PASSING NOTES.

Otago Witness, Issue 2410, 10 May 1900, Page 3

PASSING NOTES.

(From Saturday's Daily Times.)

The fact that Mr Fifcher has come to the end of his futile perambulations through the courts and chanceries of Europe and America will not be without effect upon the war. Its effect will be to take the stiffening out of the Boers. As long as there remained the smallest chance that any military Power would come to their help it was incumbent on the Boers to show that they were worth helping. The activity and initiative displayed in their raid south ofvßloemfontein and their attack upon Wepener was intended to be a practical comment on the Fischer mission. Now that Mr Fi&cher has failed, definitely and finally failed, what motive remains to prolong the struggle? Why go on squandering human life V The Hollander gang that have been running the Avar will doubtless- go on as long as there is any plunder to be got out of it ; some of the indigenous Boer leaders will go on from pure cussedness ; but the rank and file, who have nothing to gain by further lighting and everything to lese, why should ihey go on any longer'/ The chances are that, as soon as the Fischer failure is known, Boer resistance will weaken ; the force that is being pushed northward by the British advance will tend to melt away. That is the logic of the situation, anyhow ; on the other hand, it must be admitted that Beer intelligence is little amenable to logic. The one desideratum just now is, for us, another shining success in the field, another Cronje disas-ter for the enemy. That would end the war. Meanwhile there hangs in the balance the fate of Mafeking. What is Lord Roberts doing for Mafekmg 1 ? If, as we are bound to hope, he is doing something effective, he certainly conceals it well. The tension of feeling throughout the Empire for this gallant and long-enduring garrison is wrought up to well nigh agony point.

It is a point of honour with me not to burke opinions that are contrary to my own ; for that reason T make room for the subjoined letter, inordinately lengthy lor this column though it be :

THE WAR.

My clear Civis,— l wi&h I were half as sure as you profess lo be regarding the issue of this war. You did your very best to bring it about "to avenge Majiiba/' and now where are we? Look at the terrible fix in which Lord Roberts finds himself. With a magnificent army he dare not move northward, and leave thousands . upon thousands of his almost invisible enemies l ia his rear and on hia wiegs, wiih treachery.

and rebellion everywhere around him. You ssy iliat " m six months the potato will be cooked. ' But who is the potii to ? Events past and present point to the likelihood of Lord Roberts^being cooked" quite as soon ss Eruger. \Ve have not set one foot withm the Transvaal yet, oncl have a hundred miles to traverse tlnough a hostile country before we do, aiid anotaer 100 before Pretoria ba reached. ~And this is the retult of seven months' frightful toil and stiffering! And for-Avhsi e.">cl? To caplvic a country which when (or if) captured will remain unsubdued, and is certain to become a mHgrsifieci Jreiand; a country whose hills ai-3 rocks a^d scrub, vhose plains are sand, whoso rivers are either torrents or diy beds, whose horses arc half starved ponies, depe.icl-

ing for fodder on the poisonous foldl, v«ho=e cattle arc diminutive beasts, consisting chiefly of horns. A country where scab and. rinderpest ravage triv.inphaiit among all flecks and herds from ihe Zambs3i io the Cape, and from Mozambique to t!ie West Coast ; a country with a piebald population and polyglot religions 111 the proportion oi njne to two to the whites, and vax-yir.g from the Day and Martin coloured native of tropical Africa, through a, host of brown and yellow races, to the self-asseitive heaven-bora 33a irishman, -with his bottled beer, Bibles, and brandy. A country who^e enormous mineral wealth is in the hands of the birds of prey of all nations — a cewntry in which, rightly of wrongly, tlie very name of Englishman for 67 years p«3t has been detested, and is hsrclly likely to improve in the future under the force of shot and shell and conquests. Such is South Africa, c-uch the running ulce*, the horsG-ieesh, the giavc of the good name of ihg=il of its Governors of the past, and now, alas! o£ many of its generals — this is the land upon which the Empire is lavishly draining its best blooc 1 and 30 millions of money — with more of both to follow, if ever we are to enter Pretoria. Your repeated asseverations and protestations, dear Civi&, leoall the passage hi Hamlet, " The lady doth protest Aoo much, metliinks," ond at tho bottom of your heart you know thare is a little uneasy feeling thai, there ie, arc! has been from tho first, a screw loose in our part of the business, and that st the bast the game is not worth the candle. The Dutch, Civis. the Cape Dutsli, when fighting for hearth and home, are as hard to crush tc-cHy as were their foxefailiers in William the Silent's time — or as you and I should be today, although -oossibly T am old enough to be your father. — Hespectfully,

A Colonist op 48 Yeaes. I advocated tihe war as " revenge for Majuba," did I? By this statement judge my venerable correspondent's accuracy in matter? of fact. Neither I nor anybody known to me advocated the war as revenge for Mojuba. I was for the war because I was ( for the integrity of the Empire, threatened with clirnenibeiment by a conspiracy of Boers and Afrikanders. Buz all this is past argument. As to the justice of the war — '• Securus judicat orbis terrarum '' — which means, being translated, that British policy in South Africa is vindicated by a judgment that cannot be imoeachsd ,T3 partial or constrained — the judgment of the British colonies. Should we have given of our blood and of our wealth to support a policy of " revenge for ISlajuba"'? To talk of our robbing the Boers of hearth and home and liberty is mere cant. The Boer under the British Hag will have as much heori/h and home as ha has now, and moie liberty than he will know how to make an honest use of. In the attempt to confer upon the Boer the larger liberties of British citizenship Lord Roberts, as seen by this correspondent, has got himself into "a terrible fix." Ah! Yez — "a terrible fix "'— no other, and nothing less. Well, we may leave .Lord Roberts himself to make answer on this point, which thing he will do after a shining fashion, I fancy, and before the month is out.

The National Council of Women, seated in state at the Town Hall, cubs an imposing figure. And yet Mrs Civis, I find, is disposed to be critical. She will keep an open mind, but judgment is reserved. "Who appoints- them? Did they appoint themselves?" "Probably they did; or they got it done by irresponsible- voluntary associations, such as the Y.W.C.A. or the W.C.T.U. — which conies to the same thing." "Then why do they call themselves 'National'?" demands Mrs .C. severely. I remind her of the three tailors of Tooley street Avho began a memorial to Parliament: "We, the people of England." Nobody has ever doubted that the three tailors of Tooley street were strictly within their rights. It is a fice country. There is nothing to prevent Mrs Civis from inviting an afternoon tea party and calling it a Sanhedrim, or an Areopagus, or an Imperial Parliament, if she likes. Silenced on this point, though- not satisfied, Mrs 0, goe.-j on to remark inconsequently that she " hates to &cc women making themselves ridiculous." But wasn't that rather a begging of the question? Not at all! — lecture a lot of wpraen.. .discussing in public

meeting the management of babies, the importance of " pre-np/tal influences," the harshness of stepmothers, and such like , topics ; what could be more ridiculous '! 1 But this wa.s only their firsb day — I suggested, in mitigation; — they would do bettor when they got on to Constitutional ! Reform, Local Government, and the other ■ high political topics in their programme. \ " ytufT .and nonsense!'' — sxelahned Mrs C. — " they do know something about ' babies, but what do they know 'about Con- ( stitutional Reform and Local Government j The thing is absolutely ridiculous." Such j are the sentiments of Mrs Civi;- 1 , a woman who — though 1 say it as shouldn't say it — is an ornament to her sex, and the pesj sessor of as much feminine shrewdness as L would furnish out a who!e Parliament of f she-politicians. All the sama I shall not be surprised if once and again during the coming weak she sneaks up to the Town Hall — just to see for herself what kind of monstrosity a National Council of ! Women may be.

As we certainly shall not succeed in exterminating the rat, for all that we put i price on his head, we may as well take comfort in tho thought that; our policy of extermination is possibly a mistake. - I don't ray it is, observe ; on the contrary, lam altogether for extermination. My rule is the rule of the . Ministering Children's League, or whatever it is that they call the latest fancy form of Christianity — one kind addon per diem. I observe this irreducible minimum by catching a rat in a spring trap. Ono kind action every day ! But; as wo shall not catch them all, lei:. us remember the other string to our bow — namely, the doctrine that possibly we should not do well to ca.cch thsm all. The rat is a scavenger by vocation ; we cannot afford to loss his services. In the light of this doctrine it is easy to rationalise the fable of the Pied Piper pnd his doings at Hamelin. According to the legend the Piper had charmed away a plague of rats ; his reward, as stipulated by the municipal authorities— a- thousand guilders. But when he appeared to claim it there was difficult}-. A thousand guilders! The mayor looked blue, So did the Corporation too. With the meanness characteristic of town councils in every land and age, they reasoned that, as the rats were dead and couldn't come to life again, the Piper need not be paid. As for the guilders, what we spoke Of them, as you very well know, was joke. Besides, cur losses have made us thiifty. A thousand guilders! Come, take fifty ! Al? 5 ! for the Hameliners ! The Piper in revenge charmed away all the children of the place as he had charmed away the rats. For which, vide Browning, in,loc. The" interpretation of this is plain. The Piper was a too-successful latcatchsr. The ,rais of Hameiin having been exterminated, the children peiished of diphtheria, scarlet fever, and other dirt diseases. The treachery of the Town Council is thrown in merely to give body to the myth, as ibein^ a thing credible in itself and adding .probability to the whole story. Moral 1 : Let us not be inconsolable though we fail 10 exterminate 'the rat.

Mr Broclrick, Under-Secretary' for Foreign Affairs, has liad the courage to affirm that "no wax has been conducted ■with &o much satisfaction io the nation bikl with fewer mistakes than the present war in South Africa." Precisely my own opinion! T say ditto to Mr Brcdrick, and the verdict of history will g-ty ditto to us ■both. It is the harmful necessary press agencies that are responsible for the pievalence of trie contrary 'belief, as well as for our dismal jeremiads over "checks,'' "reverses," and ■"' defeats " — so called, and for our laments over an excessive expenditure of life, when, as a, matter of fact, the casualties in this war have been proportionately fewer than in any other war of equal magnitude. As for mistakes, there never yet was commander in war who did not make mistakes. The successful commander, as Napoleon used to say, is he who makes the fewest; bub they all make some. A recent critic saj^ of Wellington : "Re made many mistakes ; the Waterloo campaign was a scries of blunders, of which the crowning battle was not the least." We can thrive very handsomely on such blunders as Waterloo ! Our great mistake in tins war was the notion that we were going to have, virtually, a walk over, and ■that was noit the mistake of the generals. (Next in importance was the mistake of jnofc slipolin^ a journalist or |wo pour

eiicourager les autres. 1 have no sentimental weakness for journalists — Heaven forbid ! Am I not a journalist myself '!

j The irrepressible " Bunsby " again ! Dear Civis, — I " When i-e.vmg in the lunacy ol ink. : I catch the pen, und publish what I think." As intellectual Mends of mentnl vacuity, we I were tiying to master the word honori'ficaI bilitudiiiitatibus, its root -and meaning— Seen o I v, " Lo'-e's Labour Lose.' My friend e,ave it I up; I made a" fool of 'myself "by interpolating ! theological theories of improbable certitude, ; with r, porfu:icfory smattering, of do=c Latin. ! We filially agreed to remit the insolvable problem to Civis, whose concrete common sense, ; only, could unravel, he being much superior ! io local pundits who rave and revere in Shakesi peareanism. 'Fhe " Bunsby " jargon has merit of a sort : it is an unconscious imitation of Lewis ! Carroll's " Jabberwocky "' : i . 'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves Did gyre and gimble in the wabe; AU niimsy were the borogroves, And the raome raths outgrabe. ! I call " Bunrfjy's "' attention to this ineom- | parable classic. Lst him consult it always I before writing to the papeis. By its aid let him enlarge his vocabulary "and perfect his singular gift of lucid expression. He is [ attracted, it seems, to the long-tailed nonsense-word which he quotes from ''Love's Labour Lost." That is natural. But I cannot recommend this verbal centiI pede for " fJunsby's "' use. We should run the haserd of a strike amongst the linotype operators. As to its meaning, of I course it has a meaning — a nontense mean- ! ing, educed, in the manner of an anagram, Ihy the cryptoinaniacs who assert that Shakespeare was Bacon. Honorificabilituciinitatibus. [-Otherwise :

Hi I/udi, tuiti sibi, Fr. Bacono nati. " These plays, entrusted to themselves, proceeded from Fr. Bacon." On which ingenuity the " Quarterly Beview " remarks : "It is magnificent, but it is not Latin. Had Bacon sent in such Latin at school, he would never have survived to write the ' Novum Organon.' In that .stern age they would have killed him with whopping."' That's as may be. Granted that the Latin of the "anagram is no I Latin. For the matter of that, neither is the English translation of it English. But to cranks and nonsense-mongers these objections will seem trivial " and irrelevant. And for that reason I commend with confidence rhe Bacon anagram to mv friend '• Bimsby."'

A meeting of the committee of the Industrial Association of Otago was held at the secretary's office on the Ist, and attended by Meosrs J. C. Thomson (president), Wili Fels, C. SV. Korr, D. E. Eunson, G. L. Sise, Geo. Fenwiek, Alex. Burt, A. Thomson, L. Morris, D. Reid, jun., and A. H. Bridger. Apologies for absence were received from Messrs James Mills, James Shiel, John Moloncy, Keith Ramsay, G. P. Farquhar, and H. "V. Haddock. The President explained that the meeting had been deferred, and no systematic effort to obtain members had been made on account of the demands made for patriotic and other funds during the past months. It was reported that 44 members were already on the roll, and 16 new members were proposed and elecled. The rules of the association were considered, and, with certain amendments!, approved, to be submitted to the next meeting of the association. A considerable amount of correspondence and reports from the Canterbury and Wellington Associations were received and considered, and it was resolved to join the Industrial Corporation of New Zealand. The Secretary reported that he had received a number of communications from the secretary of the Canterbury Jubilee Exhibition, and had done all that could be done here to assist the project, and that 100,000 ft of space in the buildings being erected was likely to be more than required. Accounts were pa c sed amounting to £16 7s 6d, and it was i'esolved to hold regular meetings of the committee on the second Tuesday of the month.

It will be remembered that in the early stages of the Boer war the children of the Opawa School devotsd £20, the amount of their picnic fund, tc'the purposes of tho patriotic fund. Their self-denying action was cabled to England, and a gentleman there, who desired that his name should not be disclosed, promptly intimated that he would re

-imburse the picnic fund to the extent of the donation mstle by the children in the causa of the Empire an., her soldiers. The Education department last week made arrangements (tha Lyttelton Times reports) for paying over to the school the money received from the anonymous donor. The leason for the delay that has occurred in the matter h that the action of the Opawa School was imitated, and its priority of clrim had on that accour.i to be fully established.

So hard is it to get carpenters at present on the West Coast, owiiijj to so many being employed building pontoons for dredges, that one contractor on the Buller River, who is paying the men he has from 12s to 14-s per day, recently expressed his willingness (the Press says) to pay 18s per day to experienced shipwrights from Otago.

A somewhat unusual prpsecuticn under the Licensing Act was recently taken in Auckland. Ths defendant, a hotelkeeper ab Henderson, was charged with supplying drink to a man in exchange fGr certain tools. The evidence showed that' a guijpigger, drunk at the time, but wanting more drink, offered the defendant his tools (spears, spade, and axe) in exchange for liquor, and so obtained it. Tne * tools^ were, indeed, parted with piecemeal, and in one instance the defendant -nut dov/11

and took up money, and in another a third parry was usod as an intermediary. Mr T. Hutchison, S.M., before whom the'ebarge was heard, described the circumstances surrounding the transaction a? "peculiarly disreputable,'' and inflicted a fine of £10.

The director.-! of the National Fire and Marine Insurance Company of New Zealand have declared an interim dividend of 6d per fchare for the half-year ended March 31, payable to the shareholders on the company's register at that elate.

An Islamic prayer meeting, taken part in by nearly 100 supplicants, io celebrate the Mahometan New Year, was held on the 11th inst. in the Exhibition Gardens at Melbcmrne. It is 1510 years since the Prophet of Arabia saw the light, but when the revelation that ho laid claim to came to him he was* grown, and wed lo the first and most honoured of hib 15 wives, his first follower. If Mahometanism be dated from the publication of the Koran its present age is 1265 years. The followers of the faith who engaged in the' n atms at Melbourne comprised men from cha British provinces of India, and tlie feudatory States and Arabs. It was (according to the Age) a picturesque prayer gathering. The men having washed their faces, hands, and" feet, and cleaiued their nails, knelt on mats, their feet uncovered, but otherwise clothed in spotle 0-*0 -* albs, and above them flew flags bearing lv.otlcei. The worshippers crossed their bands on their breasts prayerfully, while the reciter, Geplani Sliah, -intoned the devotions. Thrico they prostrated themselves, touching the ground with their foreheads, and then prayeel silently. Abul Hokk, an American Maho:iietanised Christian, was the Mollah of the occasion; and, speaking English, he delivered a sermon on the " Principles of tha Faith." He explained how, in America, ha bad been converted from Christianity to the religion of Islam. " This impressive ceremony," ho said, " has been performed by the followers of the faith of Mahomet, blessed prophet of the only true faith, Islam, which means the worship of the one, only tru6 God." There had been prophets in various times— Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, ana Jesus,— but tbe last and greatest of the prophets was Mahomet.

The ordinary meeting of the Benevolent Institution Trustees, held on the 2nd, was attended by Messrs C. Haynes (chairman), O. Allan, R. Wilson, P. Treseder, J. Green, J. Swan, C. Ziele, and the Hon. Hugh Gourley. Accounts were passed for payment amounting to £§38 3s Bel. The secretary reported thai cral-door relief in April was granted io 117 men, 233 women, and 575 children, at a weekly cost of £99 6s. TII2 trustees then dealt with 38 relief eases.

The Ashburlon Mail reports that Lieutenant R. M. CulhberUon, of the Ashburton, Guards, received a. wire on the 29th ult. announcing his appointment to a commission in South Africa.

Influenza cm eel by taking a few dosea Tussicuraj write for testimonials; it will ci« all tl\at is claimed for it.