PASSING NOTES.

Otago Witness, Issue 3004, 11 October 1911, Page 11

PASSING NOTES.

(From Saturday's Daily Times.) About Italy and her burglarious assault upon Turkey I have all the feelings that it as proper to have—surprise, alarm, indignation. We are carried back to the open felonies of Napoleon; or further —to the cattle-lifting exploits of our forbears on the Border, and The bad old rule, the simple plan, That they should take who have the power, And they should keep who can. There is no such thing as international morality. The sceptred Powers in relation to each other are in what jurists call a state of nature. Cynical superiority to any code of honour reaches the comic when the German press hints that what Italy has done Germany meant to do, and rages against England for secretly inciting Italy to get in first. As interV preted by her Anglophobe editors, ; Germany talks the language of the thieves' kitchen; —there ia nothing wrong in pocket-picking; what is wrong is that you nave picked a pocket which was not for ' your picking, but for mine.

In reprobation of these enormities I have—as above remarked—all the proper feelings; in particular a feeling of disgust at Italy s lighthearted disregard of interests not her own. A European war would mean commercial paralysis, financial crash, impoverishment for millions. But I have some feelings that are not so proper; —the feeling that the Meditteranean ought to be a European lake; that North Africa from the Strait to the Canal should be held by the Christian Powers; that Crete and all the old Greek islands, Cyprus included, should be returned to the Greeks whose patrimony they are; that the £700,000 a year Egypt pays, the Sultan as suzerain were better expended on Egyptian railways and irrigation works; that in a word —Mr Gladstone's word ; —the uiispeakable Turk should be bundled across the Bosphorus, bag and baggage. Turkey has no title to a place in the comity of nations. The elementary notions of humanity and public justice are wanting to the Turk. Summed up, he is cruelty, sensuality, caprice. Lord Cromer's anecdotes of the Khedives we dry-nurse in Egypt might be paralleled in every Moslem State from the Pillars of Hercules to Araby the Blest and Afghanistan. " Oriental despots," he says, "jump from an extreme of injustice to a prodigality of generous munificence."

On one occasion Said Pasha (after whom is named Port Said) was coming in a steamer from the Barrage to Cairo. The Nile was low and the steamer stuck in the mud. Said ordered the reis (steersman) to receive a hundred blows with the courbash. These were administered. The steamer was got off the mud and proceeded on her journey. Shortly afterwards she stuck again. Said ioared out: " Give him two hundred," whereupon the unfortunate reis made a rush and jumped overboard. A boat was put off and he was brought back to the steamer. Said asked him why he had jumped overboard. The man explained that he preferred to run the risk of drowning to the agony caused by another flogging. "Fool," exclaimed Said, "when I said two hundred. I did not mean lashes, but sovereigns." And, accordingly, the man reoeived a bag containing that amount of money. The minds of Orientals are such that many of them would be far more struck with the generosity of the gift than with the cruelty and injustice of the flogging.

Freakish amusements were common with this Said. Lord Cromer relates that "to prove his courage" he caused a kilometre of road to be strewn a foot deep with gunpowder. "He then walked solemnly along the road smoking a pipe and accompanied by a numerous suite, all of whom were ordered to smoke—sever© penalties being threatened against anyone whose pipe was not diound alight at the end of the promenade." Said Pasha is on the whole a mild example. The makeup of every Moslem ruler is of the tiger and the ape, with the tiger predominant.

St. Margaret's Coliege, Dune'lin, < a hostel for young women keeping university

terms, affords satisfaction to its Presbyterian founders. Things said in the Dunedin Presbytery this week are definite on that point. And if the non-Presbyterian public had been represented m Preebytery, the non-Presbyterian public would have expressed its own satisfactaon. St. Maro-aret's College is an institution we ane all glad of and to which we all wish prosperity. Yet, as the Presbytery had read in the Daily Times, the name St Margaret's".:s an offence to the noee of high-sniffing Protestantism, even so tar away as Nelson. In a long-winded overture articulated by half a score " whereas"-es, the Nelson Presbytery complains of Queen Margaret of Scotland, forby the fact of her having been canonised " by one of the Popes," that "her historjr is medieval, fulsome, and legendary. Think of it—" mediaeval, fulsome, and legendary." Further, that '/ there is danger that this Presbyterian Collego in Dunedin with its P*»«* designation may be confounded with an unreformed medineval college or with a college also for women and having the same name in ChristchuTch whose teaching is far from being'-'—m fact is far from being what it ought to be. Uor these reasons and for others born of the night, the dead waste and middle of it, the Nelson Presbytery aforesaid humbiy orertures the General Assembly to do this and that,—in sum, to give St. Margaret's smother name. All this the members of the Dunedin Presbytery had read, but for very shame set themselves to look as though they hadn't read it. ' My sympathies are with them. And theirs will h& with me when I say that not for many a day have I read anything better fi+ted to gratify the nether powers and set the ungodly on the grin.

Having the imprudence to be born in century eleven, poor Queen Margaret i 3 clearly mediaeval; and therein partly, nay chiefly, lies her culpability. For the Nelson Presbytery " mediaeval" ie " that blessed word Mesopotamia " taken the inverse way. Whatever is mediaeval is of sin. Puir aula Scotland itself was mediaeval in mediaeval times —the Highlands and the Lowlands, the straths, the lochs, the firtha, Ben Nevis, and Ben Lomond, all mediaeval together. And nane the waur :—de'il a bit! —say I. The mediaeval people were good and bad as people are now. They were born and they died much the same; eating, drinking, sleeping, were much the same, —loving and marrying, pain and grief, laughter and tears. The Mnediseval sun shone, the mediaeval flowers grew, the mediaeval birds sang. Wandering by stream and wood you might hardly know that you were not in the Province of Nelson. As for Religion, well, the medaaevals were as religious as they knew how. ? -You couldn't ask more. Queen Margaret, there is credible testimony, was amongst the best of them. We have no reason to think that Queen Margaret shut " t her eyes to any light available; which is more than can be said of the Presbytery of Nelson. It has to be confessed that after her death she was declared a saint by some Pope, probably himself mediaeval. But the same calamity befell the apostles Paul, Peter, Andrew, and the rest. No more than Queen Margaret did the apostle Paul anticipate posthumous canonisation. He didn't know what was to happen him. There must have been many things the apostle Paul didn't know. According to De Quincey, there existed at Oxford in his time a street preacher (not unworthy to wag his pow among the pundits and pedants of Nelson) who used to bawl derisively beneath the college windows and at the college gates :■ " D'ye think Powl knew Greek?"

Nothing more surely galls and gravels the prohibitionist than an appeal to the Bible. Especially if the prohibitionist ie also a minister 'of religion. Supposing his prohibition theorem sound, the Bible should b 3 his armory, his treasury, his strong tower and house of defence. Instead of which, the Bible rebukes,'rejects, repudiates him. From first page to last, the Bdble is for freedom and moral control. Prohibition .ie for lock and key, handcuffs and the police. Consulted at the creation, and arranging things to his liking, the prohibitionist would have prohibited with scant ceremony

the fruit Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste •\■ : Brought Death into the world, and all our woe, as Milton writes. He would have laid the axe to the root of that tree, or at least would have contrived by barbed wire to make it unapproachable. The Founder of Christianity, who both and made wine for other people to drink, and who was slanderously called a wine-bibber, the prohibitionist explains away as best he can. And bad is the best. St. Paul, neglecting to prohibit strong drink and merely prohibiting drunkenness, is as smoke to the eyes and as vinegar to the teeth. "Be not drunk with wine, wherein is excess," we are to regard as " a local and prudential regulation laid down for thgi Church at Corinth nearly 2000 years ago" —merely that. As an interpretation of a moral precept I conaider this the most original on iecoid. It i 3 by the Re\. Mr Williams, of Oama.ru. A remark by the same St.( Paul —quoted by me last week —that the hard and fast rules "Touch not, taste not, handle not" "have a show of wisdom in will-worship., and humility, and severity to the body, but are not of any value against the indulgence of the flesh," Mr Williams discreetly ignores. But ha addressee to me a few observations in the spirit of the cursing Psalms, and he bide me " leave the Bible alone." I imagine that nothing can be more disagreeable to him than-the quoting of the Bible when prohibition is in question. Quoting should be limited to Mahomet and the Koran. There is ample authority for prohibiticn there.

Dear " Civis," —Referring- to your note in Saturday's issue, as follows:

"Not even to the ears of Keir Hardie and the Irish Nationalists should it come amiss that the man who baulked Canadian secession—a. man long dead and forgotten—was the man who wrote ' Rule, Britannia.' " Great is the power of the song-writer: his work is often more far-reaching than that of the politician or historian! But Thomson, the author of " Rule, Britannia," is not forgotten yet, least of all by his countrymen. Possibly some of them when reading your note might feel like the Knox Church elder who, when counting over an extraordinarily big collection with late Mr W. N. Blair, was eo elated that he said, " Man, Blair, I feel like to gang on the spree." Perhaps it would be as well not to print this; it might make some of our prohibition friends unhappy; but you may depend that many Caledonians will, in thinking of Thomson at present, and, perhaps, of Thomas Campbell, the author of "Ye Mariners of England" * and "The- Battle of the Baltic." Scotsman. The words " a man long dead and forgotten " were a paraphrase of words sent us by the cable:

Mr Bickerd'ike, the well-known Liberal member for Montreal, when asked, " Who defeated the liberals?" replied: "I don't remember his name —he is dead long ago. —but he is the man who wrote 'Rule, Britannia.'" "Rule, Britannia" ie doubtless our most enduring national song. Yet few of us know more than a single verse: When Britain first at Heaven's command , . . .. ■ - Arose from out the azure main, This was the charter, of the land, And guardian angels sung this strain: Rule, Britannia! Britannia rule the waves 1 For Britons never, never shall be slaves. Most of us remember only the last two lines, and them we. remember wrong — substituting "rules" for "rule' " Britannia rules the waves." Hardly strange is it, then, if we forget the author. But we will not forget. An eighteenth c;?ntury Scotchman, James Thomson, a son of the manse, Thomson of " The Seasons," it was that gave lis the song. An Englishman 6et it to music —Dr Arne, not unworthy of mention with the mighty Handel his contemporary. And although no Irishman had a hand m producing it, Irishmen have sung it. Indeed, according to the music histories, it is a probable opinion that "Rule, Britannia," like "The Messiah," was heard in Dublin before it was heard in London. Let us hope the Dvbliners liked it.

To be noted for the sake of distinguishing is a nineteenth century James Thomson, —like the other Scotchman and a poet, but marked off by misfortunes which made him of pessimists the most thoroughgoing. "The City of Dreadful Night,' his principal work, no one ean read to profit, despite its undeniable power. By the title understand the world we inhabit. We are all dwellers in The City of Dreadful Night. Unable to discern in the universe any good thing, this James Thomson-took to drink and so made an end. Him we may forget. But his earlier namesake, elevated to a niche in the Temple of Fame, there perches secure notwithstanding the joke against him for a line in one of his later pieces —

Oh I Sophonisba, Sophonisba, oh t Parodied bv Henry Fielding in the mock heroics of his " Tom Thumb the Great For what's too high for love, or what's Oh ! Huncamunca, Hunoamunca, oh! But more neatly travestied by the Passing Notists of the time— Oh! Jemmy Thomson, Jemmy Thomson, oh I For a' that and a' that, Thomson of "The Seasons" is a true poet, and his countrymen the wide world over may treasure his memory.