PASSING NOTES. (From Saturday's Daily Times.)

Otago Witness, Issue 2669, 10 May 1905, Page 5

PASSING NOTES.

(From Saturday's Daily Times.)

Mj Seddon though always of importance is not always entertaining ; yet, strange to say, it is impossible to keep him out of this column. lam not going to talk about the telegram episode at Mr Massey's Christchurch meeting ; that incident is funny enough in itself and falls under the principle "when unadorned adorned the most"; I leave it alone. What attracts my attention just now is the remarkable sanity of some observations on unionism addressed by Mr Seddon to a Trades Council deputation in Wellington. Mr Young for the deputation had urged that State employees should be permitted to form unions and so get " union rates of pay."

The Premier jocularly suggested that in such case "the Cabinet might go into a union, and get the court to fix its salaries. Mr Young: Yes, and then the Ministers might be paid according to qualifications. — (Laughter.) The Premier : Oh, no. That wotilan t do. That would not be according to your unionism, which aims at all getting the- same wage. Neatly put and well. An unvarying ratio between worth and wages is no ideal of unionism. Quite the contrary. "What is. a unionist ? One who hath yearnings For equal division of unequal earnings; Idler or bungler, or both, he is willing To fork out his sixpence and pocket your

shilling. Wherefore, as Mr Seddon ingenuously remarked, unionism would never do in the Cabinet ; — otherwise how should the bigger man get the bigger pay? There is no getting over this objection ; and tc the doctrines of unionism generally as a gospel for State employees Mr Seddon advanced another objection equally fatal. To allow State servants to combine in unions would be, he said, "to take away from Parliament the control of the purse of the colony and to give it to the Arbitration Court." Nothing could be truer, — rem acu tetigit : once more has Mr Seddon touched the innermost innards of a great subject as with the point . of a needle. There remains only to regret that he failed to mention the case of the private employer. For it must be equally true that unionism deprives this unfortunate of the control of his own purse and hands it over to the Arbitration Court.

Last week I spoke of Father Hays as the "hireling" of Mr Isitt and the prohibitionists. It was an unhappy expression, and I ought to have thought twice about it. To -lay, Friday, appears in the Daily Times a manifesto purporting to come from Father Hays himself, — unsigned, bub to be accepted, I suppose, as authentic : I am r>'Ot in ISTcw Zealand under the auspices of the New Zealand Alliance ox of any other organisation. It is true I received invitations from the Alliance and ficru other quarters^ I do not ccme as a consequence of these invitations. I come primarily and principally because heaith forbids me to live in the damp and cold of England. Very well ; — then we will say no more about hirelings ; I take back the word and offer apologies. Father Hays also, I fancy, is himself in the apologetic mood, feeling that somehow — of course unwittingly — he has misled the public. He allowed the Isitt party, he says, to make his " business arrangements." This may have given rise to mi sunder standing, a,nd alter the 12th Max I alono shall make

all arrangements for my lectures. T wish it distinctly understood that my meetings axe not connected in any way with any organisation, but I shall be glad to receive the hearty cooporation of all sympathisers with temperance work, iirespeetivc of party or creed. This seems straight enough ; but (for there remains a "but") Father Hays, is silent respecting his degree of complicity, if any, in the coercion policy of Mr Isitt and his prohibitionists. I surmise that Father Hays, being an Irishman, has no .Likmg for coercion policies But he doesn't say so. There is a discreet reserve. If he ■were a prohibitionist whole-hogger, there would be no motive for the change he purposes from the 12th of May; his "business arrangements" would be left where they are now, in the hands of Mr Is»itt. But though not a prohibitionist whole-hogger he is careful not to repudiate the prohibitionists,— would rather run with the hare and hunt with the hounds, as it were. That is a pity Personally I desiderate a temperance reformer of the. Father Mathew type, and I had fondly looked to Father Hays to fill the bill.

No recent book of memoirs has been more widely read or more generally approved than Sir Herbert Maxwell's "Creevey Papers," a two-volume budget of gossip, political and social,, lighting up the bad old times when George IV was King and when the monarchy, as it seemed, was tottering to a fall. Last week, dipping into Creevey for purposes not unconnected with this column — for, as Handel used to say anent his shameless plagiarisms, I take my goots vere I find them— l had the felicity to chance , on something bound to interest the whole of Scotch Otago. This was a free-spoken criticism of a sermon heard by Creevey in Kirkcaldy Parish Church, the preacher being the Rev. Dr Chalmers. Here was a Passing Note ready made to my hand. I took it over simpliciter, adding by way of comment just one remark, namely, this — that the "English conceit" which moved Creevey to caricature the dialectic peculiarities of Dr Chalmers would equally make merry over the Doric of Burns. Presently, however, comment was supplied from another quarter. Lest the following letter in Tuesday's Daily Times shoiild by any chance escape notice, I reprint it : " Crvis " and Db Chalmers. To the Editor. Sir, — I desire to enter my emphatic protest against " Civis's " attack on Dr Chalmers in Saturday's " Passing Kotes." Anything more scurrilous and contemptible is impossible. Whoever Maxwell may be, the quotation brands him a despicable cad. I say nothing of the eueer at the Synod, except that the -whole paragraph was tinwortliy of your paper, and shows that Maxwell and " Civis " are well met. "As the devil made them he paired them." — I am, e tc., Wai. Scohgie. The Manse, Mornington, May 1. This explosion need not be characterised ; to expend a single adjective upon it were sinful waste. But I allow myself a remark about "the sneer at the Synod." This is the sneer :

If I might presume to answer this question [of Creevey's] I -should say that nowadays we could beat him [Dr Chalmers] easily. And to do it I wouldn't go past the Otago and Southland Synod, now in session. The Moderator's sermon this week was better than anything he could have read of Dr Chalmers. These sentences may flatter too much, but they contain no sneer ; they expi*ess my honest opinion. I thought well of the Moderator's sermon, and there should be no offence in my saying so. Hence, if I am not to suppose the Rev. Mr Scorgie thick-witted, I am bound to believe him jaundiced, and that badly. He can hardly be unaware that the stilted " eloquence," so called, of Dr Chalmers and his contemporaries would now be found unendurable. It has gone out, along with, five-mile prayers and three-mile gi'aces. Mr Scorgie is no doubt quite able to keep his congregation awake ; but if he would send them to sleep, let him read to them next Sunday a sermon by Dr Chalmers.

"Whoever Maxwell may be, the quotation brands him. a despicable cad. . . . Maxwell and 'Civis' are well met. As the devil made them he paired them." For which see the clerical indiscretion pilloried above. May I be permitted to.inform the Rev. Mr 'Scorgie that Sir Herbert Maxwell— essayist, novelist, biographer, historian — is perhaps the mostdistinguished man of letters in contemporary Scotland. On other facts I lay n.> stress, — that his baronetcy is one of the oldest north of the Tweed; that he is a Privy Councillor, consequently takes rank with our own R. J. S. ; that he has sat in Parliament for his county, Wigtownshire, during the last 20 years and more ; that he is president of the Scottish Archseological Society, etc., etc. ; — these trivialities I pass by to say that he may be an elder of the kirk for anything I know to the contrary, and that not improbably he has a seat in General Assembly. Moreover that as editor of the " Creevey Paj>ers " he exercised " a severe system of selection," excluding whatever seemed potential of offence, he himself affirms in his preface. According to Mr Scorgie, however, what this representative Scotchman passed for reading in Scotland may not, in Otago, be so much as quoted. Talk of the provincial mind, its narrowness, its blear-eyed bigotries, its readiness to take the rustic murmur of its bourg for the great wave that rolls around the world — this is an example. And I question whether the fellow of it could be found in any other corner of the British Empire.

Dear " Civis " (with a long i, please).-=--I always read your notes with pleasure and gam instruction from them, but I would ask, with hushed breath and in fear and trembling, are you correct in writing " wiser than himself or me " ? Ought it not to be " than he (is) or I (am) " '? In .my time (50 years ago) the only grammar we'picked up at a public school was from learning Latin and Greek. So, with, all due respect, I wotild sign myself as on© Still Willing to I/earn.

Opoho, May 1. Ihe sentence referred to ran, " Let him begin, by listening to a teacher wiser than,

either himself or me," and the questio^ raised is, Does the conjunction " than " biing in an objective case? The pronoun " himself " is not neces-iarily objective ; it might be nominative, and the subject of a veib understood — " wiser than (he) himself (i&)."' But the ''me" that follows gives me away, and I have to admit the two objectives. Nevertheless please note this : The form " wiser than lam" is right, yet the form " wiser than me " is not wrong. Take two examples, each from a classic :

Be-elzebub . . than whom, Satan except, none higher sat.

Milton, P.L. ii, 299. A stone is heavy, and the sa-nd weighty; buf a fool's vrrath is heavier than them both.

Proverbs xxvh. 3. Here are two objectives, " whom " and " them," without any reason of being except that they follow the conjunction "than."' Moreover the example from the Book of Proverbs stands the same in botli the old version and the revision. I condude, then, that the objective aftei " than " is English,- and an idiom not t€ be neglected ; it makes for economy and simplicity.

This settled (till some country schoolmaster proves me wrong), I make my com* ' pliments to the correspondent whose critical acumen raised the' question, assuring him that to me it is a delight when I mccl anyone who, not being a schoolmaster,has nevertheless a- care for good English. I am beginning to -believe that the worst enemy of good English is the modem English newspaper. Not merely for th« reason that newspaper men usually wriU in a hurry. The faults of hurried writing are recognised as faults ; nobody defend* them. There is another reason. Newspaper English tends continually to hjconwt the English of the telegraph, of crossheads, of commercial advertisements. This English, if English it may be called, a jai'gon of elisions and compressions, always barbarous and not seldom hideous, is a temptation peculiar to the newspaper, no other form of literature being exposed to the same debasing influences. It is littla joy for me as a journalist to say thess things ; but it is well that they should be said by somebody, for assuredly they are true. There are newspaper writers* that have reconciled themselves to tho most abominable cacophonies ;, they arc at ease amongst phrases which, as De Quincey says, would splinter the teeth o£ a crocodile and make the deaf adder shake her ears. An illustrated paper published? north of Wellington contained, the other week some unusually good photographs of New Zealand scenery. But the printer, or the devil told off for the undoing of printers, had headed each picture not Ne# Zealand scenery, but "New Zealand's scener}-," a collocation of sibilants horrible to see and impossible to utter. This villainous misuse" of the possessive spreads amain. I look for the time when we' shall no longer permit ourselves to write "the leg of the table," " the side of the house," " the bottom of the street " ; phrases of this form will all follow the chaste and graceful idiom now establishing itself in the newspapers. We shall write "the table's leg," "the house's side," "tha street's bottom." Civis.

At Christchurch on Monday morning, 24th 1 , General Booth asked for the prayers of tha Salvationists in New Zealand on behalf of the first batoh of 1000 emigrants selected from the agricultural, industrial, ancS labouring classes of Great Britain, and sent -under the auspices of the Salvation Army to Canada, leaving London last weeki The General sent them <he following cable* message: — "God carry you 6afely to your new homes. Fearlessly calculate on hard work, and bravely meet your difficultiesDo your duty by your families. Help your weaker comrades. Maka Canada your home. Be a oredit to the Old Land. Pub God first. Stand by the Salvation Army. Savo your souls. Meet me in heaven. (Sigced) William; Booth, General of the

Salvation Army.

" I ,beg to enclose you," writes a correspondent of the Daily Mail, " a little ~ book, given away at one of the best shops in Stettin to the children of purchasers (my little boy received it), in which you will! see that it tells the story of two English, Red Cross soldiers, who rob the wounded and boast of the money and jewellery they get, and who, after a time, murder a soldier, a German, to steal his money, etc., and how in the end the rocks fall on these brutal English soldiers and kill them. By the means of such lies the feeling of hatredl for the English is kept alive among tha Germans. It is a disgrace that such p*iblications are permitted to be nublished and circulated among German children." Tha booklet, says the Mail, carries out all thai: our correspondent says — and a great deaS more. It is a scurrilous production, written, in simple, forcible German, such as would appeal to the imagination of a child. Its is called <: Tom and Bill." It is numbered! 989, and is evidently one of a serie-3. Comment is xi&eless, but in the light of these publications the assurances of goodwill o£ German statesmen are worse than worthless.

A New York cable in the London Morning Leader says: — '"A violent discussion! has been cave-ed in religious circles throughout the country owing to the Boston Congregationalists' refusal to accept 100,000 dollars from Mr Rockefeller for foreign; missions on the ground that the money waa tainted by the Standard Oil methods o£ overriding the law and crushing out legiti< mat© competition. Dr Parkhurst says thati the temptation to take the gift was greats and, moreover, nobody knew where th^ Scriptural widow obtained her two mites.< But he is not surprised that ministers decline the donation. Altogether Mr Rockefeller has given 30 million ctoliars ts.* colleges, churches, and charity."

TEe m^Sberehip of 'the Hawke's Bay pranches of the New Zealand Farmers' Onion lias increased durinsr th© past year from 21g to 5&3,

It is stated that a paddock at "Boggiebuin," near Limehills. owned by Messrs Sbeddan Brothers, has yielded 13§ bu§hels gS oatg to the St^Sx