PASSING NOTES

Otago Daily Times, Issue 23002, 3 October 1936, Page 6

PASSING NOTES

Well may the pilloried victims of the earlier Lloyd Georgian memoirs, or those among them who are still above ground, pray for the patience of Job. They will need it. But, unlike Job, they have cried, at the appearance of each successive volume, “ O that our adversary had not written a book! ” Four volumes have already been hurled at them, each as full of controversy as an egg is full of meat. Throughout all four Mr Lloyd George has lashed them with whips, scourged them with scorpions, contradicted them, ridiculed them, showing them up in a virulent “ show-down.” Now there are more to follow. A fifth volume has already been published—the Armistice volume; and a sixth and, presumably, final volume is promised before the return of the English winter snows. Even this may not be the end, for long ago Mr Lloyd George threatened that his Book of Life would end in Revelations. The fifth volume, not yet to hand, is “ blurbed ” as one of the most highly controversial publications ever written. Mr Lloyd George will therefore have exceeded his own best. From another point of view he may be accounted to have sunk beneath his worst. A better judgment would long ago have allowed the dead past to bury its dead, and the Great War to remain a memory of “ old, unhappy, far-off days and battles long ago.”

Opened last month by the Duke and Duchess of York was the new home of the Imperial War Museum, in which, among many other relics of the war, are 60,000 volumes of first-hand war material. A relic of doubtful value is this library to posterity. When six volumes of memoirs from the pen of one war chief create a never-ending controversy, 60,000 of them will merely make confusion worse confounded. When the chief actors in the drama are even now at loggerheads over events so recent, little hope can there be that future generations will succeed in disentangling fact from fancy. A sound commentary is that, as to the actual conduct of that supreme conflict and the relative merits of the parts played in it by soldiers, sailors, airmen and statesmen of many nationalities, opinion differs so sharply that all that is certain is that the world is left with a big problem to discover where truth lies. “In war,” says Swift, “opinion is nine parts in ten.” “We are all more or less the slaves of opinion, says Hazlitt. “ Opinion,” says Herbert Spencer, “is ultimately determined by the feelings, not by the intellect.” “Opinion.” says someone else, “ is the result of temperament and chance.” And so on. The man who swears that the sun always rises on his right hand meets face to face a man for whom the sun always rises on his left. And they fight about it Of the highest interest, therefore, will be Mr Lloyd George's promised refutation of Mr Keynes s suspiciously over-dramatised account ot the Peace Conference and of the successful “bamboozling” and debamboozling ” of President Wilson. The sharp wit of foreign writers has already ridiculed the whole story writers who, just like Mr Keynes, write from first-hand knowledge. These writers, by the by, ridicule, too the simple-mindedness of the English who swallowed Mr Ke s version without question swal lowed it hook, line and sinker.

According to the Chinese, it is quite right and proper to steal from the State in order to support an aged parent. Something of this same outFook is to be found even in Western communities, without the intrusion of an aged relative to tum a mis demeanour into a virtue. reflection to another —the drowsy, almost sabbatical stillness that Pervades many a suburban street on our Saturday mornings. You will find that East is West, and West is East and sometimes the twain may meet To break this new Saturday Sabbath has become a crime against the State. “I’ll soon stop it, says ihe Minister of Labour. For the State has enacted that we must honour the Saturday and keep it holy. Five days shalt thou labour and do all thy work. Will the S.ate be more successful with the new Sabbath than it has been with the old? Will there be sly-]ob selling, after-hour irading, bootlegging by bootmakers, sly whitewashing y painters? Will carpenters secretly carp against the law, will the blacksmiths knock up against it, will plumbers’ feelings flood the gutte s of their discontent and refuse to eat the leek ”? A difficult task lies before the Government inspectors. When the down-pipe in my bathroom bursts at 5 p.m. on Friday evening, pouring its cusecs through my house, must I wait till 8 a.m. on Monday without a bath? It a painter does a friendly odd job for a plumber neighbour, and the plumber reciprocates in a like friendly way, will this be a crime, though all that passes from hand to hand is a parcel of mutual vegetables over the fence? Yet such odd jobs make fewer odd jobs tor the 40-hour week of the legitimate industry. If I shamefacedly mow my lawn on Saturday morning it is surely a virtue. If I mow the lawn of a neighbour and do his gardener out of a job that might help to support his aged parent it must be a crime. Nice little problems in casuistry of this sort are springing up all around us. The strong arm of our Minister for Labour may solve them.

The small talk of the dinner table turns on the raging Income Tax. For the income tax is 'ferocious. As ferocious is it as a famished wolf in search of food. Nothing more was required to disvertebrate the camel’s back. A man’s real income is what he has left n says the Minister of Finance. As sure as eggs is eggs he will next year tax this also. A tyro in the divine art of tax-mak-ing is our Minister of Finance. He has ignored the wise injunction of the estimable economist Turgot of the eighteenth century that in taxmaking you should pluck your goose without making it squawk. The goose is already squawking. Things have come to a pretty pass when we are prepared to offer the Government our income provided we keep the tax. Everyone of us is in the predicament of Samuel Pepys when he wrote: “A silk suit which cost me money, and I pray God to make me able to pay it.” With a cynical irony the report of the Income Tax debate was placed by the press side by side with a report of a taxi inquiry. But taxes and taxis differ. In taxis you get a run for your money; with taxes you don’t. Luckily an implacable fate dogs the footsteps of the unwary tax-maker. Tax a man out of existence and he will cease to pay any tax at all. Mediasval tax-making monarchs conceived the brilliant notion of taxing windows Result—fewer windows were put in, the tax was a failure, and medieval castles to-day, with their peep-holes for windows, are a monument to tax-making ineptitude. English Governments taxed the horse-power of motor cars. Result—low powered English cars, and heavy American purchases. Lastly, no one can evade

the hard and unpleasant fact that you can’t support yourself, a wife, and a Government all on one small income.

The unjustifiable and neologistic use of the word “Olympiad” to mean the quadrennial festival of the Olympic Games has evidently taken root, Home as well as here. And scholarship may beat its silken wings in vain. An “Olympiad,” as everyone knows, is what the word is defined to be in the Oxford Dictionary, viz.: “A period of four years reckoned from one celebration of the Olympic Games to the next, by which the ancient Greeks computed time, the year 776 B.C. being taken as the first year of the first Olympiad.” Learned correspondents in English weeklies have made their protest, but their voices have cried in a wilderness. Sporting contributors have been unrepentant, saying, as one of them said. “Let not our sporting world accept the censure Let us say, as was said of the yorker, ‘ Well, what else could you call it? ’ ” “ Olympiads ” we shall therefore always have, for languages develop mostly through the blunders of the careless. The fate of our word “ noon ” is an example quite apropos. ‘ Noon ” originally meant the ninth hour of the day. That is, “ noon ” at first meant 3 o’clock in the afternoon. By a popular anticipation of the ecclesiastical office, the word came to imply the period of the day from 12 to 3. Then by a further misconception the new “ noon ” came to mean the beginning of the period to which the original “ noon ’’ was the end. Just in the same way, '■ Olympiad ” is coming to imply the final celebration of the four years’ period of the old four-year Olympiad. Vain is it for scholars to knock their heads against the brick wall of popular waywardness.

Dear “ Givis,” —Do you ever read the parliamentary reports? If not, you are missing some gems. _ For example, on page 350 of the issue of August 5 to 11, 1936, the Right Hon. Mr Savage is reported to have stated: “I have said many limes that I have never worked for the love of it. I do not mind working for a living: I want the photograph of someone who works for the love of it.” No wonder Mr Coates said, The right honourable gentleman cannot believe that surely.” Do you think it true that the Prime Minister is correct? If so, I’m afraid that the millennium is not quite so near as we were led to believe. —I am, etc., Lest We Forget. Interesting as may be the love affairs of Mr Savage, or the fact that the love of work has passed him by like a ship in the night, his own case is a mere phenomenon, a lusus naturae. It takes every sort to make a world. But when he asserts his conviction that “all men are like me,” his view of life is highly significant. It explains what has been inexplicable. He looks on the world with that flatness of vision which—try it and see for your Selves—is characteristic of the man who closes one eye, or has only one eye with which to see. A second eye is necessary to produce perspective, to provide the flatness of the scene with a third dimension. Seen through a single eye the world is all black and white, without light and shade, without hollows and protuberances. From this foundation it is possible to construct a whole personality. Novelists have done it. Dear “ Givis,”—Would you mind reverting once more to the subject of examinations? In your support of examinations you have calmly ignored the many scandals of them. What do you say of the case quoted by Dr Cattel at the International New Education Fellowship held at Cheltenham recently. Dr Cattel said: “ When I think about the subject of examinations I like to remember the casp of the American examiner, one of four, in a University, who for his own convenience wrote out a model _ answer which accidentally got included with the scripts sent to the other examiners. All three of them failed him.” . . T How can you get over this?—l am, etc., Victim. How do I get over this? Easily. I don’t believe it. The story is manifestly a fake, and a belief in it would justify a sub-normal I.Q. in any intelligence test. The origin and life history of this story are as clear as crystal. An American reporter invented it as a jest—an excellent jest, too—probably an after-dinner jest. Promotion of the jest from the postprandial stage to that of serious argument is an easy process. The reporter’s jest was content with the failure of the examiner by one of his colleagues. The repeater of the jest foolishly improved on it, dragging in all three colleagues to do the failing, and the joke is spoilt. The story has other gaping cracks in it In fact, one could write an essay on them. Stories on examinations just as good as this have long been current in schools. There is that of the examiner who failed a pupil in Latin prose, though the pupil had reproduced the examiner’s own keyversion. And that of the examinee who attributed his failure in Latin to the fact that he himself was a Ciceronian, while the examiner was merely soaked in the dialectical patavinity of Livy. Civis.