PASSING NOTES.

Otago Witness, Issue 2985, 31 May 1911, Page 11

PASSING NOTES.

(From Saturday's Daily Times.) Tho rally, great and glorious, of veteran picneers—the first gold diggers of Otago—to celebrate on the scenes of their earliest romance the jubilee of gold-imning and their own, has touched a chord, as we say, and given a thrill. There is nothing exaggerated or make-believe in the compliments we pay them and the interest we show. The disposition to quote poetry at them, as all the papers do, is natural; and if we remark at intervals that they are old, it is not in surprise ;—how should a jubilator, or Jubileeter, be anything else than old?-Hstill less in pity. The heavens themselves are old, says Lear. The most touching poetry in the world, and the most beautiful, is inspired by retrospect; it is the poetry of looking back.

Sunt lachrymae rerum, ct mentem mortalia tanguni. The line is too beautiful to translate, not to say that it is untranslateable (the pioneers won't mind). But it is in its plaee, and it looks well. Tennyson's "Tears, idle tears,"—rhymeless verse, but so musical that the rhyme seems there, and you note its absence with surprise, the divinest thing he ever wrote—are for " the days that are no more." Then there is the peerless " Auld lang syne,' the song of the old folk, though the young folk may not sing it without a quiver of the voice and a suspicion of wet eyes.

Wo twa hae run the braes And pu'd the gowans fine; But we've wandered mony a weary foot ■Sin' auld lang syne. Wo twa- hae paidl'd i' the burn, Frao morning sum till dine; But «on.s between us braid hae roar'd Sin' auld lang syne. Any two of the pioneer pilgrims at Lawrenoe this week might have gripped hands over that: "We twa hae paidl'd in the burn"; —so they did, in the burn of Gabriel's Gully. And if they did not pu' the gowans fine, it was because there were no gowans there to pu', but only Maori cabbage, or whatever it was they called it. Alack and alas for the days that are no more !

now is it that the Auckland people, essentially a modest people and shy, always diffident of their own merits, are making indecent boast of their census majority, in which there is no merit at all? It amounts to telling us that they have nothing else to boast of. The local prints don't put it that way; but the local prints are not logical. It is they chiefly that do the boasting and the boosting. A half-page cartoon in the New Zealand Herald shows Auckland 'bold and big as top-dog, the census figures on his collar, Wellington and Christchurch as lean and mangy curs, right and left; Dunedin as a half-starved • Scotch terrier grovelling in front. For noticing this exhibition with appropriate remarks, the Otago Daily Times is now informed by a New Zealand Herald scribe that we are all Scotch people down here, and, being the countrymen of Burns and Scott, have no sense of humour. If we had any sense of humour we should appreciate such a sentence as this, which is Auckland humour :

' It is very natural that these Scotch writers who live in a little shabby, scraggy corner of a remote island, with a climate which canmot ripen an apple, should be jealous of the aggressive pleasantry of more favoured people.

There, is humour here—the humour, involuntary and painful, of a high-stepping boaster too big for his boots and tortured by corns. The effect is a dancing and a prancing as of a cat on hot bricks.

" The members of the society were not cranks nor faddists nor theorists nor dreamers, but entirely practical, sane, and sound." —Mr Duncan Wright at the anrJual meeting of the Society for the Protection of Women and Children; the Rev. Canon CurzonSiggers presiding.

Mr Duncan Wright got in this reassuring testimonial just in time. The meeting was closing with appearances all the other way. Least amongst the things "practical, sane, and sound" that aire promised

us, a bagatelle in comparison with others, is the restoration of the curfew. All boys .and girls under 16 and unaccompanied by a guardian are to be rounded up and run in at 8 o'clock. I think I see it. Chairman sings:

The curfew tolls the knell of parting The bo'wiHng kids go scudding fast and free, .. Gibe at the corners, shoot the alleyway, , But leave the street to Pleaceman X and me. This achieved, we proceed to the "sterilisation of the unfit,"— nothing less. Bv way of removing any last lingering objection, we are assured that the "treatment" would leave us with "sunnier dispositions and brighter intellects. Hooray! If the meeting had read " Candide"—a book, I admit, not for the young person under curfew—it might have been of another opinion. But let that pass. Science must triumph over sentiment, remarked the chairman philosophically, and we may accept such consolation as we can get.

However 'much people might think it was interfering with the liberty of the subject they must consider that tno benefit of tb? race was a far higher thinf than the liberty of one individual —of an individual whose disposition was made sunnier by the treatment. Why don't we all hurry up? These light-hearted sterilisers are merely echoing ctactnnea preached elsewhere. That of course. An English paper points out to the preachers, unkindly, that tor the sake of extinguishing a few degenerates they would at the same time have robbed the world of its most gifted men " ; _for example, Cowpsr, Lamb, Coleridge, Byron, Stevenson Keats, Raskin, Henley, Be Quinoey. The thing is so. This is a specimen batch ol tne "unfit" Cowper was a melancholic; Lamb came of a family with homicidal mania, and was himself put under restraint as a lunatic ; Coleridge went opmmmad; Bvron had a club foot; Keats and Stevenson were consumptives. Rrskm and Henley may be passed without note; but of De Quincey it is permitted to say that so tiny an atomy the modern eugenist would have drowned at birth like a blind kitten And although .these examples may not greatly move our Bunediin sterilisers, it might give them pause were they to take stock of the people around them.

Walking through dry places, seeking rest and finding none, describes the P.P.M. (Prohibitionist " Presbyterian Minister") in his two-and-a-half column darg last Saturday. For an early example of total abstinence he goes back to the ancient Israelites who drank neither wine nor strong drink for forty years in the wilderness. Certainly the wilderness was a dry place, in fact a prohibition district. They didn't drink because they couldn't; there was nothing to be had. But in the grapes of Eshool they saw promise _ of better things, and held up for the time when they should sit each man under his own vine and fig tree. After this the P.P.M wanders _ drearily on through _ a series of dry places —Geneva under Calvin, England under the Puritans, Scotland under the Covenanters. It is strange that the P.P.M. argument should be bound up with Geneva and John Calvin, who probably drank good French wine every day of his life, and had not only never heard of prohibition but likely enough would have burned as a heretic the man thatfirst proposed it. It is true that Calvin enforced morality as he understood it at tho point of the civil sword, as a preliminary hauling up of citizens in batches of ten to swear to the creed ; and so it is true that his Geneva domination was in principle one with prohibition. But where is the Calvin domination now? Like that of the Puritans and that of the Covenanters it is "one with Nineveh and Tyre." Such systems have their day and cease to be. Their names are of bad omen for prohibitionists. But for pity's sake don't let us be serious. It is only the humour of the situation that is now the thing; all sane men have long made up their minds. And it is delightfully humorous when the P.P.M. convicts Dr Salmond of a " howler" for which, as he says, a Scottish divinity student would •be plucked. But the humour is at his own expense. You may prove me familiar with every crime from pitch and toss to manslaughter, and destitute alike of religion, morality, and common sense. But if the same argument proves me ignorant of the English alphabet, there is something wrong with your logic. Beware of the argument that proves too much.

A philosophic breadth of principle is the chief thing in the following extract from a Japanese business letter; but there are also to be noted the traces of an education in literary and Biblical Engglish;—got in a missionary school, belike :

As Mr Brown is most religious and competent man, also heavily upright and godly, it fears me that useless apply for his signature—please, therefore, attach same by Y— cmoe making forge, but no cause for fear of prison happenings, as this is often operated: by other merchants of highest integrity. It is highest unfortunate John Smith so godlike man and excessive awkward for business purpose. I think more better add little serpent-like wisdom to upright manhood and thus found good business odifioe.

" Business is business in the Far East," remarks the Saturday Review by way of comment. This Dominion is farther East than Far East Japan, and gets up earlier in the morning ; yet has a dim perception that it is never hair as wide awake. We are still guessing at the riddle set us by the Japanese Antarctic expedition that looked in at Wellington, left for the Pole, and turned up at Sydney. Nobody on board could speak English. The Wellington people recall too late a similar mystification passed upon them by a visiting Japanese warship. In order that the com.

mancler might " see a little of the country," he was driven out to the Hutt, and there was duly lined and wined, grinning and grimacing in the character of an amiable deaf mute. Returning, the driver ran the wheels up a bank. "Ha!" exclaimed the guest, grabbing at his neighbour "this, dam fool will have us over!" A thoughtful silence followed. For the joke was against the Wellington people. Wherein and how much had they given themselves away within the hearing of this guileful Jap who knew r.o English?

A Pake ha- Maori it is, I suppose, wluo dogmatises in the petulant screed below; the cause of his wrath ' ; Kianga Poaka" as Maori for Poi kopek's, or a pig-farm. A Canterbury pig-farmer writing to this column last wosk ha.d thus designated the scene of his operations. Whereupon :

Dunedinites should never write or speak Maori, as they can never spell or pronounce it_ properly. You probably mean kainga, which Dunedinites have corrupted into kaik. They cannot pronounce the " ng," so twist it into "k." Puketeraki efoould be rangi, Waifraki should bo Waitangi. But kianga!!' I told the editor a few days ago'the Times, instead of being a popular educator, is a popular mis'.cader when dealing with Maori names.

The editor, let us hope, preserved his editorial equanimity. We owe no duty to Maoi-i names that Ave should pronounce and spell them Maori fashion. Are we to pronounce and . spell Vienna German fashion, Wien? Rome and Naples Italian fashion, Roma and Napoli? Not a bit of it! We are masters in out own house. In the English place-names Lancaster, Winchester, Leicester, and others, we have softened the Latin "castra" into -caster, -chester, -cester. Is that any blame? I admit that " kianga" is a mistake for " kainga" ; —the word is of two syllables, not of three, and ai is a diphthong. But that " kainga',' has been •'corrupted" into "kaik," and bv "Dunedinites," I do not admit. It is about the last thing I should trouble to be pernicketty over, but "kaik" I take to be South Island Maori, a dialect fonn. And if so, the Pakeha-Maori is not the infallible pundit he thinks himself. Civis.