PASSING NOTES.

Otago Witness, Issue 2426, 12 September 1900, Page 3

PASSING NOTES.

(From Saturday's Daily Times.)

We have annexed the Transvaal, as we had already annexed the Free State, and the Empire is extended by a territory exceeding the united areas of Denmark, Holland, Belgium, Switzerland, and Greece. Kruger protests, and much good may it do him ;' the Continental press with one consent will blaspheme. Our offence, in truth, is rank ; it smells to heaven. This valuable piece of property, too big for concealment, is found in our possession, and 'we cannot deny it. No other course is left to us but to brazen the matter out. According to Professor Seeley, Avho wrote before the Transvaal war, we had already in his time conquered, acquired, and appropriated two-thirds of the habitable globe "in a fit of absence of mind." Now we have-a ppropriated a large slice of the remaining third, and the only excuse we can make is that the appropriation was forced upon us. We positively couldn't help it. Kruger and Steyn made war upon us ; we were compelled to make war upon Kruger and Steyn in return. Kruger and Steyn kept it up, and wouldn't give in ; whereby we were laid under the paiuful necessity of keeping it up on our 'side. ■Result, as was foreseen — Kruger and Steyn, being worsted, flee before our face, and now inhabit railway carriages marked with the Hed Cross and booked for Delagoa Bay. Their portable x^roperty they carried with them ; their respective capitals and territories they have left on our hands. [What else can we do than take care of (them? The situation has its exact parallel in Marryat's story of the midshipman who cut oft' the tail of the captain's pet clog, ,The middy was playing with the meat chopper, lifting it, letting it fall ; the. dog, frisking near, occasionally switched his tail across the chopping block ; the middy, remorseless as the Fates, went on with his rhythmical chojamna:. Presently there was

a 'surgical operation ; the dog was the : shorter by a tail. " Who cut the tail off my dog?"— roared the captain in a fury. "Please sir, nobody," said the middy; "lie cut it off himself." {

The newspapers are publishing, on what authority does not appear, the following summary of British casualties in South Africa : — Officers. Men. Total. Killed or died of wounds 315 3,149 3,491 "Wounded 885 11,207 12,092 Missing and prisoners . . 252 ' 6,149 6/101 Deaths from disease and accident 115 5,0i9 5.194 Invalided home .. .. 1,009 21,079 25,148 Total 2,696 49,633 52,329 Dismal enough, this, if accurate ; but let us beware of supposing the figures disproportionately large for an army of 200,000 men and for a war now in it's tenth month. Losses under the two headings '" Deaths from disease and accident," and " Invalided home " are almost certainly less in proportion to numbers than in -previous" wars ; for, after all, South Africa is not an. unhealthy country, and hospital arrangements are, to say the least, more efficient now than heretofore. The item " Missing and prisoners, 6401 " is nothing to marvel at, considering the wide area over which our forces have been dispersed, the number, of our slow-toiling convoys and of weakly-held posts exposed to attack. The French lost 7000 prisoners to Wellington in the single battle of Salamanca. With our total of casualties under all headings compare Massena's experiences during a similar period of 10 or 11 months. In May, 1810, Massena led into Portugal 86,000 men ; the number he led out again in April, 1811, was 45,000. The other 41,000 were the losses of the intervening campaign, and chiefly during his retreat from before Wellington's lines at Torres Vedras. He had not — as Aye, out of our 52,000 odd — sent away 25,000 "invalided home"; he had left the whole 41,000 on the ground. And Massena's losses were only an insignificant detail of the Peninsular "war taken as a whole.

The item in the casualty list 'by which the destructiveness of the war may best be judged is " Killed or died of wounds, total 3394." Can that item be reckoned heavy? Quite the other way. Taking into account the number of combatants, the time they have been at it, and the fact that these are iha days of magazine rifles, pom-poms, Crcusots, and Krupps, I pronounce the death total amazingly light. At Albuera, a battle begun and ended between dawn anJ dark, the Allies — British and Spanish — lost 7000 killed and wounded, the French 8000. At Talavera, Wellington's total casualties were over 6000. The capture of Badajos— 2o days' siege and an assault — cost him 1035 killed, 3787 wounded, 63 missing. The siege of Burgos, in which* hi failed, cost him 2000 killed and wounded; the siege of San Sebastian, another failure, was nearly as bad. Wellington was not happy in his sieges. In failing at Burgos he expended as many lives as Buller in succeeding at Ladysmith. Albuera, the most sanguinary engagement of the war, was Beresford's battle, Wellington with the main army being as distant from Beresford's sphere of action as Roberts from Buller's. What Wellington thought about it may be seen in one of Iris letters: —

The battle of Albuera was a strange concern. They were never determined to fight it ; they did not occupy tho ground as they ought ; they were ready to run away at every moment from the time it commenced till the French retired; and, if it had not been for me, who am now suffering from the loss and disorganisation caused by that battle, they would have written a whining report upon it, which would have driven the people in England mad. However, I prevented that. - Wellington upon Beresford is here sharper than Roberts upon Buller. Generals blundered and were blamed for it then as now, it seems ; then as now whining reports, fit to make the people in England mad, were written upon their blunders. In these particulars things remain much as they were. The censorship of war news is less vigorous now, which is perhaps .to be regretted. ,On the other hand the blunders of generals are less costly, and war itself less fatal. This is my main deduction from the comparison, and a very surprising deduction it is.

In the interests of Hew Zealand Liberalism — a cause which, I hardly need &ay, I have much at heart — it were greatly.

to be wished that on all subjects all Liberals would learn Lo say the same thing and to say it with the same accent of conviction. Otherwise how is discipline to be maintained? As things are going we are in danger of a relapse into mere private judgment and freedom of speech — evils from which, it was fondly hoped, Seddonism had for ever redeemed us. On the tariff question, for example, the schism between Mr Seddon and a section of his plighted henchmen was a. painful thing to feee, and a portentous. One might be led In suppose that a New Zealand Liberal claims the liberty to think for himself, which, as Euclid says, 5s absurd. Since then Mr Gilfedder, unconscious apparently that to Mr Seddon he owes his political existence, oblivious of his responsibilities to the author of his being, has breathed sedition on the subject of co-operative labour. The contract system might, in certain cases, he thought, be preferable. Mr Gilfedder was promptly snubbed into submission, possibly into penitence ; but the contagion of lawlessness still spreads. Only the other day the Hon. Duncan, Minister of Lands, introduced the grea* Liberal principle of limitation of profits, a principle to be applied, in the first instance, to freezing companies ; next doubtless to companies generally — banks, insurance, Westport coal, Hartley and Riley, National Mortgage ; to newspapers, factories, foundries ; to merchants, fanners, professional men, and. in the last analysis, to retail traders. Obviously we shall have to come, all of us without exception, under the operation of this beneficent principle — tli3 limitation of profits. And yet Mr Carncross and Mr Buddo, two lambs of the Ministerial fold, but»fced against it and egainst its author as viciously as if they had been goats of the Opposition. This soit of thing must end. Where is Mr Seddon's stockwhip? It is related of Lord Melbourne that at a meeting of his Cabinet to di&cuss a new sliding scale for the duty on corn, he put his back against the door and said, " New, gentlemen, which is it to be? Does it make bread cheaper, or does it make it dearer? It doesn't matter which : but; we must, all say the same thing." Lord Melbourne had not the advantage of being a New Zealand Liberal ; from our point of view he must be pronounced a benighted Tory. But Mr Seddon might take a hint from him. Fas est ab hoste doceri.