudson. The native replied that to his knowledge it was nameless, "but we call it Bepton Hill."

In matters of rationalised dress woman has no need to fight for her right. Everything will come to her, if she, like a Christian, but possess her aspiring soul in patience. Even men's shorts and men's slacks have come to her, and are displayed to her in many a George street window. Different has this peaceful revolution been from the tumult and the shouting that arose three-quarters of a century ago, when the first " bloomer" appeared on the startled streets of New York. The name " bloomer " itself was born in error and cradled in injustice. Its correct name is a " miller." The garment was invented by Mrs Elizabeth Miller, daughter of Gerrit Smith, a great landowner in western New York State. Mrs Miller yearned for a dress in which she could take long walks about her country home. It consisted of a small jacket, a full skirt descending a little below the knee, and trousers down to the ankle. Far from beautiful was it, but it was comfortable, convenient, and entirely modest. Mrs Elizabeth Miller trudging about the roads of western New York State excited no nation-wide comment. But Mra Amelia Bloomer came along, editress of the Lily, the first woman's paper. Mrs Bloomer took the new habiliment to her heart, pushed it in her paper, and literally made a " bloomer" of it. So at the present day, women's slacks have come in to stay—provided, of course, that they stay slack. Against the wearing of women's shorts, however, there are two insuperable arguments —one is the left leg, the other is the right.

For obvious reasons, the best examples of quick-witted clever repartee are associated with law —with the making of law and the application of it. That is, in the law courts and in the parliamentary chamber. Even the election platform comes but a poor third to these. At an election meeting no retort is more certain to raise a general laugh than a properly uttered "My gawd." But the true law-court riposte has less crudity. This is a cool cleverness in the appeal of the old lag, who replied, when asked if he had anything to say, " My Lord, I ask you to consider the extreme youth of my counsel." Though not strictly a case of repartee, there is a devilish acuteness in Sir Edward Marshall Hall's famous appeal to the jury, ending thus: " Gentlemen of the jury, God never gave her a chance —won't you?" Parliamentary retorts are, of course, multitudinous In number. Lord Salisbury, in reply to someone who anked if he missed Randolph Churchill, said, " Do you miss a carbuncle removed from your neck?" An aristocratic M.P. of more than average stature, when introduced to a diminutive member, greeted him superciliously as he looked down at him along his nose: " I've heard of you, but have never seen you." To which the diminutive member replied, "I've seen you, but never heard of you." What is commonly regarded as the most devastating repartee ever made in the House of Commons was that of Joseph Chamberlain to Tim Healy: In the course of a debate Tim Healy, denouncing Irish absentee landlords, pointed his finger dramatically at Lord Hartington, and asked when the noble marquis had last visited his Irish estates. Chamberlain, who was sitting beside Hart- • ington at the time, slightly turned his head, and, in a voice little above a whisper, but heard throughout the House, said (referring to the murder of Lord Frederick Cavendish in Phoenix Park), " Not since you killed his brother." This was the most dreadful thing ever heard in the House. Healy just fell back into his seat and never finished his speech. Civis.