PASSING NOTES.

Otago Witness, Issue 3014, 20 December 1911, Page 11

PASSING NOTES.

(From Saturday's D-iily Times.) Opposition 37; Government 31; Independents and Labour (conceivably capable of voting with the Government) 9. On this showing vr T have scotched the snake, not killed it. She'll close, and be herself; whilst our poor malice Remains in danger of her former tooth, says Macbeth, his natural history rather at fault. A well-scotched snake wriggling in broken-backed impotence has no future worth' caring about. Better doubtless had it been granted us to kill the snake outright, better for the snake. But that "she'll close, and be herself." or that " our poor malice " has anything to fear from " her former tooth," reason forbids us to think. "I am not going to say die yet," says Sir Joseph Ward; "the Government is not beaten!" His talk is of another appeal to the country, and yet another. Despairing wriggles, merely; the word of friend and foe alike is— Better dead ! Meanwhile I am for recognising our mercies. A -thumping big one is the rejection of Sir John Find Lay at Parnell. There would be no wish that at this point and for the time being Sir John Findlay's political career should end. had it ever properly begun. To put into the Legislature and into the Ministry a man whese only political experience had been the losing of an election was to affront all the decencies. As Attorney-general and Minister of Justice this nominee of the Premier was put over a regiment of civil servants with power to set up and pull down, to kill and make alive, though no constituency in the Dominion had honoured him with its confidence. Matters were not mended when there descended upon Dr Findlay a knighthood in recognition of his eminent public services. It now remains for the Premier, as a last flirt and flicker of audacity, to pop him back again into the Legislative Council. If by any chance the moribund Ward Ministry were able- to inflict another General Election upon the country, as the Premier appears to dream, there would be other incidental mercies to clironicle like that of Parnell. In this neighbourhood alone three Ministerial seats are waiting only for the right sort of Oppositionist to challenge them. Mr Sidey, of Dunedin South, knows one of them; Mr Clark, of Chalmers, knows another; and, if I mistake not, Mr Millar, of Dunedin West, knows the third.

The vote that last week all but carried national prohibition was a freak vote; — a freak vote, and nobody understands it less than the National-Prohibitionist. For which reason I am going to explain it to him. Some small percentage of voters confused the issue, victims of a double ballot paper. These muddlers I make him a present of; they are of little account either way. Let us come to the. marrow of the thing. First, there were men, not a few, who voted national prohibition for the very reason that they thought national prohibition impossible, as indeed it is. Prohibitionists of a sort thanks to the insidious persuasives of their women folk, not to mention the fanatic outpourings of the pulpit—they went to the poll. They would vote prohibition—oh yes .'—and they did. But not in the possible, practicable, near-at-hand form of no-license. Deliberately and with intention they flung away their prohibition vote on what appeared the incredible and the absurd. A day or two later when the totals confronted them, no one more astonished than they, or more disconcerted. They had helped to dress up the incredible, and the absurd as a threatening possibility. They won't do it again. .

Then, next and chiefly, in its main strength the National Prohibition phalanx at the polls consisted of women. Why so? For reasons obvious. The publichouse habit is a man's habit. And there are thousands of wives whose logic, though M feminine quality, is equal to reasoning that if tne * publichouse were abolished there would be at the end of the week nfbre shillings in the domestic exchequer. Not that their husbands are drunkards. A rfass or two of beer a day may be the limit But the working man's glass or

two of beer a day, though consistent with the virtue of an anchorite, runs into money. Quite easily, then, may we understand the prohibition rigour of the working man's wife. Whether the working man will submit to it is a question for subsequent debate —domestic and private. If all the. women in New Zealand combined to prohibit smoking, which is a man's habit, expensive, useless, uncleanly, would they succeed? They wouldn't and couldn't, for the simple reason that a war between the sexes is inconceivable. Men and women always contrive to agree in the end. Which is to say that the fanatic whose purposed revolution turns on a revolt of women will find himself left. "We very nearly did it !" exclaims the whole-hogger in awe and amaze at last week's figures. Yes, you. very nearly did it; but you will never be so near again. This is your nearest. By that conviction I «hall stand till events confute me. And he who lives will see.

We are of an imagination dull and slow if we do not see in the Coronation at Delhi a greater marvel than the Coronation at Westminster. In vain may history be ransacked for a precedent. Never before has a great Eastern people crowned as their own and in their own land a European sovereign. Nor ever before has a European sovereign gone so far afield as the centre of Asia to receive a kingdom and to return. And such a kingdom F De Quincey (quoted below on another subject by a correspondent) cites for pomp of words and stately magnificence a verse from the Book of Daniel : Belshazzar the king made a great feast to a thousand of his lords, and drank wine before the thousand.

The very school books are on this level of unintended rhetoric when they tell of India :

India is a great empire of Asia, composed of- twelve provinces under direct British administration and about 150 feudatory States and Principalities, which equally with the British provinces acknowledge the paramount sovereignty of the British Crown. All this was f ocussed at Delhi; amid what barbaric splendours, with what display of power and might, the cables imperfectly tell. Other potentates of the world look on from afar and feel small.

For the Indian populations—3oo millions —personal authority is everything; parliaments and the like acre nothing. A sovereign assembly in which there is argument, one sovereign authority decrying and deriding another sovereign authority, are worse than nothing,—suggest weakness. Barring accidents —a risk the King and Queen are braving in a kingly and queenly way —this visible crowning at Delhi must greatly strengthen the British Raj. Essential to its effect were personal acts of sovereign authority, personal benefactions of sovereign generosity. Neither have been omitted. It is the King who transfers the seat of government from Calcutta to Delhi; it is the King who restores unity to divided Bengal. • Fixed up months ago in London, kept secret till the dramatic moment, and then announced from the throne, these' changes reverberate through India and the effect is stupendous. Ipse dixit! —he himself has said it, and alone he did it ! Certainly somebody knows how' to do these things,— the King himself, if nobody else. The transfer of the Government to Delhi is an enormous change. Imagine the howl of Calcutta " vested interests " ! But Delhi is the ancient capital of India; whereas Calcutta no further back than the planting these of the first English trading factories was a cluster of mud villages. "A Presbyterian" is troubled over an incident of the recent General Assembly. Smoking in the Vestry. Dear " Civis," —So his reverence whan accidentally locked in could solace himself with his pipe and tobacco. It reminds me of an incident a few years ago. I was at the morning communion, and the minister had to celebrate communion in the afternoon in a church three miles distant. I myself saw him returning in his buggy and reeking the smoke from it. I was shocked. I just thought, well, fp know tha.t it vp.s wine that was used at the Last Supper; but I never hra-d of pipe and tobacco. The clerical precisionists who would have retired in disgust from the wedding feast in Cana of Galilee may learn from this how a self-indulgence to which many of them are addicted looks to the laity. Associated with religious services tobacco is a noisome thing and without excuse, being in no sense a food as alcohol is. A prohibition law against Sunday smoking by ministers of religion seems badly wanted.

A correspondent asks for some guiding light on the subject of punctuation, especially as respects the use of commse, and n*>rt two cringle sentences old as the hills : "Woman without her man is a brute " r and " A captain having gone to sea (&ee) his wife desires the prayers of the church." Supply the pointing. The comma is a troublesome entity. Dean Alford prided himself on having rooted out some thousands of commas from the nroof-sheet/? of one of his books, commas thought by the printer essential. Munro, of " Munro's Lucretius," in his notes and translations 'gets rid of core mas almost entirely, with an effect distinctly odd. "The King's English," a volume recently issued from the Clarendon Press, Oxford, uses un 70 pages in discussing punctuation; so that Andrew Lang after a perusal feels "almost afraid to put pen to paper." Boiled down, its doctrine is, Use as few diacritical marks as may be, provided only the sense is ckair. At that we may leave it. Another correspondent refers to something said last week on examination papers. Dear " Civis," —The question quoted last week from the Education Department's examination paner_ reminds me of Thomas De Quincey's idea of questions to be set to ah examiners

1. Translate this mathematics into tho language of chemistry. 2. Translate this chemistry into the language of mathematics. 3. Translate both into tho language of cookery.

4. Solve the Cambridge problem, " given the captain's name and the year of our Lord, to determine the longitude of the ship."

This I take to be a parable setting forth the familiar truth that examination "howlers" are not always and exclusively contributed by the examinee. Civis.