Passing Notes.

Otago Witness, Issue 1488, 22 May 1880, Page 18

Passing Notes.

Some doctors have quite a talent for making their medicines pleasant; they gild their pills and sweeten their potions so that they become positive luxuries. We need at this moment a political doctor of this stamp to relieve our taxpayers of the unpleasant taste which every new form of taxation leaves in the mouth. One of our legislators, apropos of this, recently told the old story of the sailor who was undergoing the punishment of the cafe. Every moment he alternately called out to the tar who was vigorously laying on the lashes, "Higher," "Lower." The considerate tormentor did as he was told, until the instructions became both too frequent and too contradictory, when he remarked, " Hang it all ! there's no pleasing you any way." This is about the state of mind in which the Colony is at present on the subject of taxation. One objects to one tax, and one to another; but on the whole every form of impost is very nauseous and indigestible. If only a tax could be raised without people knowing it — or, better still, which would afford actual pleasure in the paying of it— what a difference it would make to our comfort ! Teeth are drawn nowadays painlessly : why cannot our pockets be picked, to fill the Treasury, as agreeably? This ignorant impatience of taxation is really very unreasonable. We have had our cakes and ale in the shape of sundry public works of more or less utility, and have flooded the country with borrowed money, and now if we have to pay_ the piper we cannot reasonably object. Whether we have our flogging high or low, we have to submit to it, and may as well do it with a good grace. Perhaps nexb month, when we know the " dem'd tottle " of it, we may feel better satisfied ; at present I confess that I myself am not free from the weakness oi human nature, and though I know it is contrary to all sound political economy, would rather pay my taxes in the indirect way. The moral effect of direct taxation may be all very well; but when I have a tooth drawn I like to take chloroform and know as little about it as possible. Cannot Major Atkinson administer some

"Nepenthe drink of sovran grace" to the country, and assuage this pain while he abstracts our money ?

There are wry faces amongst the Harbour Board people, and no wonder. With two or three exceptions they have just had a tooth pulled all round, and even those gentlemen who escaped the actual wrench have had the forceps in their mouths. In other words there has been a very general reduction of salaries, and several employees of the Board have been cashiered. My sympathies are with the victims (reducing of screws is an odious practice which I sincerely hope won't spread) but a farcical element mingles itself with their calamity. The Board requested its chief officials to report what reductions could be made in their departments respectively. The Harbourmaster in reply recommended that his own salary should be reduced ; the Engineer — there is something human about the Engineer — advised the reduction of everybody's but his own ; the Secretary, in a lengthy memorandum, proved conclusively that there could be no reductions at all. All these are good men and true ; not one of them is excessively paid, and the Board must have felt humiliated by the necessity of addressing to them interrogations of this nature. The situation as respects the Secretary's memorandum recalls the French pasquinade in which a chief flunkey is represented as addressing the assembled poultry yard : "My master has determined to kill you, and requests you to state with what sauce you would like to be dressed." Old rooster : "But wo don't want to be killed." Flunkey : " You wander from the point " (vous vous ecartez de la question). The secretary similarly wandered from the point, and the resolution arrived at by the Board recalls him to it with some asperity. The Harbourmaster is rewarded for his laudable zeal by boing kept at the old figure, and the Engineer has the satisfaction of seeing his recommendations accepted very nearly as they (stood. The Board's sudden resolve to dispense with the steam launch Reynolds luoks exceedingly liko tho economy of a repentant spendthrift. Having magnanimously determined to surrender a useless luxury perhaps the Bonrd will now explain how it ever be ame p osses&cd of it.

An " indescribable row," according to the Daily Times reporter, was the appropriate finale of the last South Dunedin municipal meeting. Local self-govern-ment on the Flat appears to have gone to chaos ,* but, according to writers on the British Constitution, it is out of precisely such chaotic elements that order, freedom, political aptitudes, and stable institutions are in the end evolved. Professor Creasy declares that without local vestries and town councils " England would not long continue co be a constitutional or a great country." Notwithstanding the "scenes of coarseness and turbulence " which they often present, "they are essential elements of our free system." I quote this high authority for the encouragement of Mayor Moloney and his amiable fellow municipals. They, too, are an integral part of the body politic, and, in their degree, ara serving and saving the country as truly as the more pretentious assembly which sits— according to Mr F. J Moss, at a cost of £500 a day— in Wellington. It is by these apparently ignoble local contests that the Flatites are to be educated, you see, izv higher things. Even the turbulence _of their meetings is, in its way, a testimony to what Creasy calls "our free system." Certainly our system is very free at SouJi Dunedin. I know only one place where it is freer— namely, at Echuca, in Victoria, where quite lately one councillor tore a handful of whisker from the face of another, and, in the discussion which followed, was himself deprived of a considerable portion of his hair. It is by such playful effervescences as this that a high spirited people vindicates its privileges, and shows it cannot be enslaved. Before the South Dunedin ratepayers hang their Mayor, as they have playfully hinted their intention of doing, they should try the Echuca experiment of scalping the councillors.

Here is a fact fer the Eecord and the Sabbatarian zealots who write lugubrious letters to the newspapers against Sunday trains and trams. It used to be, probably is still, the practice of Queen Victoria's Court to beguile the tedium of Sunday evening by chess-playing, and the royal chaplains, who dine at Windsor after afternoon sermon, aided and abetted them therein. Bishop Wilberforce, quoted by the Saturday Eeview, is my authority. The Bishop, who waa a favourite at Court, used to sit by whilst Prince Albert played chess. This fact getting abroad, he was asked by certain evangelical clergy at Oxford to explain his conduct. It is true that the Prince plays— wrote the Bishop —and that I look on. I don't play myself because of the " weak brethren "— but " I do not think the act wrong or the Sunday to be kept as a Sabbath." The following is interesting, and, herej in Otago, ought to be instructive :

" The Prince lias been accustomed to regard Sunday as it was regarded, I believe, all over Christendom, until the English Puritans altered the English feeling— not as ' the Sabbath,' but as the great Christian Feast of the Lord's Resurrection, much as wo keep Christmas Day. The day is kept by the very strictest and most spiritual German Lutherans and Reformed as a day for public worship and general relaxation. Every pastor in Germany, the most strict Pietiati included, goes after the afternoon service and presides over the playing of a national game, analogous to our cricket, and, as the scoring of this game requires much

skill, the pastor always scores. . .#. # . course, for a person who believed that it was a breach of the law of God to play at chess on Sunday, it would be wrong not to protest against it j but Ido not think so. ... These were my dear father's views about Sunday, its spiritual character— the entering into that spiritual character being signally blessed to any one, and a mark of growing spirituality, &c— but the non-Sabbatical charactor of it."

It is refreshing to find this and a good deal more of the same sort in a letter subscribed "S. Oxon." The fact that the writer, says the Saturday Review, was able to claim his father, William Wilberforce, of an ti- slavery fame, as an advocate of the anti- Sabbatarian view of Sunday merits particular attention. Wherefore was Bishop Wilberforce known as " Soapy Sam 1 " There seems to me a good deal of grit in his resistance to popular prejudices on the Sunday question.

The ages of faith are not past. Even in Otago we can sometimes turn out a true believer. "An Ofcagonian on his Travels," who has been recording in the Star his impressions of the Holy Land, is an example. This anonymous pilgrim to the shrines of the Biblical East landed at Jaffa, the ancient Joppa, where the Turkish guard presented arms to him in the belief that he was the Bishop of Jerusalem. Probably something unworldly, rapt, or mystical in the look of the Otagonian occasioned this mistake— at least I should infer as much from what follows. "I spent the morning," he says, "in going round to see the sights of Jaffa. The only one of any note is the house of Simon, the tanner. It is a very small house. I got upon the housetop and stood on the place where Peter had his vision." The sheet which was employed in that revelation the Otagonian did not see, probably because it was not just then on view. At Bethany he saw the house of Martha; at Damascus the house of Ananias, aa well as the place in tho wall whence Paul was let down in a basket (basket apparently not preserved) ; at Jerusalem the palace of Caiaphas, and the house in which the Last Supper took place— both of which seem to have survived the destruction of tho city by Titus, and to have been preserved, along with the other dwelling houses named, to refresh the faith of nineteenth century pilgrims. At, Bethlehem our Otagonian saw "the exact spot whore Christ was born, the

place where the manger stood, and the bench on which the wise men sat." What other sights rewarded the explorations of this innocent abroad would be too long to tell, and I should scandalise the reverential feelings of the reader in the telling. Few travellers appear to have seen as much, but then few travellers have been gifted with the same eye of faith. There are tourists and tourists. A traveller in Italy recently went into a church where a hair from the head of the Blessed Virgin was to be shown. He found a priest apparently holding up something invisible between his eyes and the light, and drawing it like a hair between his finger and thumb. Looking intently and seeing nothing, the visitor asked, "Where is the hair ?" " The hair," said the priest, "is so inconceiveably fine that only those who have attained to a strong faith can see it. Though I have been exhibiting it for seven years I have never yet been able to see it myself." Now our Otagonian would have seen that hair. No one who reads his Holy Land experiences will doubt it for a moment, and to have produced a believer of this calibre in a sceptical freethinking generation is something for Ofca^o to be proud of. Is he a member of the D.V.M.C. 1

That is not a bad story which Blackmere tells in his latest novel of the Yorkshire man, who, on being admonished by his clergyman to self-examination said, "Fa ! na ! a've tried it but it sets me up so, and leaveth ma neighbour no cliance." I think this story may throw light on some of the remarkable phenomena of Egotism. We are all familiar with the man who is always right, and who waves you off with a smile of contempt when you approach him with an argument, telling you to go and study philosophy, as lie has done ; but as an instance of supreme self- satisfaction, I know no one to compare with Sir George Grey. As painted by himself, he is a patriot of the purest water ; he will never soil his hands with anything mean or dirty ; he yearns above all things to bestow on New Zealand the blessings of Freedom; he loves the poor man and despises the rich ; he is a martyr to his principles, misunderstood, maligned, and trampled on, but he rises superior to all opposition, and from the height of his moral elevation hurls thunderbolts at his adversaries below. The result of his long brooding and self-examination at Kawau has been to "set him up so, and leave his neighbours no chance." I do not know that I can name anything that he has done to sustain his great claims, but am speaking of what he says. It may be that his patriotism is that of the typical Frenchman who, in the throes of the Franco-German war was represented as passionately exclaiming, "Not a rood of our soil, not a stone of our fortresses, and not a drop of our blood." Sir George sheds, not blood, but speeches; spends, not money, but words ; and his pay is applause which but re-echoes the sense of worth within. Wordsworth says : " There is a luxury in self dis-praisa, And inward self disparagement affords To meditative spleen a, grateful feast." But how much more self praise, which not only exalts your own sense of the mens conscia recti, but by comparison "leaveth your neighbours no chance."

A glance down the " Agony Column,' of the London Times is a powerful stimulus to the imagination. A tragedy, a farco, a catastrophe, a life romance, passion, heartbreak, folly, crime, all hint thomselves to you through the half- veiled loopholes afforded by those enigmatic advertisements. You get a momentary glimpse of the secrets of queer people, and queer lives, and can hardly forbear attempting to imagine the rest. No Colonial paper has yet been able t© get up ' a proper agony column. The number of people under necessity of hanging out private signals to each other through the newspapers is not large enough in this part of the world. The Melbourne papers have some approach to it. Here is an example from the Age :— MR Tempest,— Waiting patiently, according to promise, for Letter. Somebody unchanged. Unceasing care. Delightful weather and genial. No one with any discernment will fail to see a pseudonym in "Mr Tempest," or to guess that the " somebody unchanged" is antithetic to some other body who has changed, and is omitting even the cheap comfort of the promised Letter. " Unceasing care" may mean "lam doing exacLly what I was told," whilst " delightful woather, and genial" conceals some such occult reference as in the famous Bardell v. Pickwick trial was supposed to lurk beneath Mr Pickwick's " chops and tomato sauce." Here is another example from the Bame paper — a romance in two chapters :—: — TX7OULO young lady who walked down Elizabeth * * street to railway station beside a young gentleman about C p.m. yesterday send her address to G. F. R., P. 0., Prahran. Imagine the young lady, pleasant of feature and neat in dress, — a student from the Art Gallery, a State School teacher, & music pupil, or a Collins street saleswoman, — hurrying to catch a train for her h)me in the suburbs, whom some trivial street accident — say the dropping of a parasol — enables G. F. R. to accost. Then you understand the advertise menfc. It appears April 19th, and on the 22nd is followed by this :— A LlCE.— Sunday Evening, G. 30. G. F. E. Evidently tho first advertisement has been answered. The nameless "young lady " haa denned herself us " Alice," and intimatoa that she awaits developments. ' She has been prompt, too, Of course the

" young lady " of the 19th and " Alice " of the 22nd are the same, since G. F. R. — unless he is an utter Don Juan, or a Sultan needing merely to throw the handkerchief — can hardly have two strings of this nature to his bow. Alice, then, will meet him "Sunday evening, 6.30"— n0t to go to church, you may rely. All this is delightfully romantic rather than agonising. Probably the agony will come in later.