PASSING NOTES.

Otago Witness, Issue 1942, 7 February 1889, Page 21

PASSING NOTES.

On this side of the world it is possible to speak of the miserable and disgraceful ending to which the Austrian Crown Prince has I brought himself without that bated breath and muffled utterance with which the catastrophe will be discussed in Europe. Whether the Prince fell in a duel, or was assassinated by an outraged husband, or died by his own hand— whichever report is true— the event is a terrific scandal, and its political consequences may be serious. The days are past in which kings and the sons of kings were thought to be above all laws, human or divine. In the last century France tolerated a Louis XV, and Germany an August the Strong, with his 353 bastards ; in England, within living memory, loyalty to the sovereign condoned the drunken blackguardism of George IV. All that is over and done. There is hardly a country in Europe in which nowadays the sovereign is not on his good behaviour, with the understanding that he is to hold office guam din se iene gesscrit. Peccadilloes are charitably winked at, but no civilised nation of the present day would permit its sovereign to be a corrupter-general of morals, or tolerate a court given up to open profligacy. If report has not belied him, the' Austrian Crown Prince seemed likely, had he lived, to put the loyalty of his subjects to the severest strain, and certainly, the circumstances of his death go to confirm that view. It is fortunate for the interests of personal rule in Europe that similar examples are just now rare. Mr Stead, of the Pall Mall Gazette^ vouches for the personal integrity of the Czar and Czarewitch, whilst the virtues of Frederick the Noble, and the patriotic devotion of the young Emperor Wiiliam are a proverb. As for our own Crown Prince, though chiefly famous as the prince of good fellows, and typical "man about town," there can hardly be a doubt that he is the most popular person in his mother's dominions. A canny Scot is Professor Black I He understands the art and mystery of prospecting — no man better 1 In prospecting for any valuable metal, say tin, your object is not merely to find what you are looking for, but also to keep anybody else from finding it. By the help of science, combined with shrewdness, the professer in his recent explorations in Stewart's Island was successful in both these objects. He found the tin, and at the same time so hoodwinked, bamboozled, misled, and misdirected his rivals in the search that when they, after devious wanderings, arrived on the scene they found the professor already in possession, his pegs down, and his mind at ease. There was never such racing and chasing on Carmaby Lea as that which preceded the Professor's pegging at Pegasus Bay. Whilst his rivals were hurrying along tho coast in cutters and steamers the Professor and hia men made a dash of 00 miles through the trackless bush, arriving at Pegasus in. such a state of exhaustion that he, the Professor, "could not have gone another mile to save his life." He recovered, however, in time to meet one of the other parties when they came in, and send them off on a false scent to the southwest arm, where they wasted a week or two " vainly endeavouring to find traces of tin." Generalship of the same astute kind came into requisition later, when the Professor, diligently pegging out more and more ground, encountered another party of rival prospectors. " With some difficulty and the exercise of a good deal of ingenuity," says the account, he and his men " managed to mislead this party and send them on to a distant flat at the foot of the mountain." No one who reads the story of his Stewart's Island campaign will doubt that the ProI fessor's zeal for the development of our mineral resources (in proper hands) deserves the highest praise. For the colony's sake as well as his own let us hope tbat the Professorial pegs at Pegasus Bay are wisely pegged, and that he is "on the Lin." The depressing adage that there is nothing new under the sun is perpetually bringing people up with around turn ; sometimes doubtless greatly to their annoyance. I fancy that Professor Baldwin who has just dropped onco more from the clouds and alighted whole will not particularly appreciate the enterprise and research shown by a Mr John Crook, of Auckland. This gentleman goes out of his way to shpvv that so far from Baldwin being an originator he is the wpyist of an idea at least 100 years old, and that he is not even entitled to the copyright "of the column of air " down which he professes to slide. The parachute we all knew was as old if not older than the balloon, but the opening in the centre of it to allow the compressed air to escape we did fondly hope was, as Professor Baldwin claimed, his own invention. So far from this being the lease, however, Mr Crook, who is nothing if not acourate, has just been regaling the Anckr landers with an account of the exploits of a M. Garoerou, who in 1797 undertook aerial journeys from Parus for the purpose of de-

tacending with a parachute. Moreover he says \— ■ During the summer of 1815, Mdme. Garnerou successfully achieved the same daring exploibafc, Paris. Several attempts were then made to prevent the oscillation, and suggestions as to altering the form of the machine, &c. It was also suggested to have an opening in the centre of the parachute to allow the compressed air to escape. Thus are the pretensions of our modern professor to originality for his central valve , blown into thin air. What he did was done a century ago ; and worse, it was done by a woman. r A .genuinely new sensation when .found is certainly worth making a note of ; but where at this rate are we find one ? Looked at from the standpoint of the .sensational novelist this " taking off" of the Archduke Budolph must be rich material. What gruesome romances might not be woven from such fragmentary details as have so'far reached us 1 Everything is suggested ; nothing is known positively save that the Prince is dead, and that his end was a violent one. All this mystery, and the utterly contradictory statements that have been cabled go far to heighten the lurid effect of the incident. Death from apoplexy was what ,ye first heard— an official subterfuge quickly abandoned when the public scent grew keen. Then the Archduke had been offered, by the brother of a princess he had ruined, the alternative of a duel or death by suicide, and had chosen the latter— obviously a stupid oanard t for men like the deceased^ Prince are little wont to make such a choice as this. Two consecutive statements thus proving false, why should subsequent statements be credited as true ? Why even should the story of suicide be accepted at all? Assertions have "been made in one quarter that the Prince was fired at through a window, and from the other surroundings of the case, even this sounds more credible than the felo dejc theory. The Prince was singing when he arrived at the chateau, and men in mood for suicide seldom sing. He ordered a cab, too, a few minutes before his death. Singular again. In this instance also, as might have been expected, there was a lady in the case, and a beautiful baroness, name not stated, has since committed suicide at Meyerling. That sounds more likely. It is the victim, not. the the seducer, who* generally resorts to that last desperate expedient. We can understand, or at least imagine, how Prince Rudolph might have been sacrificed to a woman's vengeance or a man's just anger; but the one thing it is difficult to imagine under the circumstances divulged is his suicide. Almost as I write this, however, comes by cable another bran new rumour too strange not to be true. Prince Rudolph, it is now said, first shot a lady belonging to the Bohemian nobility and afterwards himself. That is more likely. We can accept suicide upon those terms. Similar acts of jealous ferocity have been read of in very much lower circles— as low even as Whiteshapel. Whilst we are all thrilling and fuming with moral indignation over the Daily Times •revelations about the sweating system, it may be as well to inquire who it is that in the, last analysis profits by the sweating system. Is it the warehousemen, the contractors, the sub-contractors, or the drapers who retail to the public? It is none of these. Political economists will demonstrate to you that every copper sweated out of the earnings of starving work-people reduces the price at which, finally, the commodity is gold to the consumer. It is the public, therefore, that pockets the unholy profits oC the sweating system. Such is the beautiful result of competition i What the contractor, taking advantage of the competition for employment, sweats out of the work-people, the warehousemen or the draper sweats out of the contractor. At every step in the series of middle-men competition prevents an inordinate profit. Finally, competition amongst the retailers reduces the price to the consumer. If another turn or two of the screw reduced the wages of seamstresses by 30 per cent., competition would, in the end, make a present of the whole of that 30 per cent, to the public. I find one of the victims interviewed by the Daily Times commissioner recognising the economics of the case much more intelligently than most of the sentimental philanthropists who have rushed in to advise about it. This witness, a Mrs M., had been asked "Can you say who is to blame 1 " Here is her answer : Well, it's not the manufacturers' fault. They are that many, and they cut each other down so in putting iv for the big orders— the Government auo 1 railway orders— that everything is cut down. You can see how it is— each man is trying to cut his neighbour out by doing the work cheaper, and the one who will do it for the least gets the work. That is how it is they have to give small wages. I don t blame the manufacturers one bit; it's the people's own fault. Manufacturer's have to compete with each other, and one is always cutting tho other's throat; but it's the fault of the people. "It's the fault of the people ;"— well, I'm hot so sure about that. Is it the duty of the people to pay a higher price for their shirts and trousers than the drapers are willing to sell them at ? If the working man can buy moleskins at 7s Gd, is he to insist on paying 10s? Andif he did, would the extra half-crown find* its way to the poor seamstress ? How, tn the name of Adam Smith, can it be expected that we should pay more for commodities than the sellers ask for them I I don't pretend myself to find a remedy for the evils of the sweating system; "fools rush in where angels fear to tread," and on this painful question I desire to be, like Mr Disraeli, "on the side of the angels." Some of the remedies that have been propoecd are absurd enough to make a horse laugh— c.g t% that wages and prices should be fixed by law, or by arbitration. These are the politics of Jack Cade : " There shall be, in England, seven halfpenny loaves sold for a penny ; the three-hooped pot shall have ten hoops ; and I will make it felony to drink small beer.' Legislation of this kind has been attempted more than once. The ludicrous results it produced may be sought out, by those who are curious, in the proper authors. Nostrum for the cure of the sweating system have I none. Nevertheless, one thing I see clearly: If half the number of girls who work a 9 seamstresses for tarvation wages and the privilege of going i pfc :at night would aooept domestic ser-

, vice at, say, £20 a year and their board and lodging, they .would be vastly better off themselves, and at the same time make it possible for the other half to obtain wages at which they might live. Americans notoriously have an appetite for tall stories, bat I should have expected that the one quoted below from the New York Tribune would have been rather too much for them. However, the Tribune ought to know its own readers ; perhaps its, generous estimate of their credulity may not be mistaken : — A traveller in New Zealand tells the following story to illustrate the insensibility of Maoris to pain. "My friend," he says, "had given a Maori a pair of boots, but they were too short for him. For some time he endeavored to force them on, but this was impossible ; so he seized a small tomahawk (hatchet) and cut off his large toe to the length of his other toes, and them applied some juice of the flax plant (phormium tenax) to the cut to stop the bleeding, and.pulled on the boot, which was not removed until the toe healed. He put on the other boot after a similar operaticn. I have known several instances which appear to prove that the Maoris are less sensible to pain than Europeans." Though not able precisely to cap this story, I can give another not unworthy to be bracketed with it. This also has to do with ; Maori insensibility to pain. Tvso Auckland 1 ' chiefs visiting a European resident took advantage of the absence of their host from the room to examine the crue-tstand on his' sideboard. They were especially interested in the mustard pot, the bright yellow con-: tents of which they fancied must be some new and delectable kind' of jam. At length one of them scooped out a. spoonful andswallowed it. Not a word did he speak, nor moved a muscle of his face, but spite of his self-control the tears ran cown his tattooed, cheeks. "Why do you cry?" asked the other. "I was just thinking," he gasped, "of the death— of my poor old father." Then the other Maori swallowed a spoonful; — results as before— silence, an iron-set face and a rain of tears. " Why are you crying ? " asked' the first. " I was thinking," was the answer, "how sorry I am — that you dil not die — at the same time— as your poor old fath<"\"' Possibly I may have read this story in Juage Manning's " Old New Zealand "—I don't remember, Anyhow, I won't vouch for the truth of it, but it is at least as true as the yarn from the New York Tribune.