PASSING NOTES.

Otago Witness, Issue 2928, 27 April 1910, Page 5

PASSING NOTES.

(From Saturday's Daily Times.)

The state of the Commonwealth poll, with Labour at the top, is not altogether unrelated to the Newcastle strike and the just reward meted out to the men who chiefly made it. We a.re to see in this election the reply of Labour to the judgment of the courts. It is a triumphant reply; but to estimate with any precision the might and measure of the triumph we must go a little into statistics, which is a thing I abhor. However} there seems no help for it; let us make the plunge. •The total number on the rolls is 2,156,339, and the votes cast • (not including the informal ones, which were comparatively heavy) numbered 1,276,924, divided thus: Labour 633,382 Fusionists .' .. 577,104 Independents .. 56,448 The percentage of votes cast was 58.75. Take the last fact first. The percentage of votes cast was 58.75 ; which is to say that of every 100 electors 41 abstained from voting ; —4l and a fraction, really ; but we can afford Mr Man tali ni's contempt for fractions. To put it simpler, of every 10 electors 6 voted and 4 abstained. Next, if in the voting totals given above we add together the ■ Fusionists and the Independents (which Independents, whatever they were, were certainly not Labour), we get 633,552. And the Labour total was 633,382, or 170 less than the other. Disregarding with Mr Mantalini the dem'd ha'penny, let us say that the two totals are equal. Then we are saying that of every 6 voters there were 3 who voted Labour and 3 who didn't; and that of every 10 electors there were 3 who voted Labour and 7 who didn't. So much and no more is the Labour triumph. Not the less will the 3 who voted Labour take the seat of authority and proceed to rule the house. But they will need to do their spiriting featly, winning acquiescence by moderation, or the 7 that didn't vote Labour will be heard of in a way that should prove interesting.

In so big and sprawling; an electorate . as _ the Coirumonwealth—from Perth to ', Brisbane, from Hobart to Carpentaria— I more and more will place and power fall i to the carpet-bagger.—the man for whom j a seat in the Legislature means a liveli- j hood. No merchant, lawyer, journalist, farmer, of the outlying States can afford to spend half the year in Melbourne, away from his business, kicking his heels in attendance on Parliament. The man of independent means could afford it; but the man of independent means is not the kind of man that gets elected. The nominee of the Labour unions, on the other hand, not only can afford it, but thrives on it. Who so snug as a Labour member with his sufficient Treasury cheque paid monthly, and never the need to soil his ha,nds ? Physically, that is; more vou can't expect in so dirty a trade as polities. The mad scheme of planting the legislative capital in the back blocks, at some Australian Borrioboola Gha, if ever it becomes fact, will perfect the carpet-bagger monopoly. Nobodv will be able to live at Borrioboola Gha who doesn't live by politics. And so the Australians are going to be shut up to the Parliamentary representative who can live on his Parliamenta.rv honorarium. The Labour member can live on it in ease and affluence. And so we come to this, that Australia by its mere bigness is pre- . destinated to the control of small men. Not a few Australians, I fancy, are nauseated with politics—" full up," as their phrase is. Already there are fourteen Parliaments in the Commonwealth ; and Mr Fisher, the new Labour Premier, thinks there ought to be forty. So says the editor of Life, if we may believe him. I fall back on the consolatory fact that Australia, like New Zealand, is a country not. easy to spoil. '■

It is pleasant to play the fool on occasion, says Horace. And on authority just as good we hear of foolish talking and jesting which are not convenient. Under this head come the jokes of persons in office about German black bread, horseflesh sausages, trichinosis pork, and sauer

krout, otherwise rotten cabbage. If you would insult a whole people, ridicule the food they eat. There is no shorter way, or surer. The offence in " Johnny Crapaud," crapaud being, a toad, lay not so much in miscalling the lilies in the old French standard " tcad's," which they undoubtedly looked like, as in reminding the Frenchman that he was an eater of frogs. Dr Johnson's gibe in his Dictionary (if there it really is) —" Cats: in England a food for horses; in Scotland for men " —expressed his unintelligible spite against Scotchmen, and is resented to this hour. A common sailor will fight sooner than hear himself called " a limejuicer," or "a burgoo-eating Geordie," if he sails out of Newcastle. And the Germans, if they fight at all, will fight the earlier for the vulgar taunts of Mr Lloyd-George from his p.ace in the House of Commons. Such worcils as these are more provocative than Dreadnoughts: " I call it black bread. —(H-on. members : 'Rye bread.') Is that black?—('No.') Is it feed? Really, lion, gentlemen opposite, amongst their other defects, are colour-blind. The Germans themselves call it blr.ck bread, and that is how you order 'it.— {' No.') What is its colour, then ? I should not have thought there was the slightest doubt about it. I have heard hon. gentlemen say it is excellent stuff for the workmen.— (Laughter, and cries of ' No.') Well, I should like to kr.cw how much Uie hon. member for Clapham consumes. I should think ha diets himi&elf very strictly.— (Laughter.) The hon. gentleman charged m.e with saying it wag food we would not give to tramps. I said: ' Right hon. gentlemen say this bla-ck broad is excellent stuff, ve.ry nourishing, very palatable, exceedingly appetising '; but I said in Devcnshire, ' iLave you any tramps'?' And they said, 'Yes.' Then I said, ' The next time tramps come round give them • some of that German black bread. Every time a, tramp calls give him a clivnk of it, >aiid you will get rid of him as if he were given rat poison.' " (Laughter.) This is storing up wrath against the day of wrath. Quoting it, the Spectator " cannot resist a feeling of physical nausea." Not at the idea of black bread —which, like oat-cake, is something of a dainty—but at the spectacle of the Chancellor's reckless larrikinism. This morning, Friday, I saw the comet. Small merit in that. Anyone may see the comet who gets up early enough and chances on a clear horizon. . The comet is up an hour or so before the sun, whilst ' the sky is still dark to set it off, pale and mystical, a sheeted ghost, its hair streaming wild and thinning away into the vague. Halley's comet at last! —and I was the " aequa posteritas " to which Halley pathetically appealed, little thinking that after two centuries his words would be remembered on a New Zealand hillside. The words were Latin words; their drift, that if, in accordance with his calculations and predictions, the comet of that year 1682, should return about the year 1758, candid posterity would not refuse to acknowledge M that this ' was first discovered by an Englishman." We are now at its third return, true to time. At its hundred and third, when perhaps some New Zealander, lone watcher of the skies from a broken arch of London Bridge, shall see it swim into his ken, it will still be Halley's Comet, and the greft,English astronomer will still abide in honour, as is his due. .... j For expressing the sentiments proper to this portent of the s skies you need all the odd and ominous adjectives in your vocabulary. It is spectral, eerie, weird, uncanny. Already suicides are reported, " because of the comet." Such the terror it inspires. Leaflets circulated in Russia described the approaching comet as " the sign of God's scourge and the harbinger of universal war and famine, if not the end of the world." Taking advantage of the ignorance and superstition of the people, unscrupulous persons are collecting large sums of money for supplicatory masses and special prayers in all the churches and monasteries of the " Ukraine Mecca" for the " rescue of Holy Russia from destruction by the falling comet." These subscription lists include the names of many prominent members of various learned professions. •. Members of learned professions can be as stupid as other people at times, and as superstitious. One of the queerest farragos of superstition known to me is HaeckePs " Riddle of the Universe." But ! let that pass. How explain the wonder and awe which seem to belong to Halley's Coniet above others? As a recurring i visitor it is old; but the heavens themselves are old. It overhung Jerusalem before the great seige. And so did the moon. Perhaps the true reason is the mystery of its exits and its entrances, and of the enormous gap between. In the interval separating its unintelligible departure and its unintelligible return generations pass. Men may come and men may go, but this goes on for ever. All of which seems too utterly trite for setting down in print; yet, somehow, is for the moment impressive. If the comet is to impress us in any other way, we must wait till the 18th of next month, when we may expect a flick of its tail. I Correspondents of mine some months ago were explaining, and explaining away, the preposterous longevity of the antediluvian patriarchs. There is also, I believe, a suggestion (of American origin) intended to explain the thaumaturgy at Mount Carmel and the catastrophe of the priests of Baal —namely, that the prophet Elijah flooded his altar with petroleum. Explanations of this character usually explain nothing; yet people seem interested in them. For which reason I copy an example from a recent Spectator, February 19. For a sign to King Ahaz, the shadow on his sun-dial went back ten degrees. Now hear and apprehend. What may have taker, place (says a correspondent of the Spectator) is what I have myself actually seen occur with

? the shadow of the tall-trunk of a young ' oak tree thrown upon the side of a barn, —a by rhich I had so often measures, the approximate time that I used to oal! the barn and Ihe oak tree " the dial of King Ahaz." / On one day a; ; unusually heavy stationary mass of storm-cloud obscured the sun itself; but the sunlight, blazing through a rift in the cloud at one side of the sun, cast the shadow of the oak BACK to a point a quarter of the circle from where it had" just been. If the " dial of Ahaz " was a pillar or obelisk, the shadow of j which was thrown upon a circle of deI grees marked on the ground or on a wall, ; the same Ihing couid have occurred without any convulsion of the solar system. The sun himself was cut off and out of it; but his rays still streamed through a rift at some distance right or left. That is the doctrine, I take it. Very good. There remains now the whale in whoso " society'"— as the preacher put it —Jonah spent three days and nights. Anyone i able to rationalise Jonah and bis whale may count on a welcome. Has f~v one noticed the problem in equitation presented by a verse of Scott's " Lochinvar " ? One touch to her hand, and one word in her ear, When they reached the hall door, and the charger stood near: So light to the. croupe the fair lady he swung, So lig>.:. to the saddle before her he sprung. Granted that he sprung light,—and he would need to, since the lady was already, up—a question of acrobatics remains, iny deed a kind of moral question. Did he fling his leg over the lady's head or over the head of his charger? One or the other, of necessity; unless he shot up rocketand descended perpendicularly, legs a-straddle. - I chanced on this criticism of Scott where least' I should have looked for it, in the pages of a New York weekly. A correspondent had tested Lochinvar's norsemanship by actual ex-, periment. When I first read this poem I remember insisting on playing it, my sister taking the part of the fair Ellen, sifting on the crupper—that is, she wa3 at the beginning of the verse, but ere its close she arose, dusty and dishevelled, also indignant, from the ether side of the pony, and refused to play any more unless I got en first and took her hand ' while she set her foot on the stirrup and. viMjlted upon the pillion behind, as she had done all her short life, and I (. think she was always a trifle suspicious of Sir Walter afterwa/d. As we ■ have no Scott cultus here (more's the pity !) —no Society, Guild, or Club keeping green in this Edinburgh of the south the memory of the greatEdinburgh classic, there is no authority, to which the Lochinvar puzzle may be re-; ferred for solution. Perhaps in the circumstances th. Burns Club will try its hand. I owe an explanation, perhaps an apology, to the many readers of this column who, in their kindness, would help me to write it. They send me suggestions, criticisms, hints, innuendos, scraps of information, newspaper clippings, and also leters in due form for publication. Not many of these benefactions are acknowledged; only a few, perhaps, ar? put to'use; some gravitate at once and irresistibly to the basket under my .table, —t'iie balaam box, as the old Edin-: burgh name tor .it was. But all . alike 'are welcome, quantum valeant; for all aliko'l am grateful. Keep it up, please. Don't be discouraged, even though in response I make no sign. You may be a boon and a blessing to me, if not directly to the public. When letters come on subjects already worn out thoy are subject to the unwritten motto of this column—" Ne quid nimis," Nothing too much. Other letters can be noticed by a word only ; —one to-day asking whethen the name "Kilmog," or "Kilmug," alludes to the accidents that await record-break-* ing cyclists at that part of the road.' As for letter writers who disport themselves in the ordinary correspondence columnsmy special admirer " H." for example—> I dance them up and down as long as they amuse; the moment they begin to be bores I drop them. This week the indefatigable " H." is at it again with trochees, anapests, iambuses, a nice derangement of epitaphs, to show that a Milton line which all the critics give up. as unmetrical:— - i In the bosom of bliss and light of light, may be made all right by putting the '■ accent on " bo— " and on " bliss "; transmogrifying the stately Milton measure into the jigamaree of " Alonzo the brave." For example, on that basis:—v Alonzo the brave was the name of the knight, (In the bosom of bliss and delight of delight), The lady the fair Imogene. And this is the heroic line of Milton! I | had some compunctions after assigning to this wasted genius the epithet ";ass" i last week. But he himself had introduced the ass, —first an easy ass, then an uneasy ass, —and I merely left the animal with the original owner. CIVIS.-