PASSING NOTES.

Otago Witness, Issue 2685, 30 August 1905, Page 5

PASSING NOTES.

(From Saturday's D-iily Times.) Mr Seddon, as I gather from something said in the House, is not going to circulate 50,000 copies of the Sneddon voucher at the public expense. No, he is not going to do • it. Then I retract and apologise. Not ■ that I, personally, ever said that he was going to do it, — it wasn't me, it was Mr T. E. Taylor. But I expressed a hope that he would do it, and a conviction that it was just the kind </ thing that he might be expected to do, and that the country might be expected not only to condone but to rejoice in. For the country , is very much of my own opinion — that a Premier (if \lm initials are R. J. S.) should •be allowed his pickings, even as a cook or kitchen maid is allowed her perquisites. Thtis when Mr Seddon was out of health we lent him the Hinemoa, put a doctor on I board, and sent him cruising up and down the coast. His salary ran on — £1750 a year ; he invited his friends ; we played the host to all alike. In the end lie puts ■ in a bill for travelling expenses — 45 days at 30s a day. Some ill-conditioned grumblers in the House are still harping on these travelling expenses. Nothing could exceed the dignity of Mr Seddon's ' attitude in presence of such an annoyance. Travelling expenses at 30s a day for 45 , days during which he spent nothing are ! with him as the small dust of the balance, j Carping critics he looks down on with lofty scorn, and the country lik-cs to see him do it. Personally lam for getting rirl I of Mr Seddon at the first available opportunity. It would be meat and drink to j me to watch him being politically hanged, ' drawn, and quartered. But not on a ques- ' tion of pickings. And that is where the New Liberal' quartet have made their mistake. j i Dr Johnson has a characteristic Jolineonism about women who preach : " Sir, a woman's preaching is like a dog's walking on his hind tes:s. It is not done well 7 but you are surprised to find it done at all." This applies, yet does not apply, to last Sunday's evangelical exercises in the Garrison Hall, where a pair of footballers, addressing a football congregation, delivered a pair of football sermons. We are surprised to find it done at all, but ! more surprised to find it done well. Yes — "mon ane parle, efc meme il parle bien" — a line which, though apropos, I ask permission to leave untranslated. The next development in this kind will be a series of Sunday sermons on golf, by competent exponents of the game — names withheld for the present, there being some slight uncertainty about th© preaching place. It is understood to be a question between the Garrison Hall and the links. After golf will come the turn of bowls ; after bowls, tennis and hockey. Ultimately we shall arrive at bridge, with a large and fashionable audience. If not, why not? That football can be made fruitful of moral suggestion is already proved, although football, one would have said, is a particularly hard case. After this there can be no reason why any other form of sport should not take to the pulpit. We may in due course be invited to sit under a representative of the turf and the totalisator. In the Paris Figaro for July 7 is a twocolumn letter from a '" Sj>ecial Commissioner " sent by that newspaper to Berlin with a view to his investigating on the ! spot the state of German feeling towards I France, also towards England. In particular it was the special commissioner's business to discover what official Germany really thinks of the English-French understand- [ ing. On this last point he had no difficulty whatever. Codlin's your friend, not Short, — that, in substance, was what | official Germany had to say by way of comj ment on the entente. Morocco? — there j need have been no trouble about Morocco. J Reflect thai the question for yon and for j us was in reality not Morocco, hxxt fico access \ Isa tlio MediteiTap.ea.ii. England has already Gibraltar, which/ is tho entrance.- aucl Suez.

which is the exit. Not content with these advantage's she coveied in addition Tangier?, opposito to Gibraltar, in fact tlio other leaf of the front door. Have W3 not rendered Franco a service in compelling her to look this everrfcuaWy in the face? Spite of appearances it is thus Germany that has been France's true friend. The English, cowardly but subtle, hare bee. playing on their neighbour's .simplicity. We know quite well the ways of the English. England has never fought except under compulsion and when unable to dupe another nation into fighting ia her stead. Look at the Crimean "War, which left aaound Sebastopol 100,000 Fretoch graves; look at the war of Japan, an example of England's hidden working; look at all her history. There is a saying that liars should have a long memory. Some remark of that sort seems indicated here. As a matter of fact England was jockeyed into the Crimean War by Napoleon 111, who just then had urgent need of a foreign disturbance to distract attention from his domestic crimes. Anybody desiring light on this point may be commended to the earlier volumes of Kinglake's great history. ' Duper and duped were Franc© and England, in that order; and I dare say we left as many graves around Sebastopol as our estimable allies. Figaro's special commissioner takes a low view of the intelligence of his countrymen when he passes on from Berlin this German interpretation of the Crimean War. There are some interesting speculations on the contingencies of a German. . controversy with "the British shark" (1© requin britannique) — an amiable allusion to the rapacity and voracity with which we range the high seas and grab whatever is worth grabbing. Yes, indeed, — the British shark ; let us recognise our portrait. And canst thou draw out leviathan with a hook? This question, which stuck up the patriarch Job, admits, in German circles, of an affirmative answer. Is it after all, so sure .-a thing", so indubitably certain, that in a naval contest ■nith England we should be beaten? Renwmber, the English fleet has had- no fightii.g experience. Out fleet is the smaller of tho two; so was the fleet of Togo. [Modest comparison!]. And, anyhow, wo have seventeen good battleships, of latest type, homogeneous, in excellent fighting trim; we have a dozen good cruisers, and two divisions of torpedoes. What is more, ■we have crews drilled on the Japanese method', and all prepared to die! Is it so very certain after all that the boasted English fleet would make of us only a- mouthful? Not certain, no ; — we do not in these matters talk of certainty. But there is a mighty big probability looking our way, craven and white-livered though we be. Germany as a sea power if too much for a mouthful will not be too much for a meal. To the British behemoth belongs a capacious gullet and an absolutely bottomless appetite, — his enemies being his judges. In reading the letter given below don't miss, as I for a moment did, the obscure joke in the first sentence. Keep your mind fixed on the antithesis " English Slang " and "Andrew Lang." Dear " Civis." — I once read that there was two racdes of expressing oneself — the one in "English Slangiiage" the other in "Andrew Language." The latter would appear in a Scottish connrrnmity a diplomatic way of avoiding tho distasteful " English " and the inharmonious and not altogether correct terni 5f '" British " language. For it is a curious fact that though the language has teen evolved in England through Angle-Saxon, Nornian French, and at least five eoparate Latin developments, stiH Scotsmen such as Bain, Stevenson. Macaulay, and Andrew Lprg, come (as all Seotenicn. do) to the front as authorities en, or as exponents of, it? form and literary %tyl.~. Tim by way of introduction; — I s>m ro Scotsman myself — only an Englishman predestined to obtain a living among a race that has tho reputation of keeping the Sawbath and everything else it can lay it-< hands on. I eat its porridge and drink its wlnsky daily (thai:ks be.), and trust that my children bhall not he ashamed when they meet with tho enemy in the gate. Hoping therefore by a process of diet, circumstance, and evolution to becomo a Scotsman. I feel justified in thra/iriag your attention to ceo or t-.\o expressions creeping into- every day use. First of all, tke writer of a letter in your columns on 27t!i July, " Mark Cohen " (a namo ncr unknown in support of education), one who s-peaks sometimes with all the weight of the mystic editorial '"' we," says, "Mr Mackenzie, M.H R , on that occasion denounced ths scheme; I was with him every time." The occasion is, you will observe, an isolated one; yefc, en that single occasion Mark Cohon with " with him every tiin*." Secondly. In a business letter lately I saw the following: "It is 'up to' Mr Smith to pay JCiOO ." Thirdly, I call in evidence Sir Robert Stout, a name Very familiar in days gone by to ths Pi inter's Devil who presided over tho Passing Notes column, but now, perhaps, hardly known tn tho linotypist. In a stinging homily on a tainted transaction he says from the Judge's chair (vide Tuesday';) Times): "It would take a lot to convince him that this was not a ' put up job.' " Let me suggest a few questions for the next matriculation examination: — Explain ths following sentences, giving derivation of ths metaphors used: "It was a put up. job"; "I was with, him every time"; "It is up to him to pay £100 ." Mr M'Laren and Mr Ashton might take theso sentences as a text on " Clean Sport and Clean Language." I fancy they would be understood, for the idioms of the footbali field may be said to ba working their way past the backs towards the goal posts of English Slanguage.— Youra, Joh» Browjt. English in the past possessed a slang of its own ; nowadays it seems content to borrow from America. The phrases given above are Americanese ; the authorities quoted as using those phrases have evidently formed themselves on the literature of American poker. That half-educated Americans should develop a dialect of their own is nothing surprising. Their country is big enough For dialects by the dozen. Nothing eaves Tom provincialism in speech — that is, from dialect — but the prevalence of a common iteraturo. But the half-educated American :loes not read literature ; he reads newspapers. In a recent number of Harper's Monthly Magazine — a serial which, though

published in New York, has nevertheless a care for literature and f«r drinking at the well of English undefined — there is a writer who makes his moan over the illiterate well-to-do and their incapacity for imparting "culture"' — as he calls it, hateful word — to their children. "Prosperous young persons," he sqjs, are stuffed with " homespun stories anent Franklin's penny roll and Lincoln's rail-splitting," but ol " the tales on which the ages have grown cultured " they kr.ow nothing. He gives a list, from the myths of Achilles and Odysseus down to Robinson Crusoe, Alice in Wonderland, Tom Brown, and tha Arabian Nights.

Test tlio firoi; five children you inn across on a list as fundamental as this, ancT thai results may startle you. Even the commonest! legends pf owe fathers have ceased to h& current among children, parents having abandoned for the most part the gentle art of story-telling, and limch that shotvld be a choice heritage of culture and delight to every well-reared child! is being relegated toj the mere student of folk-lore. Mothers, meanxime, devise ever-increasingly ciabora.ts apparel for their offspring, and fathefsf dive ever deeper into those inspired sources of -wit and wisdom the daily newspaper?. These be thy gods, O Israel! Truly the piiblic school aaid the putrlic library, united 5 , seem but a small David to go foith against so mighty a Goliath. Small wonder, then, that America, for all s bigness, i 6i 6 a nest jot provincialism and that the very Newspapers talk dialect, lhere exists, it is true, an indigenous literature which affiliates itself without difficulty to our own. Howells and James write English tfcsfc -is jcosvect, ii a trifle superfine; the same holds true of thafc delightful friend of my boyhood Fenniniore Cooper. Then there is Oliver Wendell [ Holmee, who might be a great writer bub that he has written so little ; also there are some recent novelists— to be counted on the fingers of a hand. But the illiterate well-to-do have their own novelists as they have their newspapers. Here for example on my own table, profaning its sanctities, 'is "Calumet 'X.'" by Mervin-Webster, authors of "The Short Line Wai 1 ." For other information on its title page — how many times it has been electrotyped, reprinted, specially issued— space have I none. Clearly it is a book with a vogue and the Mervin-Webster syndicate must be> making money. But it is not English; none of the people ia it talk English ; they talk the Chicago varkty of Americanese. We too in turn may wander as far from the parent type, but not— let us hope— in quite the- same direction. Our Chief Justices and other high pundits are showing a. regrettable want of originality. . Let them teach us to develop an English Slanguage of our own. Civis.