PASSING NOTES.

Otago Witness, Issue 3005, 18 October 1911, Page 11

PASSING NOTES.

(From Saturday's D.iily Times.) " Turco-Italian War," now established as a newspaper cross-head, ' looks well from the press-room point of view. But the cables that follow, filling a column or more, are poor and flat. When is the fighting to begin? Samuel Taylor Coleridge with a party of friends was once drinking tea< and discussing Plotmus at a house in street when a fire broke out in Oxford street hard byi The fire was at a pianoforte maker's, and promised to be a conflagration of merit. Everybody ran to the spectacle; Coleridge and the Coleridge party ran. But, asked about it afterward, the philosopher professed disappointment. " Sir," said he, " the fire turned out so ill that we damned it unanimously." Not yet may we judge the war, save in its dire possibilities of reach and scope. But aesthetically considered it is a failure. By S. T. C. it would be. classed with the Oxford street fire. The crowded Italian transports crossed unchallenged ; the troops they carried landed in Tripoli with the facility they would have enjoyed at Dunedin or Wellington. The resulting situation is peculiar, not to say absurd. Turkey is a great military Power, yet cannot so much as get in a single blow. The sea lies between, and Italy commands tb» sea.

It remains for Turkey to invoke the Powers. A vain hope ! Unable to trust each other, the Powers couldn't intervene if they would. It is an old joke that the " European Concert" whenever called upon plays out of tune. And the chances are that they wouldn't intervene if they could. There is nothing improbable in the story that Italy consulted the Powers in advance, and was assured of toleration, if not of approval. For my own part, I see no reason why overcrowded Italy, losing population continually to America North and South, should not think it a righteous thing to appropriate an empty region lying close to her own shores. From the Sicilian coast to Tripoli is from Dunedin to Wellington. In the distant past Tripoli was a garden; left to the North African Arab it has lapsed into a wilderness. Italy will make it once more a garden. France has taken Algiers, and Tunis, and finally Morocco —subject to a composition with Germany. Britain has taken Egypt. There remains only Tripoli,—predestined to the Italians just opposite. And so, as w-a read in to-day's cables, any influence exerted by the Powers will be for the purpose of constraining Turkey to " swallow the pill." The pill will be swallowed, with convulsions to follow,- —the rousing of Moslem fanaticism, and the stirring up of trouble in the Balkans. Not much longer shall we have to complain that the war news is dull.

" A new heavens and a new earth wherein dwelleth righteousness " is the modest objective of Mr Fowlds. Apostles preached it, martyrs have died for it; but after twenty centuries we had only got as far in this part of the world as the Ward Government and the Great Liberal party, until the advent of Mr Fowlds. We have but to tail on behind Mr Fowlds and the millennium is ours. Religion has nothing to do with it; morally we may be good or bad; distinctions of that kind matter nothing. The "righteousness " of Mr Fowlds's new heavens and new earth is merely a variety of land tenure. You may hold as much land as you like, or at -any rate as much as you can get, but the value of it will be taken out of'you by operation of the Single Tax. All taxation will be laid upon the land so that to have land will be the same' as to have it not, except that you will be allowed the privilege of working it. Uniyersal happiness will immediately follow; the wicked —that is, the Socialist w ill oease from troubling, and the weary—no longer harassed by prohibition argument —will be at rest. A " new evangel" Mr Fowkls calls this. Distinctfy new, I should say. There are few current quackeries that have not been anticipated; but no one had proposed to evolve a new heaven and new earth wherein dwelleth righteousness out of materials &o siffipifc. It is a pity that Mr Fowlds flung up his portfolio. After all,

the most natural place for a land quack is the Ward Ministry.

A correspondent with leanings to theology writes me on " the doings and ideals of a little-known sect " established amongst us with the object—as reported in the Daily Times—of preparing for the Second Advent shortly expected. and settling how to recognise it when it arrives—.harmless visionaries calling themselves "The Star in the East," "which star seems strangely enough to have arisen in the west. : ' He ends a lengthy epistle with these prescient words: I almost fear lest I have trodden upon forbidden ground; if so, I understand that the W.P.B. is forbidden to none, and am there well content to rest until after the functions of this " Society " are fulfilled. Reasonable man. On the same generous understanding—"that , the W.P.8., waste-paper basket, "is forbidden to none"—l may dispose at once both of him and of half-a-dozen other importunates. To begin, here is a Peninsula farmer whose pigs have so thoroughly rooted up a paddock that he is able to pLant it in potatoes without ploughing; yet "all that those wilting workers got W their labour was tucker " and the destiny of ultimate conversion into bacon; —which Parable of the Pigs is intended to illuminate somehow the Labour question. Next, from the South, a screed of verses, 13 of them, derisory and prophetic, generated by the scandalous allegation that Bolclutha is "much quieter " under No-license, in fact is quiet with the quietness of a cemetery. Thirteen verses—a baker's dozen! —and not without merit. By a stretch of complaisance I spare the first and the last. My word ! " A cemetery," quo he, Ho! ho i We'll shortly lat him see, He micht see noo wi' half an e'e Gin he. were willin', It's gaun to be a big city, I'll bet a shillin'. And this you'll see — Sir Tom Mackenzie, Bart., P.O. F.R.G.S., K.C.M.G. T'wad tak' the hale lang A B 0 A' in a raw, t And Premier o' the Colony - Nae far awa. The apotheosis of " Clutha Tam " is a natural climax. And just as certain as the rest.

Next in order, an angry New Zealander who writes from Sydney asking me to pillory the author of a newspaper diatribe against New Zealand, in particular against Dunedin, a column of filthy lies by a—what shald I saj?—concealing himself behind thename " Marinca," a name not definite enough for the infamy it merits. A newspaper with a distinct taste for slander was needed to publish this libel, which desideratum Sydney supplies. Declining to contaminate my wastepaper Dasket, I get the printer's devil to pick up the abomination with the office tongs and carry it to the Corporation dustbucket. Enters next, with a breath of fresh air, the " Ridiculous Farmer's Wife " who from time to time instructs me de omnibus rebus et quibusdam aliis. She is a Roman Catholic, consequently holds with the Pope about '; Ne Temere," a subject on which much inflated nonsense has been talked.

We have a great leakage in the Church through mixed marriages, and, as the Catholic party never or hardly ever becomes a real credit to the Protostant faith, it is much better to make restrictions. Why don't the Protestants get the King, who is the visible Head of the Protestant Church, to pass an act to the same effect? Not that they will ever stop altogether from falling in love and marrying. But I see Mr Birrell, in one of his speeches, said that after years of trying to force Ireland to beCome Protestant they began to see it was something like trying to turn a horse into a cow; we were a different species. Mr Birrell will understand Ne Temero better than Dr Gibb. This from a " Manuscript found in a Milk-house," five-and-forty folios or thereabout, say half a page of the Daily Times. But the newspapers prefer to stuff themselves with unreadable election speeches.

Next again, a complainant who is " well-nigh dead of prohibition and such topics," as indeed Ave all are. " Anything for a change!" says he, and brings in for discussion, as a subject of thriving interest, the Infinitely Little, or a particular case of it :—Ought we to say "tomorrow is Sunday," or " to-morrow will be Sunday"? Treating of this fine distinction, he twists and turns with the agility of .a mediaeval angel dancing on the point of a needle; and he signs himself " Professor." Yet, for all that, the receptacle gapes for him, is moved from beneath to meet him at his coming. Only a pernicketty pedant would stickle for " te-morrow will be Sunday." Vividness, if you care for it, demands " to-morrow is." Take examples from Shakespeare : "To-morrow the wrestling is," "to-morrow is the joyful day, Audrey," " sir, that's to-morrow," "is not to-morrow, boy, the Ides of March?" Shakespeare is authority good enough for me. Apropos, there follows a well-meaning friend and helper with a Shakespeare-Bacon chestnut. By Bacon-Shakespeare methods it is proved that in his forty-sixth year Shakespeare translated the Book of Psalms, Authorised Version. In the forty-sixth Psaim the : forty-sixth Avord from the beginning is : "shake," and the forty sixth word from the end is "spear," and the Avord " Selah" occurs three times, its initials : yielding " Shakespeare est libri auctor j hujus,"—"Shakespeare is the author of this book." Better, because fresher, is ; the same, correspondent's quotation from '. Punch. i Punch, recently, calling up shades of i Avriters, asked each Avhat he found best i to "Avrite on." One said fish; another. * porridge; another, whisky; some didn't

quite know; Shakespeare promptly said " Bacon."

Last in this general jail delivery I dispose of a malcontent whose grievance is the weather prophets. They are disappointing when wrong (as they usually are); they are still more disappointing whan right, for the weather they predict is usually bad weather. The objector takes a comprehensive view, .and evidently there is no pleasing him. I offer him a crumb of consolation in a little story that the late Sir Charles Todd, for many years head of the Adelaide s Weather Bureau, used to tell against himself. In •an up-country township he once came upon a local weather prophet with a great reputation. " How do you do it?" said Sir Charles ;—" I'd like to know, for I do a little weather predicting myself." " Oh, that's easy enough," said the other. " There's an old cove in Adelaide called Todd, who puts in the papers what he thinks the weather's, going to be, and I always put just the opposite to what he says, and that's the way I score." ClVis.