The Otago Witness, WITH WHICH IS INCORPORATED THE SOUTHERN MERCURY. (WEDNESDAY, MARCH 6, 1901.) THE WEEK.

Otago Witness, Issue 2451, 6 March 1901, Page 41

The Otago Witness, WITH WHICH IS INCORPORATED THE SOUTHERN MERCURY. (WEDNESDAY, MARCH 6, 1901.)

THE WEEK.

" Nanqnam aliud natara. anua tapieatia dixit." — Jctkital,

We hardly thought that matters would so fall out.in New Zealand that Local Affairs a political speech by a memAgaiii. ber of the rank and tile in Parliament would partake somewhat the character of a novelty, but so it is. We have been living for a long time past in an "atmosphere compounded of militaiism and that sort of excitement of loyalty which is the outcome of what may Le called our new-born relations with the Mother Country. Although the South African war has cost Great Britain over 80 millions and will demand a good many millions more, i j say nothing of the terrible sacrifioe of human life (which comes sadly home to us here now), we would not for something wipe the year 1900 out of the calendar, for it has worked unthought-of marvels in the way of consolidation of Empire. But while we have been kept on the stretcb with local troops going to or returning from the Transvaal, and with visits from Imperial and Indian troops — both alike most heartily welcome — and with the concerns of our new- great neighbour, the Commonwealth, we have not been attending very closely to our own affairs. Doubtless members of Parliament felt that amid all the excitement their speeches would be rather out of place, and would not be listened to. Very likely they were right ; they mostly are in interpreting public opinion. But if we nidge by Mr G. W. Russell's outbreak at Riccarton, the other day, that idea is passing away. We cannot profess to have any admiration for Mr Russell as a politician. His attitude of independence, which might otherwise be useful, never seems to us to have much of a foundation of honesty about it. But he is not without ability, and a certain shrewdness, and in his present address, only a summary of which is before us, he has mentioned two matters worthy of attention. The first is the danger to the colony from the utter collapse of parliamentary opposition. It is not the fault of the members of the Opposition who are left. But the fact is that their utter powerlessness to exercise the least check upon the Government is made so apparent to them at every step that they could not be other than quite demoralised. The position has passed the stage of humiliation, and has become almost ridiculous. The only possible way of teaching a Government o lesson, -or of giving them a warning or a check, is by a close division. That at once makes them "sit up," as the slang phrase goes. But there never is such a thing as a close division nowadays, except it be when the Government side, relying on their enormous numerical strength (for the whole House is demoralised by the lack of opposition), happen to be idling away their time instead of attending to the business of the House. In such circumstances every debate, if such it can be called, is quite lifeless, and generally ends in one or two members of the Opposition getting up to "protest," and then, feeling that they may be making themselves ridiculous, leaving the public business to look after itself. This is only too faithful a picture of what occurred many times last session. Meanwhile, as Mr Russell says, the Government — Mr Seddon we ought to say — are properly learning the lesson of autocracy. He is himself, we believe, alarmd at the failure of opposition in New Zealand, for he sees that it must ultimately lead to a smash up of his own party. But why should he be scrupulous where there is no control? A few men, a very few, are doubtless made that way, but he is very far indeed from being one of them. He can do as he likes and spend as he likes, and whatever burdens are entailed he passes quietly to the back of the colony. People, who used, to see in party the source of all evil will soon begin to mourn the want of party.

The other matter to which Mr Russell alluded hardly vet comes within the range of practical politics. He objects to the annexation of Fiji to New Zealand. We do not propose to deal with the question at present ; there is not sufficient information before the public to enable it to form an opinion. But it is just as well that the so-far listless public mind should be warned against the idea — which would be very mischievous — that all annexation must necessarily be a good thing.

Wo notice that -the Canadians are joining

in the cry against the antiMischievous quated form of the CoronaFormulae, tion Oath, which the Kincr

has already signed, and which on Coronation Day he will have to repeat in answer to the stereotyped question put to him by the Archbishop of Canterbury. We do not know that it is worth while making a fuss about the Oath now that the King is on the throne ; for the Oath, which once had great significance indeed, is now little more than a mere formula. At the same time, the nation has clean left the Coronation Oath behind, and that is the truth. It had its origin in the resolution of 1688, when the nation was exhausted after its firrVit with James II and his Roman Catholicism, when a foreigner was invited to the throne because he was a Protestant and the husband of a Protestant English Princess, and when the Crown was settled by law on the Protestant succession. The Oath then, as now, required the Kins: to uphold the laws, to cause law and justice (in mercy) to be executed, and to maintain the Protestant religion as established by law. All this is very good and very proper. It does not mean as much now as it did in the evil days of old, when the administration of the law was largely in the hands of the King himself. But the Oath is of great importance

still, in so far as it impresses the mind of a King with the fact that in flhe last resort he is responsible for the maintainence of law and justice; and it fortifies him for the perilous task of interference with his Ministers when it seems necessary to so interfere in the interests of the State. George IV thought, or pretended to think, that his Coronation Oath justified him in refusing Catholic emancipation. English history emphasises the wisdom of requiring the King to be a Protestant (though even that in the time to come may be unnecessary, so strangely do events which are matters of life and death in one age become wholly unimportant, or even ludicrous, in another), find to maintain the Protestant religion, for it would hardly do that a British King shoiild owe any kind of allegiance to, or be subject to, the' special influence uf any person outside the realm. The British people have much more reason than perhaps they think to be grateful to Henry VIII, who practically threw the gauntlet to the word when he passed the Act of Supremacy.

But the Coronation Oath becomes mischievous and ridiculous when it compels the King to declare his belief in the errors and heresies of the Roman Catholic religion. Such expressions were never a necessary part of the Coronation Oath ; and now, while gratuitously offensive to the King's Roman Catholic subjects, they serve but to show that curious spirit of narrow conservatism which impels an enlightened nation to go on from age to age duly repeating the meaningless formulae of the past.

It is very rarely indeed that we introduce an objectionable topic into Making the these columns, but a sense of Punishment duty to the public sometimes Fit the requires it. It does so on Crime, fc ne present occasion. Seldom has the public mind been more revolted than it was some weeks back by the crime committed by the deplorable young man Flaherty upon a child three years old. The crime was as daring as it was brutal. We confess, therefore, to a feeling of satisfaction at the sentence passed on the convict by Mi Justice Williams — that he be imprisoned with hard labour for 15 years, and receive two floggings of 25 lashes each. It is distressing to have to express satisfaction at the introduction of the lash where a human being is concerned, but the circumstances of ttie case warrant it — compel it, indeed. The crime, as we have said, was of the most brutal character possible, and seems of late to have been growing in frequency. We are perfectly aware of all the objections that have been urged against flogging as a tmnishment. It is supposed to brutalise the criminal. Very likely it does — where there is room for descent in brutality. In Flaherty's case there is obviously none. The wretched man is evidently quite without imagination, without the instinct of pity, and destitute of the moral sense. Witness his extraordinary callousness in handing to the court a document showing that he had paid for his board at the house where he was living ! His highest conception of morality extended no further than the idea- of paying for his daily food.

We are not so foolish as to suppose that the lash will either brighten the intellect of such a man or awaken any dormant moril sense that may lurk somewhere within him. The community has little further concern in him. The grand aim of the law is to protect the women and children of the colony by deterring other men from committing crimes of a similar nature. Does the lash deter? The almost unanimous testimony of modem judges, magistrates, and officers of justice is that it does. Hence its re-ini-portation into the law. When the crime of garotting terrorised the city of London, the demand for the lash was so universal and so urgent that it had to be complied with — and with excellent results. Flogging, as it was practised in days gone by, was an outrage and scandal, as were the punishments of hanging and transportation.^ But the reaction against flogging was carried too far, and it was the inexorable logic of events that forced communities to recognise that for some offences it was the only punishment calculated to deter. These offences are of the wantonly brutal kind. We can understand young men of diseased and perverted instincts giving the rein to them when there was nothing in front of them but imprisonment. But when imprisonment is associated in their minds with the lash we may reasonably expect from craven fears the effort at control which the moral sense failed to evoke.

The method of procedure adopted by the

Crown in proceeding against The Impostor the man Stanton, who, withand out qualification, set up as a Ills Dupe. cancer specialist in High

street, was no doubt entirely right, though somewhat unusual. The usual course is to wait until someone dies or has his health ruined under the hands of the quack, and then, so far as the evidence will permit, proceed against the man for manslaughter or something worse. There is, of course, no offence against the law in trying to cure your neighbour of any disease with which he might be afflicted ; and there is equally none in receiving payment for your well-meant efforts, provided it is not extracted under false pretences. Stanton's offence was not that he pretended to cure cancer, but that he improperly led the public to believe that he was a doctor. It seemed to be agreed between the legal gentlemen engaged in the case that the man might call himself "Professor" and carry on with impunity — of course, while nothing went amiss with his patients. But it matters nothing at all how the Crown elects to proceed in such cases, for success need scarcely be looked for. The rjuack doctor has thriven in all ages. Addison has described him in the seventeenth century in language which would in no particular sense be out of place in the present day. When Stanton was fined £50 he drew a cheque for the amount with cheerful alacrity. It was a splendid advertisement for him. It put his name and occupation in the mouth of the public. (We have an uneasy sen&ation that we are doing the same thing now.) And a very lar^e

section of that public, in pretty nearly all ranks, being c extremely credulous and gullible, would see nothing in the case more than that a' mar who could cure cancer was fined because he wasn't legally a doctor. The same credulity would then perceive the jealousy of the medical profession behind the Crown in the prosecution. And so the facts would finally resolve themselves into the odd but simple belief that this quack ■was being persecuted by the medical profession because he was in possession of a secret of which it was ignorant ! All this is human nature, but the reader will note how beautifully it works out in favour of the impostor and his dupes. Here, then, we perceive the secret of the vitality of the medical impostor. It does not re's: upon his cunning or capacity to deceive (far less upon his knowledge, for usually he is found blindly and stupidly ignorant of the simplest characteristics of the diseases he profe*ses to cure), but is solidly based on the ineradicable credulity of the public. Strange as it may appear, the grand point in favour of the quack is that he has not been medically educated — that is, that he has not spent laborious years in practically, as well as theoretically, studying all that science and accumulated knowledge and living experience had to say on the subject of disease. The knowledge of the schools and the hospitals occasionally fails, as everyone can see, with particular diseases, therefore (argues the man in the street) a startling cure is not to be expected from the mere doctor. But the man who has no knowledge of disease whatever may have lighted upon some wondrous herb when he was walking in the fields, or he may have accidentally kicked against a marvellous mineral, or he may have discovered some sort of "electricity" (an extremely favourite form of humbug which greatly impresses the ignorant), and then he proceeds to cure some case "which all the doctors had given up." So the formula runs. And thus it happens that all over the world, and in all ages, poor creatures who have very serious diseases and mostly very trifling purses despise the man of knowledge and eagerly rush to the impostor. But isn't it too much to expect that same impostor to deny himself the contributions the credulous are so leady to pass into his pocket?

The visit of the representative Indian troops has been a fitting seOur quel to that of the soldiers Indian selected from the regiments Visitors. of Great Britain and Ire-

land. The interest — historic, Imperial, and broadly human — attaching to these latest guests of ours, could not fail to win for them a cordial reception in any British community, and it would be difficult to say whether a general admiring curiosity or an intensified sense of the full import of the Imperial greatness and unity had the chief place in the minds of the thousands who watched the unwonted spectacle in the streets of Dunedin on Saturday. These, too, are of us ! — these superficially alien Orientals, with their dark, grave, uncommunicative faces, — with their relationship to a strange past and to civilisations older than our own, — with their wealth of ample memories and ampler possibilities ! How eloquent and significant to the imaginative mind is the message of these high-bred sons of Eastern aloofness ! Yes, they too are of us, despite all seeming barriers ; theirs, too, is our Imperial heritage ; they, not less than the soldiers of our own race whom we cheered last month, are sworn to fealty to their Emperor, who is our King ; and they also, " in the day of Armageddon, at the last great fight of all '" — they or their sons — will be ready, and may be called upon, to give their lives for the honour of the British name. They come hither on a peaceful errand, but most of them have done stern work in their lost Empress's cause on Indian battlefields, and their looks suggest that the day of fresh fighting could not come too soon for them. We do not forget the difficulties and dangers of the Imperial position in India ; the possibilities may be dark as well as bright ; but, taking the present situation and the fair promise for the future, it may surely be said that the willing and cheerful allegiance of our Indian soldiers is a superb testimony to the genius of British rule. And this suggests a practical question. Is the history of British India known amonorst us as it should be? Sixty years ago Macaulay, in his essay on Lord Clive, deplored the ignorance then prevailing among educated Englishmen in regard to the great actions of their countrymen in the East. "We doubt whether one in ten, even among English gentlemen of highly cultivated minds, can tell who won the battle of Buxar, who perpetrated the massacre of Patna, whether Sujah Dowlah ruled in Oude or in Travancore. or whether Holka was a Hindoo or a Mussulman." It will perhaps be retorted that t"he very essay from which we have quoted has. to a lartre extent, been instrumental in sur>r>lvincr the deficiency ; and certainly we should not think of suggesting that there is a single member of a Patriotic Committee in New Zealand who wouM not score full marks, or at least 90 per cent., in an examination paper on Buxar, Patna. Suiab Dowlnh. and the rest. Tt is of the children in our primary schools' that we are thinking. They can hardly be expected to read Macaulay. — the majority of them at least. — and we fear — in fact, we know — that large numbers leave school sadly deficient in knowledge regarding tfie work of the Empire in the East — and elsewhere. There has been some talk of late about " patriotic education," and we are aware that many of the teachers are doing good work, more or less incidentally, in this direction ; but much remains to be done. No boy or girl ought to leave school without a living (not a mere mechanical, dry-as-dust) knowledge of c general trend and the salient events of Imperial history. Some, in one way or another, obtain this knowledge : how many miss it? The patriotic movement will not have accomplished its full task unless it has the permanent effpet of fostering the study of national and Imperial history amoug all classes of the community. *