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Otago Witness, Issue 2082, 18 January 1894, Page 27

The Otago Witness, WITH WHICH IS INCORPORATED THE SOUTHERN MERCURY.

(THURSDAY, JANUARY 18, 1594.)

THE WEEK.

' Itanfuun »Uu4 nature, »Uod uplsntla dliit."— Jmrnui " Goodn»tur« and good lenu muit oter Join."— Pora.

The jury's rider in the South Dnnedin stabbing case, to the effect that The hate all suburban police stations Inquest. should be connected by tele-

phone with the chief office in the city, represents an obviously necessary reform. Most people will be rather surprised to learn that telephonic communication of the kind does not already exist. That it has not exi&ted for years past is probably in no way the fault of the police authorities, but is due to the parsimony of Governments in the matter of providing minor conveniences in the departments which bave merely the merit of being practically useful and humane, but which possess no value for show purposes. We have no doubt that, now that it has been shown that a human life has quite possibly been sacrificed in consequence of the neglect, the matter will receive attention in the proper quarter.

The inquest, as was very proper, was conducted with great minuteness, and the verdict ef the coroner's jury was a satisfactory conclusion to it. No blame can be attached to the police authorities in connection with tl c occurrence. Drunken brawls will oour in spite of the beßt possible system of police ; and knivep, if used under such circumstances, will occasionally trespass over the hair's breadth of muscle or vein which makes all the difference between a trifling gash and a deadly wound. Mudge, the victim, was a quiet, harmless fellow, who met his death by the pure misfortuno of being in the same locality as a pocket knife that was flying about viciously in the hands of a frenzied brawler. He was unlucky in being stabbed in one of his legs -a part of the human frame not usually aimed at with ltthal intent ; unluckier still in being just near enough to his destroyer to effect the division of the femoral vein when the flying knife came his way. Whether the destroyer himself was unlucky as well as criminal remains for a jury of the higher court to say. The occurrence was truly deplorable, and it may be hoped thai an example will be made of the ttabber should a conviction be secured ; at the same time we may all congratulate ourselves that the case ia not one in which an intense public indignation or horror is in any way called for.

This is no doubt an awkward time to suggest reforms in the railway To system, for no one knows Some Person what is going to be done Or Persons about the control. The Unknown. Government, or rather the

Premier, is bungling on towards the date fixed for the execution of the Railway Commissioners — who have been

convicted on much the same kind of evidence as that upon which Mr Speight's enemies in Victoria contrived his official ruin — and the management of properly worth millions of pounds is all between wind and water. Anybody who ran a private business in such a fatuous manner would bo liable to have his sanity called in qaestion, but if one's party is in a majority it does not really matter what one does with the public estate.

However, as-uming that somebody or other will be in charge o£ the railways after Saturday week, it may be worth while to remind him or them that the holiday season is not yet over, and that the " all-line " holiday tickets which have jast proved such a conspicuous success on the other side may be- capable of an adaptation, further than has yet been tried, to the railways of this colony. Victoria is small and compact, and is not cut into two by 50 miles of ocean Btraits. The " all- line ' system over here should not be quite bo simple as in Victoria. There should be one " all-line " fore for, say, three or four months of the year ; another for one or two months ; others, similarly arranged, for the South Inland railways alone; ditto tor the North Island railways alone ; and arrangements for exchange, extension, and so on, should approach as nearly as possible to the American sy3tem. We need not enlarge upon the public convenience that such a plan would serve, further than to j mention that scores of people, perhaps hundreds, are debarred from thinking of allline holiday tickets because the prices charged bave in the past been based on the assumption that everybody who gets them will cross the Straits— which they won't. The Government have just made the currency of their postal notes unlimited in time ; if they get the railways, suppose they do something of the same kind with railway tickets that have been duly paid for. Every now and then the British nation gets , a nasty twinge about the Tlu 1 perfection of that charter of Speight-Syme- its liberties, the right of trial Trial. by jury. It is known (as a profound secret^ to pretty well everybody that her Majesty's judges everywhere hold the intelligence of juries and the glories of the system remarkably cheap ; as for her Majesty's coroners, if they could somehow be inveigled into the mythical Palace of Tiuth and questioned on the subject under the magi': influence of tbe place, there is no saying what adjectives they might substitute for the convent ional "good and true." We should rather like to put Mr Justice Hodges there and ask him what he really thinks of the sapient jurymen who pronounced upon the libel case Speight v. Syme.

There is every reason to believe that the finding represents a monstrous judicial scandal. Nor is it necessary, in order to arrive at this conclusion, that the evidence should have been minutely followed. It is only requisite to compare the judge's summing up on the various libels charged with the record of the jury's dealings with them, to become convinced that in this momentous trial the jury syßtem has utterly and lamentably broken down. The assumption mos j naturally made to account for the miserable inadequacy of the jury's work — namely, that theie were successive lionest differences upon the several questions, resulting in the establishment of reasonable doubt upon 10 out of the 11 issues — cannot stand the test of a study of the course of the trial. We do net know who the jurymen were, and do not care. Neither do we know the parties to the trial, except from their public services, which, notwithstanding that the men are unfortunately at such desperate loggerheads between themselves, we readily pronounce to have been very great indeed. But we are aware of the issues submitted to the court, ef the general course of the prosecution and defence, of the judge's summing up, and of the contemptible absurdity and inadequacy of the jury's pronouncement; and being aware of these things, can only remark that a more scandalous confession not only of incapacity, but of dishonesty, has never been made by a British panel.

Perhaps the principal fault of the French officers who bungled so disasA (Jrim trously the other day in Comedy. Africa — that land of per-

petnal bungles — is 'that they have turned the taking of human life into a comedy. Sad as is the unnecessary death of several brave men of both nations, and melancholy as the waste of nerve and muscle and living souls must appear to all, it is impossible to resist a certain sense of the grimly humorous in this weird story of the African coast. Two nations, England and France, establish colonies near to each other among the pestilent jungles of Sierra Leone. The deadly peril from disease which daily and nightly encompasses the bold pioneers establishes a common bond of sympathy, which is increased in strength by the everpresent " native difficulty " of those regions, and results in more or less allied measures for mutual protection between the psople of the two nationalities. A time comes (as it always does in these cases) when the chronic " native difficulty " develops an acute phase, and " expeditions" are ordered simultaneously by the French and British commandants. It is another chance of testing the powers of the Mariini-Henry; it is the opportunity of perfecting the practical records of the Lebel ; let us hope that it is also an enterprise necessary for the safety and honour of the respective colonies. Mutual warnings pass, and the little columns start, each From its sweltering barracks in th^ " capital," in the falling shade 3of evening. The dusky enemy lies in his forest fastness and watches the red coats of the one column and the red breeches of the other as they converge, each band ignorant of the other's whereaboutß. His teeth gleam as he clutches hid spear; but his dark cheeks go green and yellow as he notes the flashing steel and recognises the deadly mitrailleuse, and the multiple barrels of the Gardners and the Maxim 3. The camps are pitched — not in sight of each other. Night falls.

What does the lurking savage see next ? Stealthy movements in one of the campshurried gatherings, eager conclave?, a silent, swift departure ; in the other, a profound stillness reigns. Then, before the eyes of the watcher, the grim and ghastly concedy

of which we learned the brief details last week unfolds itself. The men of the red breeches fall upon the men of the red coats unawares ; their rifles ring out incessantly, answered presently by the rattle of the Martinis from the entrenchments ; the gloating warrior in the forest sees, to his amazement and to his fiendish glee, his enemies ignorantly murdering each other, their ghastly mistake still covered through the smoke that envelopes both sides.

Then, when brave men have bit the dust on both sides, and while men as brave still fight on over their bodies, some passing zephyr lifts the smoky veil, and in a moment the truth, grotesquely horrible, is apparent on both sides. Nothing remains but to convey the news to London and to Paris, for the diplomatists to make an "incident" of. The blood of the poor fellows soon dries on the African sands, and their story becomes a record in the archives of the Foreign Offices. They died on the strand of Sierra Leone, where people die like flies anyhow — and as well that way perhaps as any other. .Their fellow-countrymen smile grimly at the queer complication, and pass on to another item in the paper ; the diplomatists at Home bow, and scrape, and smirk, and part with mutual expressions of high esteem. And the black "soja," more gleefully satisfied than any, goes back unmolested to his native fastness.

11 Sierra Leone " (the Mountain of Lions) got its curious name from its Whore Portuguese discoverer about I< the time of Columbus — not Unniioiicil. because there are so many

lions there,]but because of the incessant thunder on the top?, which reminded De Cintra of the roaring of the king of beasts. The army and navy services have a more suggestive name for the settlement. They live in more or less remote dread of being sent there some day or other on garrison duty — which will have anew terror of its own since the late "incident" — and they call it "The White Man's Grave." We should not be at all surprised to learn that there is a considerable amount of 1 cal jealousy amongst the other three West African colonies — Lagos, the Gold Coast, and Gambia — at the unmerited distinc'ion accorded to Sierra Leone in the direction here hinted at. They are all undeniably possessed of an equal titlo to the appellation in question, and it seems unfair that the claims of Sierra Leone should have been bo distinctively recognised. The three unappreciated death-traps, however, take their revenge in a sufficiently effectual way. They may not have the satisfaction of a suitable nickname, but they put in their mortuary statistics all the same.

Sierra Leone includes several coastal islands and a large and undefined track of interior Africa, all more or less fever-in-fested ; mostly more. White people are safest high up the Mountain of Lions— which, needless to say, is now called Sugarloaf, with the^ true British contempt for poetical nomenclature. They reckon up about 75,000 people there, which makes the place look on paper like a thriving British colony until you learn that they are all negroes except some two or three hundred. The negroes are as industrious as negroes usually are, or in other words produce say 20 per cent, of what might fairly be expected from their labour — the products being the usual things one reads about in tropical statistics, such as palm-oil, indiarubber, and other gums, coffee, spices, and so on. The imports and exports each figure up to between £300,000 and £400,000, and the annual shipping tonnage at the port (cleared and entered) is 700,000 tons. This will serve to give an idea of the business done at the place. Sierra Leone is distinguished from the other three West African colonies (in addition to the distinction conferred by the endearing epithet already noted) by the possession of a public debt which amounts to £58,000; but they can never have heard anything out there of the approved Liberal methods of creating surpluses, for their sinking fund amounts to no less than £27,000. They have a government, of course, but, sad to relate, it is composed in a strictly Tory way. Actually there is nothing you can call a suffrage, and as to women's rights, no one within thousands of miles of the Mountain of Lions has ever heard of them. The colony has passed through the usual Chattered Company phase of existence, which ended in 1807 ; and it now supports many civilised institutions and a bishop. The French colony is on the north frontier, and is known as the Riviereß dv Sud. Its annual cost to the parent country is Btated in the French budget at the modest sum of 33,000fr (£1320), a sum which will possibly be materially increased this year by a substantial indemnity to England for the late accident. Sierra Leone and its French neighbour are both in cable communication with Europe, whenever the cable people at their end are not down with fever and ague.

The Aucklanders somehow or other usually have a clerical trouble of Some some kind on hand. The last Literary offender but two departed for Kirorls. other pastures a year or so ago, after Borne lively meetings of anything bub an edifying nature. The last but one is still in hot water over his dallyings with Theosophy, and may end, according as the usual appeals and conclaves turn out, in owing allegiance to either the synod or the Mahatmas — the former apparently being disinclined to share it with the latter, which perhaps is not unnatural. The reconciliation of Blavatskyism with the Westminster Confession, which the gentleman principally concerned seems to hope to effect, would require a Declaratory Act of a decidedly drastic nature, of which we fear there ia no immediate prospect at present. The very last culprit of all — a certain Rev. J. B. Johnson — has, however, expressed sanguine anticipations of reconciling bis continuance in the profession of the ministry with something even more unlike what is usually associated therewith in people's minde. He ministered last in Ballarat, where he was, let us say, a little ahead of the times — his peculiarities being out of accord with the ideas of his congregation. Congregations are apt to have troublesome ideas of their own at times as to the conduct to be expected from their paßtors ; and they were very troublesome in Ballarat. It

ended—we really do not want to particularise — in the Rev. Mr Johnson coming over to put New Zealanders in the straight path. They neglected to give him a send-off in Quart zopolis, and he loft his testimonials behind him — in point of fact, in the hurry of the moment no testimonials were forthcoming. However, they ought to have been, so in default of anybody ehe the rev. gentleman supplied the omission himself, and it iS only fair to admit that he made an excellent job of it. Something of the same kind waß done in our own province not* long ago, and in both cases the resulting adjectives were all that could be desired. However, it is not only in Ballarat that unreasonable congregations exist, and one or two inconveniently precise persons in the Auckland one took to prying into things a little, with the result (as in the Otago case) that the authorship of the interesting document became so uncomfortably clear that the principal in the transaction finally confessed. While Mr Johnson was about it, he also owned up to having sent a lettef signed "A Friend of Blue Ribbon" to a certain temperance society in Ballarat, hinting with considerable directness that pecuniary recognition of Mr Johnson's services to their cause would be very much in accord with the fitness of things. In making these little admissions the rev. gentleman explained that he had approached the Throne of Grace with his peccadilloes with satisfactory results; but even this has not entirely allajed the unreasonable dissatisfaction which exists. The upshot is a second exodus from Ballarat and (so it is promised) a second term of edification for New Zealanders at the feet of tho Rev. J. B. Johnson.