PASSING NOTES.

Otago Witness, Issue 2914, 19 January 1910, Page 5

PASSING NOTES.

(From Saturday's Daily Times.)

" Now the hurly burly's done, Now the battle's lost and won," is not for either side in the great ( Budget embroglio to say,—not yet. _ But things are getting on. Sixty-eight English boroughs are polling to-day. The results, however they pan out, ..will certainly trouble the Sabbatic calm of to-morrow. It will be a, day for adding up gains and losses, for ccngratulatings and condolings; the church-going bell in the 68 boroughs will ring political victory and defeat. Here, at the ends of the earth, we are spectators merely, and of most of us it may be said that we have barracked for neither side. It wasn't worth while. All the isame, we are keen on the game, and must get over Sunday as religiously as we can, waiting Monday's cables. For my own part, I keep an even miad. If the country wants rhe Budget, the country will say so; when once the country has said so, there is nothing more to be said. The House of Lords will accept the inevitable without- a whimper. Not that even then We shall be at the beginning of the end. Not necessarily. If neither party counts a majority that is independent of the Irish vote, we reach the Irishman's Paradise —a see-saw of parties with the Irish vote able to tip up either end at discretion. The Irish Nationalist vote is always at auction to the highest bidder. Last Parliament there was no market. It may be that the elections will make a market. In which case Home Rule looms up, and metre trouble with the House of Lords.

For the present trouble with the Lords there is neither precedent nor parallel, think most people. Which is a. mistake. The present trouble is that the Lords have refused ,a tax. In 1860, just half a century ago, the Lords did worse; they imposed a tax. Anybody who cares" may turn up the story in Justin McCarthy's "History of Our Own Times." Mr Gladstone's Budget of 1860, as it passed the Commons, took off the paper duties, a remission of enormous importance to the cheaper newspapers. But the Lords deleted this feature of the Budget, on the ground that the country couldn't afford lose the money, needing it for defence purposes. By this " gigantic innovation, 1 ' as,Mr Gladstone phrased it, the Lords actually imposed a tax which, for the space of a year, was collected on their sole authority. An appeal was made to the people generally to "thunder a national protest."

The Morning iStar newspaper led the agitation. It had recourse to the ingenious device of announcing every day in large letters that the House of Lords had that day imposed so many thousands of pounds of taxation on the English people, contrary to the fundamental principles of the Constitution. It divided the whole amount of the re-imposed duty by the number of dhys in the yean and thus arrived at the exact sum which it declared to have been each day unconstitutionally imposed on the country. This device was copied by the promoters of public meetings. . . . And the Lords were warned that unless they gave way the English people would turn them out of Westminster Palace and strew the Thames with the wrecks of their painted chamber.

" Yet the country did not become greatlv excited over the controversy," says Mr Justin M'Oarthy, albeit as an Irishman and a Home Ruler no particular friend of the House of Lords. "The country took it rather coolly on the whole." And their High Mightinesses of the painted chamber survived unharmed to repeat their misdeeds half a century later.

The efforts of certain newspapers to whip up a public excitement over the casting 1 out of the Budget have been pathetic, tragic even. The Daily News seem® to have organised a system of beacon fires from Land’s End to John o’ Groat’s, —for the original of which idea see Macaulay’s heroic poem “ The Armada.” For swift to east and swift to west the ghastly war-flame spread, High on St. Michael’s Mount it shone: it shone on Beachy Head;—?

Thence on and on through the shires and counties, from fane to fane, from peak to peak ; Till Skicklaw saw the fire that burnt on Gaunt’s embattled pile, And the red glare on Skiddaw roused the burghers of Carlisle. Even so and not otherwise when the Lords proclaimed war against our modern liberties. At midnight the news that the Peers had wrecked the Constitution and declared a revolution was flashed by Daily News rockets from point to point throughout the country. Thirty seconds after the fatefid division had been made known at the House of Lords the first rocket sped into the clear air from our Bouverie street offices. Instantly another followed from Fleet street. Only a short pause followed, and the answering signal sped skyward from a ring of stations in the suburbs of London. Elsewhere the boom of-sigrial maroons broke the silence of miunight before the coloured shells burst in the air, spreading far and wide the news. Thenceforward, like minute guns, at five-minute intervals they fired a salute, while every three minutes the flaming streamers of the rockets bore the news of the revolution.

“In the name of the Prophet—Figs!"

The same newspaper in the same issue breaks out hysterically over LloydGeorge’s attitude and occupation at the moment when the deed was done: Mr Llo'/d-G-eorge Dikes While Peers Kill the Budget. Whilst the fate of his Budget was being decided, perhaps his own’ future career, certainly the future of England, Mr Lloyd-Grsorge sat quietly in a Strand restaurant enjoying his dinner. We might have expected, as I gather, that ad such a moment Mr Lloyd-George would have betaken himself to prayer and fasting; or that he would have been found haranguing a mob in Trafalgar Square; or marching at the head of a procession with banners. Instead of which he was seen quietly dining in a Strand restaurant.. Well, man must dine; but still—the wonder of it! . Lloyd-George is of the people in sentiment and appearance, no evening wear, but quietly, plainly dressed, his long hair falling over his coat collar, he looks what he is—a true son of the people. Never for a moment was he still after coffee was brought. The conversation never flagged, there was no dulness, no brooding, no appearance of melancholy, nothing to show that he cared one jot what the Lords were going to do. And thus lived the man on the night of the Lords’ great act of treason to British liberty. t.:.- . There is just one detail that arrests me — “his long hair falling over his coat collar.” We appear to have a Chancellor of the Exchequer who resembles a piano expert or revolutionary plotter from Central Europe with a name ending in -ewsky or -ousky. I will try to adjust my ideas to this fact. Meanwhile it is a pleeasure ho think bow many times at election, meetings the advice must have reached him—“ Go an’ get yer ’air cut!”

Mr Frederic Harrison, writing in The Times, complains that centenary commemorations are being overdone. There are too many of them; and there are too many of them because we date, them wrong. It is not, that we commemorate the wrong people, or are lapsing into an indiscriminate Japanese worship of ancestors.. Our error is that in reckoning a centenary we take the day of birth instead of the day Of death, and so bring about that Mr Frederic Harrison, being a veteran man of letters, has to officiate at the centenary of his own contemporaries— Darwin, Tennyson, Gladstone, for instance, —which is a weird experience and uncomfortable. The hundredth anniversary of the birth arrives when " we have hardly recovered from the ©motions of a grand national funeral," he complains; and " the funeral bak'd words do coldly furnish forth the centenary feast." If we waited till a great man had been dead a hundred years, we should better know whether lie was really a great man, and often find ourselves able to economise. Tested by time,, there would be fewer great men to commemorate. Waiving that consideration, there remains a serious incon equity in the case of politicians only just dead'.

The case of Mr Gladstone, for example. The hundredth anniversary of Mr Gladstone's birth has to be commemorated, alas! in the midst of a. fierce conflict still raging between his friends, colleagues, rivals, opponents, within but 11 short years since he was buried in the Abbey by the nation,' whilst the fires that he lighted up are still blazing round us, and hot. words art still bandied about over his half-closed grave. It is such a clamour as might bring him up agadn; and we may imagine ourselves apostrophising the mighty shade at its own centenary in the words of Hamlet to the Ghost:

0, answer us! Lei us not burst in ignorance; 'but tell W'hy thy canoni&ed bones, hearsed in death, Have burst their cerements; why the sepulchre, Wherein we saw thee quietly in-urned. Hath oped his ponderous and marble jaws, To cast thee up again. And, if the mighty shade could speak, its word would be—The Budget and the House of Lords.

If the ghost of Gladstone walked, I should venture to bring- under its notice the Crophi and Mop hi story which appeared in the Daily TinW a fortnight back. I had intended a note on that story last week, but tinno and chance were against me. In Stanl?y's Autobiography there is mention of a conversation the explorer had with Sir Gladstone on the possibilities of British ezin Central Africa, possibility s

toward which the great man showed him* self totally indifferent. A map was pro duced. “Excuse me one moment,” said he; “what are those two mountains called?” “ Those, sir," I answered, ” are the Gordon Bennett and the Mackinnon Peaks.” ” Who called them hy those absurd names?” he asked, with the corrugation of a frown on his brow, “ I called them, sir." “By what right?” he asked. “ By the right of first discovery, and those two gentlemen were the patrons of the expedition.” “ How can you say that, when Herodotus spoke of them 2600 years ago, and! called them Crophi and Mophi? It is intolerable that classic names like those should be displaced by modern names, and “ I humbly beg your pardon, Mr Gladstone, but Crophi and Mophi, if they ever existed at all, were situated over a thousand miles to the northward. Herodotus simply wrote from hearsay, and ” “ Oh! I can’t stand that.” ' It, is creditable to Mr Gladstone’s hazy scholarship that he should have remembered Crophi and Mophi at a sudden call; hut where was his sense of humour ? It doesn’t need the garrulous Herodotus to tell us—though tell us he does—that his Egyptian informant was taking a rise out of him; the names themselves tell that. “ Only one man in all Egypt could explain to me the sources of tha Nile, and he seemed to be joking. The river rises, he said, between twin mountains named Crophi and Mophi; halt of it runs norh and is the Nile; the other half runs south into the sands of Ethiopia.” Thus in substance tire ingenuous Father of History, quite simply. It is a.s though we should say —The one mountain is Mumbo, and tha other Jumbo; or, if you prefer it, the one is Hocus, the other Pocus. Strange that Mr Gladstone had never seen tha joke. For we must certainly give him a sense of humour. He was a good diner-out. and none but the man who loves a joke can be a good diner-out.

From the correspondence columnsu over the signature “T. Buxton” — In a recent letter of mine to the Southland Times I called “ Civis ” a Bauite, “ a serpent by the way, an adder in the path that biteth the horse’s heels so that his rider falls backward.” That, of course, is only metaphorically. But it fits “ Civis ” with a grim cynicism. Though taking my original from Holj Writ, T. Buxton doesn’t quite get tlia v hang of things. It is only with asses that I meddle obnoxiously—asses, not horses; tickling their ribs, moreover, and shilled to avoid their heels. T. Buxton hasn’t got the thing right. What he wants with the word “ metaphorically,” blurring his outlines, I don’t know; nor why he accuses himself of “ grim cynicism.” Probably he doesn’t know what cynicism is, grim or grimy; but the phrase reminds me of a former appearance of his in this column. He had been addressing an Invercargill meeting of working men on the iniquity of Sir Joseph Ward in presenting the Empire with a Dreadnought. And . these were hi* sentiments :

What did it matter to the working man if New Zealand was taken by Germany ? Personally he did not care, who was his master so long as he fed him. If the Kaiser, wanted to New Zealand and would feed the working man, let him come. -.''

Here is cynicism if you like, and of fch« grimiest. Some remarks of mine with which I dismissed him then may serve the same purpose now “ Buxton ” is an English name, and that is about all that was English in the speaker, I fancy. He -#;,uld be the Kaiser’s man if the Kaiser would feed him. Exit the Kaiser would have other uses for the Buxton carcass than to feed' it. Failing to drill it, march it, make it carry a musket, the Kaiser would manure the fields with it. And that would be the end of Herr Buxton. Ci vis.