The Otago Witness. THE WEEK.

Otago Witness, Issue 1970, 22 August 1889, Page 21

The Otago Witness.

THE WEEK.

WITH WHICH IS INCOEPORATED THE SOUTHERN j MERCUBY.

THURSDAY^ AUGUST 22, .1869,

" Nunqnam allud natara, aliud Baplentia dixit."— Jovbnal. " Good nature and good Benso must erer join."~PoPß. The warning which we ventured to give in these columns at the time Tha New when extravagant and mysFooa Proms, terious claims were made for i the new food preserving process appears to, have been well founded. We took the trouble to analyse the nature of such effects as this wonderful powder could produce, and showed that they were nothing but the effects well known to result from the use of the fumes of burning sulphur, combined with ordinary smoke. The addition of " nitrate of potash "" — as the familiar substance saltpetre was called in the specifications,— of cinnamon, and of quassia chips we indicated to be, not the mysteriously potent preserving device that was claimed, but merely a subsidiary agency in the sulphur fumes and the smoke. In chronicling the repeated failures which Lave taken place on practical trial of the new piocess, the London correspondent of the Age seems to indicate that the company have now ceased to talk about the invention in the language of mystery, and no longer' indulge in the portentous rubbish which they at first put forth about " scientific men being completely puzzled to account for the marvellous effect of the patent powder," and so on. They now condescend to name sulphurous acid gas — or in other words, the fumes of burning pulphur— as the effective agent. It may be

confidently assumed that this tardy abandonment of the methods of advertising quackery, and resumption of the language . of sober fact, is attributable to the comI ments of " scientific men," who inconveniently declined to be paralysed and flabbergasted by the performances of the | patent powder in the way formerly attrii buted to them. In these sceptical days it is very difficult to palm off miraculous cures, whether of living beings or of dead mutton, upon the Stock Exchange. Miracles are all very well in their place, and we all know — or ought to know— they were excellent capital stock once upon a time ; but when they come into competition as investments nowadays with the last new land or loan or gold company, or 3 per cent. Consols, or even j Colonial Government debentures, they do not "pan out" to any great extent. It would have been much better if the new Preserving Company had said at first, "We propose to disinfect our meat in the same way as disinfection is carried out in skips and hospitals, by sulphurising it, and then- to endeavour to keep it sulphurised throughout the voyage," instead of saying, "We have a mysterious and wonderful powder, the marvel and puzzle of all the wise men of England, which we have only to put in the same room with a dead sheep or fowl to ensure its eternal preservation." However, better late than never. Now that pretence is discarded, experiment and common sense will soon decide whether there is any good in the new process ; and if there is, we shall be the first to heartily congratulate the company on their success in working out to a practical conclusion an idea which in itself is by no means unpromising, even though it is hardly new. Sir Kobert Stout, who for some time has been writing periodioal letters to tuo otn B o tte rjaiiy Times on political control Railway, subjects, occupies about.threequarters of a column this week with his ideas on the Central railway. To put it somewhat more accurately, he occupies three quarters of a column, and he heads it as we have headed this note ; but as a matter of plain fact it must be confessed that there is very little about the railway in his letter, and what little there is can hardly be pronounced likely to aid the cause of the work. We should be soiry to say anything discourteous of Sir Robert, who doubtless means as well as most people ; but we fear that if his letter were presented to the House as the Otago case it, would effectually damn the remaining chances of the Government Bill. The ex-Premier begins his letter with the remark that "it is not his desire to deal with the present political muddle in Wellington." Experienced readers of Sir Robert Stout's political manifestoes will not need to be told after this that he at once goes on to devote himself to dealing with that muddle, or what he deems to be such, and in fact he does nothing else. In the cour3e of dealing with it he contributes the following among other dissertations — namely, on the delinquencies of the Premier (the strongest supporter, by the way, which the bill has secured); on. some "petty, querulous complaints " which occurred two or three years ago ; on the reasonableness of the travelling allowances drawn by himself and his colleagues when in office; on Special Commissions (about nothing in particular) ; on Mr James Allen's wickedness as a politician (very nasty are the terms of this reference, but let that pass) ; on the abstruse political causes of the irritation of the Opposition; on the fact of the two Legislative Councillors being Atkinsonians ; on the political perfections of Dr Fitchett (very gushing are the terms of this reference, but let that' pass too); on the malignity of the Otago press (which is untrue, slanderous, unfair, and what not); on the mendacity of the special correspondents of the Daily Times, poor fellows, in particular — they are quite too dreadfully bad for anything; on the subserviency of the editor of the Times to his "specials," the Atkinsoniosity of the Otago press, &c, &c. ; on various North Island questions, coupled with an instructive outburst of virtuous indignation against, a private railway company which "has already received from the State thousands of acres of land" (but a judicious silence about another private railway company which has received millions); and about "varis oder kinds ob things " as Hans Breitmann would say. But hardly six lines in the whole affair about the Otago Central railway I It reminds us of the episode last session of Mr R. Reeves and hi 3 Foul Brood among Bees Bill — the title has really nothing to do with the object of the discourse. The only real reason Sir Robert has discovered for pushing on the railway is the gold discoveries at Nenthorn ; which is a little unfortunate, as Nenthorn is not in the least interested in the extension of the Central railway beyond the present terminus at Middlemarcb, the natural "port" of Nenthorn. However, Sir Robert has had his fling at the Times and Mr James Allen and patronised Dr Fitchett ; and if the fact happens to be that in doing so he has bungled his ideas on the Central railway, why, so much the worse for the fact. The reports which we published last week from our special correspona onnic dent at Nenthorn describing nt the present condition of Dominoes. things at that goldfield will have been read with considerable interest. The proceedings at Nenthorn, it appears, resemble nothing so much as a game of dominoes. One of the gamesters puts down as a first instalment a rectangular oblong affair with one or more shallow pits in it, and then ceases action and awaits developments. In the case of the Nenthorn gams the oblong is about 30 chains long by about 10 broad, whereas in dominoes it is only an inch or so either way ; but that is a mere detail, not a difference in j principle. As soon as the first, gamester has [ played someone else sticks a similar oblong on to the end of his. This second oblong may or may not have any of the shallow pits on it ; or it may have one or more at one end of it and none at the other ; or ib may have simply a sort of indentation drawn across its middle, marking (in the Nenthorn variety' of the game) the trenching for the supposed reef, or what is intended to look like it. The second player's move having been duly noted, a third oblong is placed similarly to the end of his ; this time, however, the ob-

long may, instead of being placed longways, be stuck across'the long diameter of No. 2— its position depending on the presence or , absence, or the number and position if present, of tne shallow pits on its predecessor. We need not further follow out the analogy, which will be readily established in its ultimate details by a comparison of a map of the Nenthorn claims (assisted by a perusal of our special correspondent's report) with the course of any given game of dominoes in one of our Princes street bar parlours. In each case it is notthe rectangular oblong affair that possesses the intrinsic value, but merely what it represents in the way cf its delusive effect upon the person from whom you hope to win your stake. The "subsidised prospectors " described by our reporter, who " conceive the idea that their mission is fulfilled by marking off licensed holdings, licki ing specimens until their tongues get as rough as a cow's, squinting through magnifying glasses, talking geology, and selling shares," are the most active domino-players of all ; and they are rapidly driving off the real prospectors who are after solid stuff, and care nothing for dominoes and such like trivialities. We have always expressed a firm confidence in the potentialities of .Nenthorn, and notwithstanding the puffery and knavery that are rampant our opinion is unchanged. But with the ample warning before them which we and others have taken the trouble to formulate, so far as the utterly undeveloped state of the field will allow, investors will only have themselves to blame if they insist upon regarding a goldfield, merely because it is new, in the light of a theatre for exhibitions of the confidence-trick and tbree-card-monte order, in which their only function is to meekly accept the role of unsuspicious victim assigned to them by these plausible gamblers. The public attention here has been lately called, by what appears to be little a frightful case in point, to sufrercw. the que stion of cruelty to children on the part of those who should be their natural guardians. 'It happens that this is a subject much to the fore in England also just now, for two reasons. First, there is, or was lately, befqre the House of Commons a Cruelty to Children Prevention Bill, which has given rise to considerable discussion and great differences of opinion; and secondly, because of an extraordinary and sensational murder which arose out of the alleged ill-treatment of a child who was being trained as an acrobat by the manager of a travelling troupe. j[n this latter case the father of the child (a girl of fourteen) had not objected to the determination of his daughter to join the troupe ; but when the strain and misery of a childacrobat's life had done its deadly work, broken down her health, and sent her home just in time to die of a rapid consumption, the father became frantic with grief, arid, learning of the harshness and wrongs which she had suffered from her master, sought Jin vain for redress from the law. Repulsed here, he sought the aid of the editor of the Pall Mall Gazette ; who, smarting under the recent verdict against him in a libel case, refused it. Becoming mad with misery and fierce passion at his child's unhappy fate, the tortured father stabbed the manager of the acrobatic troupe to death, and then shot himself as his victim fell. This sad case has been much commented upon in the English papers, and it is admitted on all hands that terrible cruelties upon performing children are rather the rule than the exception. There are, however, other kinds of cruelties against which the bill is directed; such as keeping young children out in the streets to all hours pf night selling matches, flowers, and other trifles, and begging from passers-by; or sending them to shiver on a winter's night, or before daylight on a frosty morning, selling newspapers at railway trains, halfclad and unshod. To us, little accustomed to the sight of such misery, it seems strange that such things can exist in the heart of London ; a single case, such as that of the poor child now being cared for in Christchurch, excites indignant horror from end to end cf the colony, so that exemplary punishment of those responsible is unanimously demanded, and, as a case notorious among ourselves showed, sternly accorded by the administrators of the law. In the course of the debate in the Commons, Mr Mundella remarked, apparently without any realisation of the startling significance of his words, that " the Bill will give to children almost the same amount of protection that is assured under other Acts of Parliament to animals." This is one of the matters on which we can truly say that our' progress and enlightenment have left that of the Mother Country far behind. When Mr Dean, the defaulting town clerk of the Thames borough, had Norfolk pocketed the modest spoil island. which was the reward of his recent official operations, and was looking round to see which of the various levanters' paradises of the South Seas he should honour with his company, his choice fell upona place which was once the abode of far greater villains than, it is to be hoped, Mr Dean will ever be, andwhish is now the headquarters of the principal Christian mission of the world. Norfolk Island is in these days an almost forgotten name, but it has had a strange and at one j time a tragic history. It was a convict settlement for the worst class of criminals during the 30 years from 1825 to 1855 ; and the tales that are told, even to the present day, of the horrors of that time, its hideous cruelties and its nameless infamies, trausscend in foulness even the records of the penal establishments at Botany Bay and at Hobart Town. Almost immediately after the breaking up of the convict settlement by the British Government the island entered on its second cycle of history. In 1856 there were landed there, in kiDdly compliance with their own request to the same Government, the 194 inhabitants of Pitcairn Island, the lineal descendants of the famous mutineers of the Bounty — those mutineers who, now exactly 100 years ago, had cast off their captain * in an open boat with a few men, and, taking I into their own hands the good ship Bounty and all that was in her, had sailed away for Pitcairn Island, leaving on their way some of their%umbef at Tahiti (of whom nearly all , were afterwards taken, and some of them

executed). Nine British sailors, six Tahitian men, and 12 Tahitian women landed on Pitcairn Island ; and there they burned the poor old Bounty, and there they lived, and there they fought and struggled, until only one was left of them, and he, with the families of all the others under his care, was found living in virtuous and benevolent old age when the first British ship called there in 1814. In the next 40 years the descendants of thi3 strange medley of colonists became too numerous for their rocky home, and so they were taken to Norfolk Island, where they and their children still are, saving only a few who have stolen quietly back to Pitcairn whence they came, and a tew who have gone to a farther home beyond our mortal ken. And now, in the account we print this week of the arrest of Dean within sight of the waving pines of Norfolk Island.it will be read that the defaulter was " brought before the chief magistrate, Christian, and by him remanded to Auckland,*' the ancestor of this same chief magistrate having been none other than the leader of the mutineers, Christian the outlaw, long" wanted " and sought by the British Government for mutiny on the high seas, and the planner and author of one of the most romantic and famous crimes in all history. A curious instance of the ups and downs of human life was that which, 100 years after the celebrated mutiny of the Bounty, sent back to hia accusers in distant New Zealand a fugitive to Nprfolk Island, by warrant under the hand of the lineal descendant of the chief mutineer himself. The reception of the Emperor William of Germany in England during M 7M 7 inna nna the time of the Paris Exhibisoa. tion, and the magnificent welcome with which he met, will cause a rapprochement between the two countries which has been rather badly wanted ever since the Victoria-Battenberg engagement and the Morell Mackenzie incident, and which Frenchmen must remark with what goodwill they may. The bitterness of the French press against England and the English has lately been very irritating ; but it has'at least enabled English statesmen to enter thoroughly into the spirit of the German offer of goodwill and friendliness, without having to trouble as to what the French might think of it. The extreme importance and the admirable success of the Emperor's friendly visit may well be set against the irksome formalities necessitated by the return of the Shah — who, the Rev. Haweis notwithstanding — is emphatically a nuisance to be tolerated, not a guest to be disinterestedly honoured. There is no reason why, at this distance at any rate, it should not be confessed that— though a Shah is Shah, and an Emperor is an Emperor, whatever else either may be — it is much more pleasant to entertain a monarch who is also a gentleman than a monarch who carries nasby Eastern customs into his quarters when travelling in civilised countries. It must, we fear, be confessed that British official hospitality is controlled chiefly by those "British interests " which we hear so much about in these latter days. The festivities in the case of the Emperor William were strictly of a naval and military turn ; while as regards the Shah, the endeavour was to direct his entertainment in such a way as to impress, upon him the splendid commercial power and wealth of England, rather than the strength of her right arm. Fortunately, English statesmen have not lost the art of doing that kind of thing well. The difficult business of making the Shah comfortable, and at the same time keeping him properly attended by officers of the British Court, has been managed to perfection ; and the parade of the most powerful navy in the world before the heacl of the most powerful of, the world's armies led to such irrepressible enthusiasm on both sides that Germany turned to England, full of the glowing possibilities of such a moment, and said, " With such an army and such a navy what is there that we two could not do ? " That England, with equal enthusiasm, responded, "What, indeed? and why not range them side by side to frown into silence the would-be peacebreakers of Europe ? " will be noted by anxious Europe with profound relief. England's " little paity " has been a success. As regards Shahs, Queens, Emperors, and such like, it is rather curious shahs «.id Such, to speculate upon what the two royal visitors thought about each other, if they chanced to meet in London. Royal people of all countries, creeds, and colours are understood, even in these days, to cling to old ideas about the divine right of Kings and so forth, and seem very scrupulous in bestowing upon each other the most distinguished regard, even though the class of royalty in question may be ol the. queerest possible description. Our own Queen has, within a short time back, been obliged to turn out with all the pomp of guards, and trumpets, and things, to welcome such bearers of reflected royal glory as the envoys of the " Sultan " cf Morocco, and the emissaries of the " Queen " of Madagascar. As for the Queen of the Cannibal Islands (we apologise — the Sandwich Islands, we should say), she had to be received at Windsor, and accommodated with a dais in the abbey on Jubilee Day,and the Lord Chamberlain only knows what besides, in virtue of her purple bringing-up, to say nothing ot i the ditto hue of her royal skin. When Cetewayo, the "King" of the Zulus, was a prisoner in England he received the full benefit of this strange peculiarity of monarchical countries — though if he was not a nigger chief there is not one in all Africa, and itv wonl,d have been the grossest flattery to have hinted at such a half-and-half tint as purple in his case. Our own special king, Tawhiao, was followed all round London by an admiring orowd of amiable fanatics who asked him to afternoon tea (tea for Tawhiao!) and persisted in addressing the bibulous old Maori as " Your Majesty." Gilbert's satire on Mr Gladstone's negotiations with the cannibal "king" who laid claim to the kingdom of Scotland was founded strictly on observation. " There were three courses open to us," the great statesman is represented as solemnly announcing to Parliament. " The first was to admit the claim ; the second was to present a respectful address to his Majesty, humbly requesting him to withdraw the claim ; and the third was. to refer it to arbitration." Such is the magic of any word, in any language, that can be translated into

King, Emperor, Sultan, Shah, Czar, or,anything to the same' effect. No doubt if the Shah and the Emperor did meet in London, they did mutual homage to the purple blond that each devoutly believes to run in; the other's vein's,, and talked loftily in Persian or German about ces outres — the poor Were not created royal.