PASSING NOTES.

Otago Witness, Issue 3018, 17 January 1912, Page 11

PASSING NOTES.

(From Saturday's Daily Times.)

On our relations with Germany, that most uncomfortable subject, everything had been said that could be said ; nothing remained but a certain fearful looking for of judgment; when, tension and passion having reached the bursting point, the guns would go off of themselves. That was how it looked a week ago. Wearied out, we wanted to hear no more, and in desperat'on were for letting things take their course. But the Germans have contrived to say something new, something undeniably interesting. They say that on three specified dates—July 24, August 19, September 18—the British "intended to attack the German fleet without declaring war." "Intended," observe; then what put them off? Was it that they had lost touch, so that when for the purposes of destruction they wanted the German fleet they were unable to find it? A yarn to this effect put forth by the scaremonger on the British side, Captain Faber, obtained no credit. Nobody believed that on one night unspecified the Admiralty couldn't sleep because it didn't know precisely where the German fleet was. But the German belief that thrice we have been on the point of attacking them (which is pure fable) seems definite. I gather the welcome inference that the G rmans are demoralised by fright. Their nerves have gone to fiddle-strings. It is inconceivable that they should want war —the dreaded war on two frontiers — when one member of the Triple Alliance —ltaly, to wit—is out of it, having urgent private business elsewhere. Equally inconceivable is their consent to the absolute blocking of their oversea commerce. The exits are only two —the Strait of Dover and round 'the Shetlands. No German ship could reach the ocean and the outer world unless the British fleets holding these strategic points were first destroyed. The Germans dread the threatened v.ar, and we dread it just as much. Barring accident—the dropping of a spark where much loose powder is lying about—it folluws that there will be no war.

Dear "Civis," —May I ask you whether the word " egoist" or " egotist " is the more correct. If you are not certain, you might consult Sir Joseph Ward. In an address to the electors of New Zealand, published this week, ono may count the pronoun "I" 13 times, "my" three times, " me" once, " myself" once; so that in various guises the " ego" appears 18 times. And (his in 11 sentences ! The second personal pronoun, "you," which should prodominate, one would think, in a letter addressed to the electors, is conspicuous by its entire absence, cither in the nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, vocative, or ablative case. How does that strike you for "egoism"? or is it " egotisai " ? Kindly say. —Old Prospector.

The "intrusive t" by which "egotism'' differs from " egoism " lias come in—say the authorities —nobody knows how. But it serves to give a consonantal backbone to the word, and for myself I prefer the form "egotism." Since both forms persist, an attempt is made to differentiate them in meaning. "Egoism" has first an out-of-the-way use as the name of a system of ethics; putting this aside, we have ''egoism, systematic selfishness, selfopinionatedness ; egotism, tco frequent use of 'l' and ' me,' practice of talking about oneself, self-conceit." This is the Oxford Dictionary's defining and refining. Under which word shall we place the Prime Minister's belated manifesto? Discrimination is difficult; —better give it to both.

Mr Keir Hardie may never have heard of Thersites ; it is not necessary to suppose that he has. His likeness to that scurrilous malcontent is not imitation but inborn genius and original sin. Thus qualified, he might have sat for the portrait in Pope's Homer :

Thersites 'twas that clamoured in the throng, Loquacious, loud, and turbulent of tongue : Awed by no shame, by no respect controlled,

In scandal busy, in reproaches bold : But chief ho gloried with licentious stylo To lash the great, and monarchs t>o rovilo. Long had he lived the scorn of every Qreek,

Vext when he spoke, yet still they heard him speak. T|ill Odysseus took a hand ; when, 10, a swift and summary change. Here we may leave the balanced couplets of Pope for the rugged lines in which Chapman—as Keats says of him—"speaks out loud and clear" :

Cease, vain fool, to vent thy railing vein On kings thus, though it serve thee -well; nor think thou canst restrain. With that thy railing faculty, their wills in least degree. . . . This said, his insolence Ho settled with his sceptre; struck his back and shoulders so That bloody wales rose. He shrunk round, and from his eyes did flow Moist tears, and, looking filthily, ho sate, feared, smarted, dried His blubbered cheeks. . . . This simple elementary justice is no longer possible. Horsewhipped, or even punished by law, the British Thersites would straightway pose as a martyr, and begin to thrive upon it. The most we can do with him, and the best, is to put him in the pillory of the press and lift him high—an object of scorn to the universal British world.

The Gaekwar of Baroda, who has endeared himself to Mr Keir Hardie by insulting the King (as was supposed), appears to have explained himself away. He intended no insult to the King. Any oddity of behaviour when doing homage for his Gaekwarship was due to "nervousness." Likely enough. The Gaekwar is an old man, as age is reckoned in India. Instead of backing out from, the presence according to rule, he turned round and walked away. And if suddenly he had squatted on his haunches, the King would merely have smiled. Breaches of decorum as ludicrous are not unknown at Court functions in London. And at a vice-regal levee in Dunedin I have seen a respected citizen when his name was read out walk hurriedly past the dais, staring in front of him, and disregarding the Governor's outstretched hand. Such things will happen. Less than other Indian princes can the Gaekwar of Baroda be supposed to have grievances against the British Government, for it was the British Government that put him on the throne. A series of palace poisonings, including in their scope the British Resident, made it necessary to depose the previous Gaekwar ; whereupon the present man, being a relative, was fished out of obscurity and set up in his place. That was in 1875, and ev-sr since the props of his throne have been British authority and subsidiary British troops. This is what Mr Keir Hardie calls "seeing his country in the dust." i

Benegade demagogues of the Keir Hardie type, what really would they be at? They would break with the thousand Vear3 of British history, dismiss the monarchy, the army, the navy, and set up a Socialist Fools' Paradise to be promptly taken charge of by Germany. Or if we may suppose Germany unable, because herself in the throes of a Keir Hardio regeneration, they w'ould develop in their own despite a Cromwell to whip them back into reason and elementary common sense. Give it time, the wheel inevitably comes full circle, always has done, always will do. In Egypt, the Keir Hardie schemo of things would put back the fellaheen into the state of privilege they enjoyed before the British occupation, "if the liability to be indiscriminately robbed and flogged can be called a privilege," says Lord Cromer; —"the Egyptian fellah was flayed alive by greedy Pashas and tyrannical Sheikhs," their chief instrument of government the courbash, a strip of hippopotamus hide tapering at the end. India, now trodden under "the foot of the oppressor"-—Kin? George V, crowned Emperor at Delhi—Mr Keir Hardie would liberate and raise from the dust by restoring to power the Tippoo Saibs and Hyder Alis, who, in days gone by, spread everywhere devastation and terror. It is evidence of a marvellous stability in British affairs that we are able to let this malignant crank go at large and talk as he chooses.

Dear " Civis," —The enclosed clipping is from the Banner of Israel. Would you please read it; then, I think, you will not write in such a sneering, sceptical manner as you did a few weeks ago Surely Archdeacon Wilborforco nnd Dean Stanley are no fools, and know what they are talking about. Neither of them is either "silly " or " farcical," nor thinks the British-Israel theory "abject nonsense."—A Constant Reader of the Times and Passing Notes.

Archdeacon Wilberforce, of Westminster, Chaplain of the House of Commons, recently told a London congregation that the stone forming the seat of Edward the First's coronation chair in Westminster Abbey was the stone on which Jacob, when running away from homo and camping in the desert, laid his scapegrace head, thereby consecrating it to be (mirabile dictu) the Foundation Stone of the British Empire. Sought out and recovered in later years by Jacob and his sons, this stone accompanied the family to Egypt; a century or two later, refusing to be left behind in the house of bondage, it " followed" the escaping Israelites during their wilderness wanderings toward Canaan, and was the ''rock" that Moses 6truck for water. The Archdeacon is able to discern "a big cleft in the back," from which the water gushed out. When in later centuries the Jews were carried captive to Babylon, which is due east, they were obliged, it would seem, to leave behind this inconvenient article of luggage; but the Prophet Jeremiah, setting out due west, conveyed the stone, and with it the "Crown Princess of Judah," to Ireland, where the "Lost Ten Tribes" had already arrived, and there he married the lady to "the King of the tribe of Dan in the north of Ireland"; —("Dan" is very much an Irish name to the present day). From Ireland the stone flitted to Scotland, and from Scotland was smuggled south to

Westminster by Edward I, whom, on this and other grounds, the Scottish people justly execrate. At Westminster Jacob's stone is the Coronation Stone —the veritable hub of the British Empire. The other week, noting this romance, I hinted mildly that archdeacons had no patent of infallibility, and further said:

Two archaxilogists to whom a London editor submitted tho story, dismissed it lightly. "Farcical " was the comment of tho one, " Silly " that of the other. And I may add on my own that Professor E. B. Tylor, an Oxford authority, summing up Anglo-Israelism from the point of view of ethnology, anthropology> chronology, and other 'ologies concerned, damns it neatly as "abject nonsense." Nevertheless my correspondent above, being " a constant reader of Passing Notes," and writing a feminine hand, must in courtesy be allowed her say. As a mark of sympathy I have corrected her spelling—(she spells "sneering" with an a, and "sceptical" without a t). And in exchange for " The Banner of Israel," I present her with something better worth reading—an article on " Anglo-Israelism " in Chambers's Cyclbpa?dia. She will rind a copy in the Public Library.

Under the heading "Blue Blood at St. Clair," a correspondent scud's me an impossible half-column on what he calls the "high jinks," at that popular resort last Sunday morning; in other words, on the surf-bathing practised there. The writer grows funny about "shirt tails flapping in the wind" ; as for the "blue blood" of his title, it is an allusion to varicoso veins, exhibited by some of the bathers when displaying their bare legs. Willing though I be to foster native humour, I have no use for it in this form. As it chances, another correspondent has something to 3ay about St. Clair and surfbathing.

Dear " Civis," —May I bo permitted a word about the present surf-bathing craze? My experience of sea-bathinjr is lengthy and varied. I have bathed from a ship's side in the open ocean and on many beaches. Twice I have fallen overboard from boats and once was 'knocked off a wharf. Also I can boast of an interesting interview with a shark, and a narrow escape. It was in Australian waters, at an unfenced bathing house with a batten stage running out at right angles, and T was bathing alone in the early morning. I had just come out, and was flinging the towel over my wet shoulders, when, 10, a marine torpedo flashed along. a :b<ig, big shark. To and fro ho turned about, nosing like a dog. It was high tide, just la-pping the battens. I ran out to look, when the brute, swimming underneath, slapped the water over mo with his tail. Fact. I assure vou. Well, knowing something about it, I should be shy of surf-bathing at St. Clair. Tho protected bath at the south end is of course right enough; though I believe a shark did once get over the wall and had to be extirpated within the enclosure. But alonn- the open beach there is often a dangerous undertow; I hear mention also of quicksands. And not so very long ago a man bathing on tihe Oamaru beach had his arm taken off by a shark.—Old Hand.

I publish this caution for what it may ba worth. Certainly there have been serious accidents, and discretion is-the better part. In surf-bathing as a recreation for young and old, the wise and the unwise, and for both sexes, there is needed what you need in taking a wife and in eating a, sausage —perfect confidence. It shouldn't be practised where the conditions seem to postulate an understanding with the coroner. Civis.