PASSING NOTES.

Otago Witness, Issue 2677, 5 July 1905, Page 5

PASSING NOTES.

(From Saturday's Daily Times.)

The ancient csremonial of Parliament at the opening of a session, Speech from the Throne, and Address-in-Reply, always had a certain dignity though politically it may have meant little. As often as not the Speech told nothing and the Address inReply echoed the emptiness of the Speech. But, anyhow, it was a function that had dignity, not to dwell on its suggestion that in the Council Chamber of the nation things were to be done decently and in order. Unhappily there seems just now a conspiracy to bring this ceremonial into contempt. At the opening of the Commonwealth Parliament " the Speech contained only five clauses." In this brevity, which should have been thought the soul of wit, there evidently lay some mysterious offence.

Members were completely taken by surprisa at the abrupt termination of the Address. As soon fts Lord Northcote had withdrawn, a.nd the significance of the Government's move dawned upon members, they burst into general laughter, interspersed with shouts from the Oppositionists, who were apparently chargined. What exactly the nature of this grievance, I fail to see ; but it seems clear that the political aloofness of the Governor-General was compromised ; he and his Speech together had become a pawn in the game of party politics. Similarly in New Zealand ; — if Lord Northcote is cut off with five clauses, Lord Plunket is made to toil through fifty-five. And where the New Zealand Speech is not triviality it is advertisement. Fifty-five clauses did I say? — I haven't counted them, but a cursory glance convinces me that the Press Agency left some out ; c. g. :

It will be satisfactory to the country to learn that the flight Hon. the Premier sleeps in pyjamas and usually breakfasts 1 on pwridgc and bacon. He remarked this morning that it was going to be a fine day; and, although Tain has since fallen, my Advisers are of opinion that the weather is not really damp, considering the season of the year. Such portions of the vice-regal deliverance as escaped this vein were electioneering twaddle distilled from the record of Mr Seddon's presessional stumpings. And thus was composed and compacted our "Speech from the Throne." Poor Lord Plunket!

The Women of Australia are lifting up a Standard against Australian Socialism. Not without reason, and not too soon. For it appears that Socialism, as understood in Australia, is equally opposed to religion and to marriage, whereas women as a rule are interested in both.

To the Labour party militant, gecta and josses and creeds and scraps of theelogy are as nothing. Mau's b»dy, in sh»rt, is absolutely all that it care 3 about. His s«ul — if he h»v« any — can lip.

1 For, take it any road yeu will, religion is a curs* and a snare and. a delusion and a malicious sham. These specimen utterances by the "Tocsin," " the official organ of the Political Labour Council of Victoria," are of a nature to set any go»d woman's teeth on edge. In agreement with this attittfde towards religion is the doctrine that marriage is to be "an association terminable at the will of either party," and a further doctrine respecting "the economic independence of women," by which ear-filling phrase is | meant that a woman, though carrying a baby born or unborn, is to fend and forage for herself. In short the morality of the Socialist State is to be one and the same witfi the morality of the fowl-yard— a single particular excepted. The hen as yet has not attained to economic independence. Any well-bred rooster invest i- ! gating a midden-head and finding something to eat calls (his harem about him, looks on benevolent whilst they devour. Apparently the domestic fowl has been i <!egraded by too close association with the i.Jura&ii race. Butt, generally-* amonsst

the beasts that perish the economic independence of the female is complete, and this is the ideal towards which we are again to move. It may have been noticed that Mr Reid is utilising the giddy moment of his premiership to declare war against Socialism; whereas Cardinal' Moran, with a big Labour vote to conciliate, rebukes Mr Reid as a scaremonger. For my own part I shoufd be inclined to pin my faith to neither the politician nor the Church- ' roan, but to the indignant womanhood of the Commonwealth. ' If the women- fail, there is always in reserve Dame Nature,and with her is the last. word. Let Socialists of the "Tocsin" type,' which seems the prevailing type, achieve pos- \ session of Australia ; — they will not keep it long. It will be taken from' them v and given to a people bringing forth the fruits , thereof, even to the yellow races from tk* j North.

i . : : - i Sir Frederick Treves, whose alarmist ' warnings against alcohol may be read in ■ Thursday's Daily Times, is 6f course the" popular surgeon who made appendicitis fashionable and has since given to the world his travels in the Far East, delighting and puailing'the reviewers by a charm- 17 ing book on the tritest" of themes. In what he now says about the .evils of I alcohol there is nothing new, -albeit much | that is true, and the prohibitionists are entitled -to make the .most of it. Which thing they will do without "-difficulty since the trufcb, in Sir Frederick Tr eyes' s putting of it, is. like the premature report of Mark Twain's death, much exaggerated. ', My liking .for the distinguished author , shall not blind me to his exaggerations. ! For example: "Alcohol is distinctly, a! poison." .--So it is — a poison of sorts, a j poison which millions swallow, and survive. And because they survive you will never get mankind to believe that beer or wine or whisky is seriously tb'bft dreaded as a poison. For the matter of that, common table-salt is a. poison. To | swallow the contents of a full salt-cellar I were as bad as to empty down your throat a decanter of whisky. In either case you ! would be a gone coon. Yet for all iiiat we should not easily reconcile ourselves. to porridge without salt. Perhaps, however, whisky is more of a poison than table- ' s&lt because it represents temptation. Not to me. I am as little likely to guzzle the decanter as to swallow the contents of the salt-cellar. Not to me is whisky a- temptation, nor to more than one man in twenty of all who use whisky. t That the twentieth man cannot be as ' the other j nineteen is lamentable enough, no doubt ; but the fault is not in the whisky. The fault is in the man ; — he prefers to be as he is and to do as he does. To bring this twentieth man to a better mind is the affair of Father Hays and the teachers of" religion; but yon will make little headway by preaching to the other nineteen that alcohol is a poison. X Being a surgeon, Sir Frederick Treves is not necessarily an authority on poisons. In medicine there are greater names than his, amongst them that of Dr G. W. Balfour, author of a treatise on the pathology ' of intoxication. Please observe that I don't pretend to discriminate between expert and expert, but I know the difference between surgeon and physician. To the physician, not to the surgeon, it belongs to tell us about poisons, what they are and what they do. As. known to exact science the case stands thus : I

From tea *o haschish w© have, through hops, aloohol, tobacco, and opium, a sort of graduated scale of intoxicants which stimulate in small doses and narcotise in larger. It is well to remember that there is not a shadow of proof that the moderate use of any one of these agents as a stimulant has any definite tendency to lead to its abuse. Which statement the prohibitionists with united voice will deny and decry. ' But that is a detail, and facts are facts all the same. It is when the stimulant is employed as a narcotic — Dr Balfour goes on to say — that is, when a man chooses to get drunk on it, that a morbid appetite is developed, growing by what it feeds on. In or3er. however, that I may provide my prohibitionist friends with something really worth kicking at, I go on to quote one sentence more: -

In regard t:> this matte* it is interesting to know that ophim, which, us*<i in excess, is on» of the most deleterious of these stimulants, is employed by 400,000,000, or nearly * one-third 1 of the whole human race, Cii-d tlisfci among these we have the Chinese, v.'ho almost to a man are opium smokers, and vho nevertheless are known to be ono of th 3 most frugal and industrious of peoples, powerful, muscular and athletic, and the lowpr orders more intelligemt and far superior in medal acquirements to those of corresponding rank in our own country. Any "White Australia" fanatic, denying the possibility of these virtues in an opium-smoking yellow man, may be left to be finally disillusioned by the on-coming Japanese.

Since there lurlcs amongst us "an atheist- (so at least he signs 'himself), an aboriginal oddity that ought to be as extinct as the dodo, it jb just as well that now and then he should come out into the open. I say this though every successive apparition gives me the creeps. It is as though there passed, winnowing the air with heavy-flapping wings, some ancient bird of night. If it were a question of religions and religionists, Mahometan, Buddhist, Parsee, Shinto, llormons and Seventh Day Adventists, the Choctaw form of believer and the Pawnee— bring 'em along !— l'm not afraid ; my nerves would stand it. But a belated and benighted atheist ! — I should not be more surprised to meet an Egyptian mummy in all his musty wrappages walking about in Princes street No living form of philosophic thought is atheistic. Though, if it comes to that, I am bound in fairness to admit that there is nothing of philosophy about our Daily Times atheist. His attempt to express numerically th*e faults of the Bible— ■which contains about 153 glaring contradictions in thft Old Testament and nearly tlia

same number in the K«w; also over 200 case* of obscenity scattered throughout both Testaments, and about 123 errors in the story of the Creation alone — is not up to the intellectual level of the New Zealand Third Standard. Listen also to his yearnings for something higher and purer ! I would rather see the beautiful legends of the Greeks and Romans taught as inspired i and tiuo in every particular, as they are infinitely belter, and in some cases more soul* inspiring and sesthehc, more respondent to oui pcet-ical and sympathetic impulses, than the — • —than the Bible, in short. Those "beautiful legends of the "Greeks and Romans" forsooth, — much 'he knows about them! Let him take a Homer (English translation) - and read how the high god Zeuß disciplined his wife Hera, hanging her up : by the hair and tying anvils to her feet ; i how he lamed the god Hepluestus by | pitching him headlong out of heaven ; also | how the same 2eus did a number of other things which could not be described except in a divorce court after the respectable public had been requested to withdraw. These are the " beautiful .legends," " soulinspiring and sesthetic," " respondent to „ pur poetic and . sympathetic _ impulses," which " An Atheist" would substitute for . the Christian Bible. My advice to him is that in all decency he "should get away out oi the sunlight and go to roost again amongst his moles and his bats. Dear " Civis/'— Here are two notes of the i Ham/eric contest last Saturday between ■&» | Kaikorai and University football teams — t ba>rrnckjng notes; — I don't profess to talk j focrtbail itself. The subtilties of a game so I refined and intellectual are beyond me. There was an attendance of 5000, and id , included 'excited people of both sexes and of all classes of society. Two young girls of good manners and. address — interested in ancS applauding the University team whenever its members showed good play — wore in close pioximity to » youngish woman who, with her husband, was deeply interested in " th» Hill team," and " baxracked " for hej? favourites as energetically and excitedly as tha other two did for the 'Varsity. The girls presently noticed that their vigorous encouragement of the Bluss excited the resa-ntrneint of the young woman from the Kaikorai, who finally turned on them with a remark, in a tone showing that she meant what she said, " If this goeis on any longer there'll ho mora» than words between us before we leave the giound." Thau was a quietus; the "sweet; girl graduates" — if that's what they wer» or some day hoped to be — Subsided. Elsewhere amongst the University barrackerg sat " Proff " Black, as his students name hinr, and next to him a University senator, Dr Burns. Professor Black is so ardent a. worshipper of football that when the University team has done well on a Saturday, ha addresses his students en Monday in admiration of their prowess. It is even said fhaf» particularly successful footballer students axai s\m -of"" a -pass — but that is no doubt fat? letohed. Aa the game progressed on Saturday tha professor's exuiternent grew, and manifested ittelf in various ways to the discomfort of lus brother dignitary. Finally he lifted oft the hat of the latter and threw it into the aiv, and further marked his approval of tha play of the University team by digging himl pleasantly in the ribs. The victim of this) enthusiasm recovered his hat, and expressed! his sentiments in language appropriate thereto. Twa auld Scotch tykes, they wo-aldi know ho-W to make it up afterwards, I daro say.

The crowning joy of Saturday's rough and tumble, me judice, was the potted goal. It came at the due psychological moment, just as time was up, and it equalised the score. Nothing in football pleases me so itjuch as a lucky pot. I say this knowing it is a mean thing to say. -I ought to like the scrums, and the runs, the dribble and the pass; but I don't. What I like is the flukey pot. The crowd likes it too ; but what the crowd likes better, what your Blacks and your Burnses like, is the fierce strife in which crops out the aboriginal man. The players and the barrackers alike ' are back in the Stone Agd and only return to civilisation When ths hurly-burly's done, When the battle's lost and won.

Football is a reversion to primitive! savagery, taken in two spells, and controlled — imperfectly controlled — by a> referee. Civis.

On Sunday night, 25th, the residence oh Mr Ings, at St. Clair, was entered by come» person between tk« hours of 6.30 and 8 o'clock. The intruder evidently selected an hour for 'his purpos* when the occupants wer» absent at church, and as no doors or windows were forced it is conjectured fchafi a duplicate key wae used. A cashbox was taken away, which contained wills, deposit receipts, and other papers, and cask to the amount of about ss. On Monday the cashbox, broken open and empty, was found on, a. section close to the house, and while- tk* postman was clearing th* letter pillar irs th« vicinity yesterday he found among th« deposits a parcel containing the missing wills and other docuso-ents. The parcel found in the pillar had no address, but when the papers wer» take» to the Posfc Office and examined it was discovered t« whom they belonged, and tk« police wcr« communicated with, and they aivj now; prosecuting inquiries into the occurrence

The police have i*eceived information thafi {he post office, store, and dwelling-haus« aft Waiwera, occupied by Mrs SI. A. Anderson, was destroyed by fire on Monday night, 26th. The piemises destroyed were all combined in one building. There is "no information! available as to insurances ©r cause of th» fire.

The following appears in an English contemporary. — "A g»od cl«rgynaan, enthuew astic for the dissemination ©f the letter, recently invented a gam« for his Sunday) scholars. He gay« th© beginning of th« text ; th« ending was put up to competition. " Vhe eyes of all wait upon The« " began the clergyman. A little hand weai up, and a little mouth piped^^And TJiou , UadJ*