The Otago Witness,

Otago Witness, Issue 2331, 3 November 1898, Page 33

The Otago Witness,

WITH WHICH IS INCORPORATED THE SOUTHERN M EB.CU RT. (THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 3, 1598.) THE WEEK.

" Sunquam aliud natura, aiiud sapientia dixit."— Jdvbnal. "Good nature and good seni'o must ever join. I '— Popk. This week's southern edition af the Witness will see the light on the To-day's Tuapeka polling day-, so Election. that we can indulge in the virtuous reflection that nothing we can say will either advance or injure the chances of any candidate. The Government, as so often happens, looked round for a weak man to bear their colours — strong ones, in the full sense of the word, do not suit if the other kind can be got — and evidently found him. Unhappily, Mr Sim was physically weak also, and after one excursion into his proposed sphere of influence he arrived at the conclusion that it would never do. The announcement of his return home acted in a curiously emollient way upon Mr Ramsay's Opposition proclivities, which during the Port Chalmers election were of quite a rampant kind. The temptation to Mr Ramsay was of course very strong to profit by the sudden appearance of the Government ticket in the market for disposal to 4he highest bidder, and it is small wonder that at his meeting the same night his views of Ministerial action underwent a peculiar expansion, the boundaries of which were too artistically nebulous for exact definition. We can testify to the success of Mr Ram- j say's tactics (as success is counted in political contests), for we have ever since^altogether failed to piece together his political professions into any plain meaning. This candidate, however, seems to us to be a better speaker than Mr Gilkison, who does not appear to possess the faculty of infusing interest in any degree into his utterances, though he is both more modest and more direct than Mr Ramsay. The latter, in his constant descriptions of the fine moral principles which he considers characteristic of him, verges dangerously on the maudlin, and seems to have forgotten- the old copybook text about this kind of self-praise. We are sorry also that (especially in connection with a very inglorious piece of shuffling) he should take up with the cheap political cant he seems to cling to about "Young New Zealand." Ifc sounds _ all right, but greater experience and a wider

knowledge of the world never yet counted as disadvantageous with sensible electors, and we want no such foolish new division in New Zealand politics as this candidate proposes in> his own interest. Of Mr Symes city people have been unable to form any definite opinjpn beyond the fact that he is deservedly esteemed in his own neighbourhood. He, like Mr Gilkison, belongs to the " Dunstan end " (as they phrase it in that electorate), while Mr Rawlins is " Lawrence end," and Mr Ramsay, as befits his shuffling utterances, is all round. We hope that Mr Rawlins will on the present occasion receive the recognition that his pluck, persistency, and unfailing good nature in contests, as well as his exceptional industry in the study and assimilation of politics, undoubtedly deserve. Tuapeka will honour itself if on this occasion the " all but " of two years o,go is replaced by a cordial majority. Ifc would be difficult to analyse exactly the actual public sentiment with Scenes that regard to what are called are not " scenes " in the House. The Brightest. expressed sentiment, we are aware, is invariably one of shocked surprise, and the favourite adjective is " painful " ; but we are not just now alluding to outward expressions. In tho first place, " scenes " often seem very much more serious when read about in telegrams than they have appeared to the participators and their audience during the actual occurrence. >Sometimes members who have been in the House all the time have never suspected that a " scene " was passing until they have read about it in the next day's papers. But, of course, there are real " scenes," very apparent as such to all who are present at them ; a.nd it is with regard to such genuinely unpleasant affairs that we are at present speculating. The public reprobation of them is, no doubt, sincere enough in its way, but there is no denying that the general course of discussions upon such matters is not of a very solemn kind. The description, if smartly done by an alert reporter in the gallery, is often very good reading — sometimes, if one might venture to hint so much, quite a relief from the protracted dulness of a " great " debate — and the public, though it expresses all the bentiments proper under the circumstances, betrays an unregenerate tendency to forgive a great deal for a relaxation like that. The R. M'Kenzie business was unquestionably one of the real " scenes," to the seriousness of which everyone in the House at the time was keenly alive. The " chair," in the very unimpressive person of Mr Guinness, was defied in an unmistakable manner, and its occupant " told on " the offending member with a solemnity nob entirely of the made-to-order variety. The regulation reproof, &c. , which followed must be accepted as having been all very proper under the circumstances, and Mr R. M'Kenzie (who, wo may here remark, has not " caught it " a moment too soon, and may be regarded as having been lucky if he was really innocent on this particular occasion) behaved with ill-regu-lated obstinacy in meeting his punishment. We are certainly not concerned to defend him, nor can it be pretended that either Motueka or the country would be any the poorer for the execution of his threats ; still, we confess to a doubt whether any procedure can be quite correct which rigidly prescribes, in relation to a really technical fault, an unreserved apology before explanation or defence. There may be good reasons for it, and we are ready to be persuaded of them ; moreover, we fully admit that the R. M'Kenzies of politics require sharp and stern measures if they are to be kept in due order ; but regarding the recent row impersonally, we have a feeling that it indicates a ' decidedly weak spot either in the rules of the House or in the Speaker's interpretation of them. The comical irregularity of the withdrawal of the resignation, on the other hand, will awaken an irresistible chord of sympathy with the gallant weakness of Sir Maurice O'Rorke. In the face of many misgivings we are prepared to accord the utmost \ The possible credence to the asDefouce of tho surances given by the Govern- j Flag. ment as to the' condition of the colotvy's defences and the possibility of effectively manning them should a sudden extremity arise. The Premier says the colony was never better preparecl. He is quite right to say so, but it ! should be understood that the statement is : not exactly for home consumption. We may pass it by as a diplomatic necessity of the hour ; if Mr Seddon had publicly declared during a grave crisis that the defences were j dangerously inadequate he would have laid himself open to severe blame. Let us, how- j ever, as we have said, give all reasonable credence to the optimistic assurances of the i defence authorities ; but, that being under- j stood, let no one imagine that there is not an immense deal that urgently requires at- ! tending to. To mention one item alone, it '< is quite beyond doubt that the harbour ! mine service in its present stage is as de- ' lusive as our so-called torpedo boats, and ' yet the official communications from Wei- ] lington treat the torpedo service as a live ] organisation and invite the public to rest confident that if a hostile cruiser appears i they will see what they will see. The truth J in this relation is so notorious that it is hard not to feel that other similar a*sur- j ances are badly discredited. However, the ; only point now Avorth speaking of is the ' necessity for prompt and thorough improvement in the defuice equipment of the colony. " We've got the men — no commandant, wearied and disheartened by official callous- ! ness though he may have been, has thought { of denying that ; " we've got the ships " i — a fair allowance of the British navy, with more to follow in case of need ; and, provided we devote our resources to a real advance in armament and material, and not merely to the providing of billets for Ministerial favourites, " we've got the money too." A modern small arm is an urgent necessity, and the hesitation shown in providing that and its appropriate ammunition is next door to criminal ; well we should know it if we had to send our sons and brothers out before Christmastide to meet I a hostile landing party, with nothing to oppose to our enemies but the antiquated popguns which ought long ago to have adorned the walls of the colonial museums. The energetic reorganisation. oi the mine service •

is a matter of tremendous importance ; there are not many Deweys outside the AngloSaxon fold. The medical, commissariat, and transport departments want committing unreservedly (with a blank cheque) to the commander of the forces. We can then shoot him if they fail, but a Minister always escapes. Finally, the forts want a thorough ransacking, an importation of artillery sergeants should be arranged for, and the supreme question of ammunition should be placed absolutely beyond uncertainty. This is a minimum programme of essentials ; and an assurance that it is so regarded officially would be received with real enthusiasm by the bulk of the people. The Bishop of Dunedin's address to his syliod is in an unusal deBishop gree suave and businesslike, Nevill's and there is much in it Address. that is really interesting. In this we do not include the long dissertation on the priority controversy between himself and Bishop Jenner (which represents a kind of ecclesiasj tical tweedledum and tweedledee), nor the , learned citation of ancient references in ' &UTDport of his lordship's views about the f proper way to try an accused bishop — supposing so awful a possibility really to exist. Bishop Nevill sensibly criticises the very flabby proposal of the recent Lambeth ; Conference to institute a kind of grandmotherly committee to give soothing ad- | vise to colonial bishops in difficulties. We agree with the bishop that very little but meddling and muddling will come of it, though here again we are bound to add , that our opinion is not, like his lordship's, i founded on the fact that " the sixth Canon | of the Council of Nice, a.d. 325, the sevcn- [ teenth Canon of the Council of Carthage, ' a.d. 418, and the twenty-eighth Canon of the Code of tJae Canons of the African Church" all point in that direction, for which we willingly take the bishop's word ! The defeat of Bishop Nevill's " coadjutor " I proposals by the General Synod is doubtless ' a sore point, but is treated with admirable 1 calmness on the whole. The failure of the i "pastoral letter" on religious instruction i in the schools is of course bewailed, but most people will wonder oi> what grounds ■ it was e\er expected that anything would come of it. There seems to be a considerable amount of simplicity on the Episcopal j bench, which believed in good faith when , it was told that " if the bishops would only give some clear lead upon this subject the : people would gladly follow." The "lead" actually given consisted in a proposition which ignores every difficulty and overrides every objection that has troubled the conscientious thinker from the first, and simply invites him, as Sydney Smith would have put it, to " go and be bishopped " out of his ill-regulated hesitations. This is perfectly hopeless. If bishops or anybody else should really desire success in the direction indicated, the reality of the difficulties in the way must first be admitted. It is of ; no use to rail at all who differ from them as though these latter invented the difficulties for some malign purpose. If bishops will not learn that the " enemies <,f religious education," as secularists are falsely called, have instituted the present State system in the profound conviction that until sectarianism vanishes from Chris- " tendom justice is violated by any other, , they will always have the mortification of finding that what they think is ecclesias- ! tical thunder reaches the ears of the ' threatened laity as an ineffectual squeak. On the present occasion Bishop Nevill makes his protest frankly comic by pro- j '. mulgating a unique hypothesis of the'source whence leading articles in the press proceed. i In his lordship's experience, they have ap- : parently been ordered with the ink and [ paper. Oddly enough, one of the first pro- . ceedings of the synod after this episcopal deliverance was to arrange to s\.art a diocesan journal—board of directors and all. Possibly the prospect of " ordering " your particular fancy in leaders with the clay's supply of butcher meat was too overpoweringly fascinating to be postponed even till the next sitting. * We trust that an opportunity will be given to the Hon.' Mr Ward to { Penny movo the resolution of which Postage. he has given notice, to the effect that this colony should reciprocate with the Imperial Government in the matter of a penny post. It will \e observed that Mr Ward's resolution goes j further, for it advocates the extension of j penny postage to all civilised countries. This, ' however, is not an essential part of the pro- j posal, and ifc may be deferred in the meantime while the question is discussed in its more restricted relation to the mother country and to the constituent parts of the Empire. It is, of course, within our readers' { knowledge that the Imperial Government i has recently made an offer of reciprocal penny postage with every colony that chooses to come under the scheme ; and, indeed, it appears to be pretty well settled now that postage from England to the colonies is to bo a penny, no matter whether the latter reciprocate as regards return postage or not. The reception of the offer in the colonies has been, on the whole, disappointing, and the English newspapers not unnaturally incline to sardonic comment upon the fact that for years colonial champions at Home have been abusing the British Post Office for opposing penny postage, while now that it is suddenly offered to them without reserve the colonies nearly all draw back visibly disconcerted, and stammer out a confused series of excuses for repudiating it. It fell to Mr Ward's lot to inaugurate New Zealand's entry into the Postal Union some years ago, and it is appropriate that he should now seek the further credit of liberalising our postal conditions to the farthest limit yet proposed anywhere. We are aware that there are difficulties, but Mr Ward should have an opportunity given him of showing the House how they can be removed. He failed to act up to his professions in a similar local question when Postmaster-General, and it may fairly be assumed that he is more in earnest in deliberately reopening these matters now. Rumour assigns to him the prospect of an early restoration to the position he forfeited. We regret that such a steit should be deemed possible by any New Zealand party, but if it is taken one o£ tUe few mitigations will be found in the fact

that in the capacity of Postmaster-Generaf Mr Ward did the country good service be*, fore his fall.

! Sir William Crookes, the president this yeat of the British Association Science for the Advancement ci and Science, and one of the fore* Commerce. most scientific experimenta« lists in the world, made a' departure in inaugural addresses at Bristol the other day. More correctly, he gave his hearers (and the large external audience which looks to the annual meetings of tha Association for all that it has time to gather* about the progress of science) three several addresses to choose from. Probably tho first has attracted most attention, dealing, as it does, with a subject — the bread supply of the world — not usually associated with 1 the idea of science, and in which everybody is commercially or economically interested. The general tendency of the president's hypothesis was that the consumption of wheaten bread being an accompaniment of civilisation, and civilisation being constantly on the increase in an accelerating ratio, the nations are outrunning their possible supplies. This is not a case of mere scientific prediction, as in the well-known instance of the supposed coming exhaustion of the coal j mines ; according to Sir William Crookes the ', crisis is already with us. " According to tha best authorities," the president declares, " the total supplies from the 1897-98 harvest are 1921 million bushels. The requirements 1 of the 5162 million breadeaters for seed and ' food are 2324 millions ; there is thus a deficit [note the " is "] of 403 million bushels, which has not been urgently apparent owing to a surplus of 300 million bushels carried over from the last harvest [of the world]." There is a regular increase in the world's breadeaters of several million people per j annum. This year the increase is over six ' million, and thus, Sir William concludes, | "we start with a deficit of 103 million bushels and have 6£ million more mouths to feed. It follows, therefore, that one-sixth of the required bread will be lacking unless larger drafts than now seem possible can be made upon early produce from the next harj vest." If all this could be relied upon as l approaching anything like the accuracy of , the distinguished speaker's special scientific ; work, it would obviously come under tka I heading of good news for farmers, whatever ] aspects the question might seem to possess I from the point of view of the members of the British Association. But nothing is [ more certain than the uncertainty of trade predictions, and amongst them all there aro none so utterly fallacious — experience has proved it times out of number — a3 statistical demonstrations of an infallible rise in the prices of wheat, iron, and wool. No feverish activity in corn has followed the president's demonstrations. Such proofs are, doubtless, novelties at the British Association, but they are a very old atory on the produca exchanges. Moreover, later in his address Sir William himself " hedges " — much in tha way, too, that the average man does when he theorises on the conditions probably to prevail some 25 years hence. After propose- , ing his cure (which consists in manufacturing : nitrogenous fertilisers by the electrical treatI ment of the inexhaustible supplies of nitroi gen contained in the atmosphere, thus dis- ■ tributing nitrate of soda over the world at j £5 per ton) Sir William gives this comforting hint in conclusion : " And in the nexfc ; generation, instead of trusting mainly to foodstuffs which flourish in temperate climates, we probably shall trust more and more to the exuberant ones of the tropics,'' where they can grow two or three crops (of bananas, for instance) every year ; or, in default of that, "we must call into commercial existence Central Africa and Brazil to redress the balance of Odessa and Chicago." We seem to have read something like this in the Mark Lane Express itself.

We have said that Sir William Crookes delivered practically three seveJiens About ral addresses. The first we Blind & Matter, have already summarised.* Of the two others, one was the usual review of the world's progress in science for the year ; and the other, representing an absolutely new element in such a { connection, was a solemnly renewed profession of profound belief in the reality of those psychic phenomena of which the speaker was once a leading investigator. Declaring that this subject was to him " the mightiest and the farthest reaching of all," and that to j ignore it in his address would be an act of I cowardice which he felt no temptation to ' commit, Sir William Crookes proceeded to ! define " telepathy " aa " the fundamental law, as I believe it to be, that thoughts and images may be transferred from one mind to another without the agency of the recognised organs of sense — that knowledge may j enter the human mind without being comi municated in any known or recognised way." In his belief, the processes involved in this effect are analogous to those of which Marconi takes advantage in his wireless telegraph ; but obviously the above all requires much sharper focussing before it is ripe for comment by the unconvinced. The more undivided interest will centre, no doubt, in the president's summary of recent advances in science. Professor Dewar, by allowing liquid hydrogen to boil in a vacuum, has got within 23 degrees of the theoretical "absolute zero " — that stage of cold ot which a thing can never get any colder. It is but a trifling gap, and there are wonderful possii bilities open when it is bridged. The three new atmospheric gases that have followed argon— crypton, neon , and metargon— are not definitely admitted yet to the dignity of elements ; nor is coronium, the alleged missing element in the sun's " corona," which an Italian professor thinks he has squeezed cut of some Vesuvian exhalations. Wireless telegraphy has made a very slight practical advance, though Signor Marconi has had the advantage of an opportunity to make h'm^elf useful to the Queen and the Prince of Wales. One scientist, at least, hopes he is on the track of that mysterious relationship be- . tween matter and relher which, when cleared up, will explain gravitation. The year's work in Rontgen rays has been fairly fruitful so far as advances in the mechanics oi the apparatus are concerned, but the theory is still elusive. In recording that "no other source for Rontgen rays has yet been discovered but the Crookes tub© " (invented by, tlia sneaker himself many years before Rantt

gen) the president can only go so far as to •say that the wave theory of these rays is, on the whole, making more headway among scientists than the particle or "bombardment " theory ; but the collision of particles is not " out of it " yet. Sir William Crookes mentions, in conclusion, that he has himself recently caught a new element (it is not the first to which he has stood godfather) and he iseems rather proud of the fact that his new pet, which he calls "Monium" (the lonely one) "is willing to enter into any number of chemical alliances," instead of exhibiting jthe persistently sulky aloofness of argon and Its newer cousins. As might be expected, it to the rare-earth class — the asteroids tof the terrestrial family, as the discoverer iiappily calls them.