THE WEEK.

Otago Witness, Issue 2263, 15 July 1897, Page 33

THE WEEK.

" Nunquam aliud natura, allud sapientla dixit."— Jovinal. "Good nature and good sense must ercr join." — Pore.

The business of the colonial Premiers in London, such as it wap, is A Frost. x evidently over, and they all intend' to leave England in a week* or two and proceed leisurely, via sundry foreign countries which they want to "do," to their respective capitals. It has become clearly evident that beyond taking their allotted part in the Imperial reunion of last month they have, with one notable exception, done nothing, conceived nothing, developed nothing, said nothiug*~"that will live in memory beyond the week after next. We are forced to the painful conclusion that Premiers, taken as a distinct species in natural history, are an ordinary lot after all. There has not even been, in the history of the past month, sufficient differentiation among the whole collection to give scope for the principle of the " survival of the fittest " to come into operation. The " struggle for existence " does not, of course, count among a species whosß " environment " is perpetually a gorgeous display of all the delicacies of the season, humbly presented to the individuals of the race by liveried servants of an Empress-Queen, and partaken of in raiment composed of " white Kerseymere breeches, gold sword knot," and the rest of it — vide full descriptions in this week's papers. Some faint reason seems to exist, on the authority of some English statesman or other, for selecting the Premier of Victoria, Sir George Turner, as the statesman of the coterie of the Hotel Cecil. He would not be our eelection (or, at any rate, would not have been three months ago, when he went Home), and the general feeling of disappointment experienced is only accentuated by the recognition — if we must recognise it — of the supremacy of so very ordinary a party politician among the Premiers of the Queen's dominions. We never expected Mr Seddon to be heard of to any great extent. He is not of much use where bluster does not go down, and it does not go down in London. However, our business just now is not with persons but with deeds and words ; or, rather, with the exception noted above, with the absence of anything valuable in either of those lines. We suppose that the most ardent Seddonite can hardly pretend that we are writing with any party bias, or affect to be able to quote a j single act or deed by which our Premier — or \ for that matter, any Australasian Premier — j has advanced the cause of Imperial unity, promoted Imperial welfare, or x caused the j Imperial idea to surge in the impassioned heart of any British citizen. The one excep- ! tion, and it is a very striking one, is that of the Cape Government, who have intimated their intention of presenting, free of all con- j ditions, a warship to the United Kingdom. South Africa with her warship and Canada with her preferential tariff have each scored one. So far as the Premiers in England are concerned there has been plenty Counterfeit of platitude of course — oceans Coin. of it, and not even very original stuff of its kind either. Mr Seddon baa led easily ia this. Platitude, uttered as if it were Revelation, is his chief platform stock-in-trade, and nnf ortunately in laying in a stock of the gorgeous clothes we have lately had described and of other novel personalties too numerous to mention, be has failed to supply himself .with any new line of oratory to match bis sartorial splendours. Platitude, however, is tolerable enough in its way, and on an occasion like the present there always must be a certain amount of it. An eternal directness and crispness of speech is like unvarying sharpness of outline in a picture — theoretically correct, but tiresome and inartistic if unrelieved by occasional lapses. What is not at all so pardonable is the kind of device to which Mr Seddon has lately characteristically resorted to bolster up tbe reputation he would fain have made in London, but hasn't. Conscious that something was expected of him, and that so far he has done nothing save flit from banquet to baaqaet, from mansion to castle, and from castle to palace, he has fallen back upon the old, old plan of bamboozling his simple-minded adherents by pretending to achieve things with which he has really had nothing to do. Even the 'Acting-Premier must have made a grimace and uttered a disrespectful protest or two when he was peremptorily ordered from London to inform the colony at large that Mr Seddon had actually got the shipping companies to l'educe their rates for the carriage of frozen meat. Mr M'Kenzie, who as a resident of the colony and head of the Agricultural department knew perfectly well that all this had been arranged in the colony some weeks before Mr Seddon, aa the Daily i Times puts ir, " took a walk down" to the shipping office " one fine morning, might : really have plucked up courage to cable a mild remonstrance before consenting to i make both his chief and himself so ridiculous as this solemn official announcement ! has made them in commercial circles in the ! colony. It is, however, only one indication that the Premiers themselves are recognising i with distinct uneasiness the poverty of the | appearance they have made when we find i one of tfcfem descending to a childish dodge like this to get up at any cost some spurious enthusiasm about their " work." It remains to be added in their favour that apparently no word of light and leading has been uttered from fir3t to laßt by Mr Chamberlain j himself. In the great speech upon which we recently commented, and which was uttered before the arrival of any of the Premiers in London, the Secretary of State would appear to have exhausted for the entire period of tbe Jubilee Iris power to stir I the pulses of the English-speaking world. ! An involuntary scientific experiment, con- | ducted with great heroism From the and determination, and in Dark Valley. the face of imminent deatb, is a novelty for which the world should be grateful. Tbe other day

Dr O. Le Neve Foster, a well-known physicist, and one of the British inspectors of mines, was sent to report on a lead mine in the Isle of Man where a fatal accident had occurred. The mine was full of deadly gas, in the lethal embraces of which lay, at tbe bo t to ai of a shaft, the dead body of a miner, plainly visible. It was part of Dr Foster's business to suggest how the remains of this poor fellow could be brought to the surface without serious risk of leaving the remains of others behind instead. Dr Foster and several others descended the shaft to a landing, whence a ladder led to where the body was. The cage only held one at a time, and when all were down at the landing one (Captain Kewley) went two or three steps down the ladder and tried to angle for the dead miner's clothes with grappling irons. He at once collapsed, however, from the effects of the poisonous gas, and his companions had to haul him back and put him in the cage for the surface. On the way up the cage jammed in the shaft, and there it etuck for an hour before it oould be moved. Meanwhile the people on the landing had found out from their own sensations that they also were in poisonous air ; and their feelings on seeing the shaft blocked by tbe arrested cage — their sole means of escape — may psrhapg be faintly imagined. They prepared for death — Dr Foster's way of preparing being to take out his notebook and minutely set down every occurrence, including his own sensations and what he could gather of those of others: V I fear we are all dying," is one of his notes. "No help coming. Reddicliffa is struggling. No real pain. Good-bye. I fesl as if I were sleeping. Again, good-bye all. — 2.15 p.m. We are all done. It is really like a bad dream. No pain. For the benefit of others, no pain. It is BtraDge to write noteß while onß is dying. Reddicliffe is about the worst : I think he will go first." Then when at last the box was released and hope sprang up again we have : " The box has just gone up with Reddicliffe. Williams goes next. There is life in the old horse yet. I feel as if I could sing. God has heard our prayer — my turn to go." (He went the last of all.) When this heroic doctor got to the top he staggered out, notebook in hand, scrawling in uncertain characters the exact time of his arrival. Then he notes — the last entry — " Dr Miller says I must be quiet, but I won't." Probably at this point Dr Miller confiscated the pocketbook, or the patient would have kept at it till he got well. The value of Dr Foster's notes does not, of course, lie in those we have quoted, but in the others, dealing, with the physiological sensations made apparent in that cave of deatb, with the big black body of the jammed cage between bim and the blue sky he seemed so unlikely ever to see again. Fiction has rarely conceived a more weird situation. There is something very fine about that parfciug entry : " For the benefit of others, no pain."

The delightful enthusiasm and uncompromising convincement of youth One of our beamed brightly from Miss Rebels. E. R. Benjamin, LL.B., ac she delivered her oration on the past, present, and future position of " our women " to the students and dons of the Obago University. This, Miss Benjamin tells us, is the very first time she has spoken in public, and we are pleased to take the opportunity of congratulating her upon a debut so pleasing in every way, and of assuring her that she need not be in any way disturbed as to the excollance of the impression created by her maiden effort as a public orator. The novelty of the thing, however, and the natural tendency towards deference where a pleasant-spoken and clever youug woman is concerned, must not blind us to the fact that the opinions of a young girl of, say, 20 (we have no idea of the exact state of the case in this respect, and nothing on earth would induce us to ask) are not any more conclusive as to grave social and political questions than are those of the ordinary hobbledehoy of the opposite sex. The cocksureness of youth ie one of its most attractive qualities, even when it takes the form— aa it does in moßt- instance?, and did in Miss Benjamin's case — of explaining to people a lew year«j older how utterly wrong their ideas have been all their lives through. Bat whether the youth of 20 be boy or girl, the one thing certain is that his or her opinions of that epoch will not be those they would express five, ten, or twenty yeara later. Miss Benjamin's upon marriage, 'for instance, wo should prefer to have some time in the beginning of the nexc century, or. whet}, still later, the responsibilities attaching to tbe care of a big daughter or two have produced their inevitable effect upon her present glowing resentment against the old tendency to consider a girl's futnre as baviDg possibly something to do with a suitable husband. At present Miss Benjamin goes the whole length for women's rights. " The struggle for their rights is not yec ended. It is 1 growing keener and keener day by day aad year by year. For centuries women have submitted to the old unjust order of things, but at last they have rebelled," &c, &c. ; and the speaker instanced her own " struggles " to get made a barrister and solicitor as an evidence of the efficacy of the rebellion — which no doubt in a sense it is, though surely the question of whether or not it is a good thing that "our women" (the phrase is irresistibly amusing coming from a graduate of yesterday, and is more so from its constant reiteration throughout the speech) should be lawyers is not settled once for all by the fact that one of them was made so last week. So enthusiastic, however, is this young denouncer of the old times, that her only fear is that women, through •' over-cultivation," should become nothing but thinking machines. This is not an imminent catastrophe, we venture to believe. " The ideal new woman," perorated Miss Benjamin, " will perfect herself — body, mind, and soul." This is fortunate, as we have never known anybody (man or woman) do it yet. Does Miss Benjamin mean that that is what men have been doing with themselves " for centuries," and that one of women's new rights is that at last they should be free to do it too ? The prospectus of a dredging company ia hardly the kind of thing to which the ordinary man looks for poetic inspiration, but Mr Walter H. Pearson is not an ordinary man. Wo must confess at the outset to

having hitherto neglected to post ourselvef up in whatever all tbe pother may be about in connection with the Shag Valley Dredging Company, the affairs of which have been filling up the Daily Times to so great aa extent of late. All we have gathered is that Mr Pearson has attached himself as poet laureate to the undertaking in question, and is attaining fame in that capacity by leaps and bounds. Many years ago we remember to have read a State paper by Mr Pearson (then a Government officer, and no doubb an excellent one) on the alluring subject of the oyster. Beginning in the usual formal official style, the writer's feelings warmed visibly as he recalled the innocent gambols of the baby oysters in their native ocean which he had been officially engaged in witnessing, and in impassioned language he describtd the cruel trials and perils of their infancy, the insatiable fury of their marine enemies, and, finally, the hateful selfishness and greed of all mankind, who had combined to condemn the unhappy creatures to a life of peril and a death of hideous cruelty. The Shag Valley Dredging Company may have been originally as apparently uninspiring a subject as the common oyster, but Mr Pearson's poetic J genius baa risen superior to this obstacle in both cases. His letters must be read to be appreciated, and we will content ourselves by saying that if the Shag Valley Dredging Company strikes it as rich in the neighbour* hood of " Hunter's " as it has in Mr Pearson's brain, it will have justified all that Jihat gentleman (so far as we understand his drift) has been claiming in its favour. It must be understood, we would mildly add, that our praise applies to Mr Pearson's prose poetry only. His actual verse is hardly so successful. We sat down and howled by the waters Of Shag, and on our jews-harps we played may, for all we know, be good eatire/but as music it leaves something to be desired — we are, perhaps, not sufficiently poetic to say exactly what.

Mb Hall-Jones appears to have given offence by ordering a liveried coachman and a grand carriage to meet him at the Wellington wharf on his return from a recent Ministerial excursion. The costume of Mr HallJoneß's coachman does not interest us (the special trains and reserved carriages so often alleged to be requisite for the use of democratic members ot the Ministry are of more public interest, but in this respect we onlj \quarrel with excess and abuse, not with occasional indulgence such as is reasonably necessary for* the convenience of busy public men), but if we were disposed to take any part in the discussion we Bhould content ourselves by offerirjg a probable explanation of jMr Hall-Jones's outburst of splendour. He j has simply been excited by reading the daily telegrams from London. There are not any royal equipages available here; but after all a Minister is a Minister, and a Premier is no more. Why should not a Minister for Public Works look at well with livery on bis coach-box as a holder of seven portfolios, a bank boardship.and asyndicatial »gency rolled into one 1 Now Zealand must continue to lead the world. Let the untutored mob of effete England gape at the gaudy coaches in which Premiers 101 laß they work out the glorified Bpree now drawing to its close. The deserving working man of =Weiliugton shall have something to look at too. It only coats a telegram or two (on public service only) to the'purveyors of aristocratic conveyances in the capital, and a more or lesg appreciable enlaf gement of that little bill for "Ministerial cab hire" which has of late years been so sedulously protected from the light of day. %

Whenever a war has taken place we are pretty sure to hear sooner or later of some detestable cold-blooded cabal by which ifc has been brought about, and which has been hatched by men who gloried in sending thousands of innocent men to the shambles without the remotest intention of putting their own noses into any danger whatever. Everyone will remember the cynical avowal of Prince Bismarck a short time ago to the effect that he deliberately precipitated the Franco- German war by an act ef forgery. He altered the text of a pacific message from the French Government, and presented it to the King of Prussia in a mutilated form — the result being a reply tonding to elicit, as it did elicit, a declaration of war by France. Already we have in connection with the Greek attack upon Turkey an apparently authoritative revelation of the secret springs of action. The author, who says be is a diplomatist and writes anonymously in the Fortnightly Review, declares that; the object of Greece was not , the pacification of Crete, but its annexation; hence, when iq the early stages of the insurrection a peaceful settlement appeared .well assured at the instance of the Powers, it was deliberately resolved at Athens to make, any such settlement impossible, lest the resulting autonomy should lose the island to- the Hellenic Kingdom. "Ifc , was obviously necessary to create a situation in Crete which would render the pacificatory mission of the Powers a task of great difficulty." Canea had been virtually already pacified, and the despatch of Turkish troops to the island had been positively prohibited by the Power?, when Prince George was hurriedly despatched with a squadron, and Colonel Vassos landed and proclaimed the annexation. At this time, indeed, so far from the Christians being in any danger, tbe great anxiety of the European admirals was how to rescue the Mahommedan garriaonB r and settlements from the Christian insurgents. The treachery and hypocrisy of Greece have beer, fitly punished by her utter defeat ; but unhappily the mischief lives after her. As the writer only too truly says, she has propped up the throne of Abdul Hamid, strengthened the infernal system of Yildiz, and stiffened all the reactionary elements in Moßlem national life.

The attack upon cash betting in the colonies, following an English lead of still doubtful validity, may have been desultory and spasmodic so far, but it seems to us to be the first stages of a genuine movement. How it is looked upon by the public generally in' countries not yet blessed by the benign sway of the totalizator we are hardly prepared to say. It is difficult to conceive what one might do or think if suddenly projected back into the Middle Ages ; and New Zealand in totalißfttaft, a* in various muoa-tiumnettd

glories hardly less trivial, has " led the prorid." All we can Bay, now that the crusading spirit has spread to this country, is that after a longer or shorter interval of time it is pretty sure to make a clean sweep of its viotimß. The bookmaking class no doubt has its uses with a section of jfche publio — all "noxious trades" have, pnd many are indispensable — but theoretically and in principle it has not a friend ontsidn the professional stable gangs. |We oan hardly imagine a serious movement ,to avert the impending dcom of the cash bettor, for the reason that no seriouß movement can. long exist as a secret cabal, and the moment the banner of bookmaking was [openly waved aloft its adherents would BCuttle under cover in all directions, divestIdg themselves as they went of the incriminating evidence of their pocket book*. The only hope for the brazen-langed fraternity is In the elasticity of the meshes of the law's net. The way that big fishes perennially get tnrough these, with the help of those whose business it is to know the ropes (and strings), is notorious. But after a!J, that amoants only to a possible temporary respite. A really persistent net-caster will perfect his apparatus in time.