PASSING NOTES.

Otago Witness, Issue 3040, 19 June 1912, Page 11

PASSING NOTES.

(From Saturday's Diily Time*)

"A decoy to lead the farmers into the socialistic fold," is Mr John MacGiegor's estimate of the Hon. Thomas Mackenzie, his place and function. A decoy duck! Well, it must be admitted that there is a good deal of the quack about him. And the Mackenzie bid for the agricultural vote may be translated " ducky, ducky, ducky, come and be killed." At variance with this, or possibly in subtle agreement, is a pronouncement by Mr Fowlds : " Tom Mackenzie is just as big a Tory as there is in the "country." j Under the surface, a decoy may of course be anything .whatever. If compelled to read the two definitions together—a Tory, and a socialistic decoy—we must suppose a scheme within a scheme, and in the,lowest deep a lower deep. Yet, as everybody knows, Mr Mackenzie is an honourable man. Sir Joseph Ward is an honourable man. So are they all, all honourable men. They are not card sharpers and thimble riggers. It is a pity they make so unfortunate an impression. In resigning his Premiership Sir Joseph Ward kept the word of promise to our ear, yet now may be planning to break it to our hope. He t*>k the Empire Trade Commissionership as Richard 111 took the Lady Anne : I'll have her, but I will not keep her long. Accordingly he has flung it up again. The High CommissioneTship i** indecently kept ooen (a port under the lee) for one or other to slip into as chance, exigency, interest, may decide. Yes, they are honourable men, but they affect us disagreeably. The Hon. George Laurenson affects us much the same, and also otherwise. As a Minister of tie Crown he is the fly in amber. Pretty! in amber to observe the forms Of hairs, or straws, or dirt, or grubs, or worms! The things, wc know, are neither rich nor rare, But wonder how the devil they got there. Respect for literature and for Alexander Pope forbids my substituting "the dickens" for "the' devil." The line as it is must stand. Perhaps it will make things right to say with conviction tliat after hearing Mr Laurenson's Dunedin speech we do meet certainly wonder how the dickens Mr Laurenson got there. His childish notions about the newspaper pTese are of an incredible absurdity in a grown man. The familiarity and vulgarity of has references to his colleagues and his patrons, the "Dicks" and the " Joes," their prehistoric condition and occupations, can only be hinted at in this chaste column. If I talked in the same way (which is inconceivable) I should expect that the Government would make a Star Chamber matter of it, hauling me to the bar of the House and consigning me to dungeon cell. Nor dare I rebuke as it merits Mr Laurenson's impertinence in wanting to know what Dunedin meant by electing representatives of whom he, Mr Laurenson, could" not approve. That too must pass. But there is one fact connected with tho visit of this egregious Minister to Otago that may be permitted to speak for itself; I glean it from the sympathetic columns of the Alexandra Herald : The Hon. Mr Laurenson watj one of the congregation at th<» Presbyterian Church on Sun lay evening fcw?t- Mr Laurenson is a strong sympathiser with all institutions that go for tbs uplifting of humanity and does not undervalue the power for good that tha church can be. How gracious! The Presbyterian Church is greatly obliged to him. There is, I see, another incident chronicled by the same friendly observer, and I was nearly overlooking it : Mir Laurenson not only preaches doing, but practises it as well. He bought from Howden and Moncrieff's nursery two oases of their fine apples in order to show the people of Wellington what this district can produce in the way of luscious fruit. Considering the importance of the event, I suggest that the cost of the two cases of apples purchased by Mr Laurenson be placed upon the Estimates. Spiritism—or Spiritualism, if the name

is preferred in that form —has been looking up of late. So little is heard of it that I had supposed it supplanted by Theceophy. But it „ was quite alive in an Old Bailey case the other day. A solicitor named Syms testified that he had posted a number of £5 notes to spirits in the other world for the purpose of ''investing in rubber." There was a "postman of the spirit world," one Laurent, a Frenchman, dead in 1793; witness wrote to him as "my dear postman.'' Asked why Laurent should be a postman in the spirit world, Syms replied :—"Because he was a chemist in life, and would be able to dematerialise letters from the ordinary world to the spirit world." Another spirit engaged in the rubber transaction, "Dr W°" had arranged to meet Syms at the banker'6; "he was to materialise there; it is not a very uncommon phenomenon." The lawyer shaking his head, Syms remarked smilingly :—"You have not read Sir William Crookes's book, Mr Bodkin. He has there materialisation in full." It was explained that the £5 notes, and also sovereigns, were sent to the spirit world through Mrs So—and —So, the medium. Naturally! Mr Syms's statement that " there is no difficulty in? dematorialising sovereigns" was* promptly caught up by the Recorder—" No; I can quite understand that. I can understand money melting away.'-'—(Laughter.) Mr Bodkin: How do you do it? Supposing you left out a sovereign on your table, would it become dematerialised? Syms: It has been done. Mr Bodkin: The only evidence being that it is not there in the morning?—Yes, that is the only evidence. It turned out before the case ended, that Syms was more knave than fool. But that detail counts for little. Knave or fool, or both, he was bound to be. tSpiritism, whatever modicum of truth there may be in it. is mainly a record of gaping credulity and rank imposture. I am prepared to admit the modicum of truth, or at least the possibility of it. The Society of Psychical Research troes as far as this, but no farther. After searching and resenrobing for years and years the S.P.R. defined its position and attitude in n recent Presidential address by Mr Andrew Lang : The eociety, as such, has no views, no beliefs, no hypotheses, except, perhaps, the opinion that there is an open field for inquiry; that not all the faculties and potentialities of man have been studied and explained, up to date, in terms of nerve and brain. Every intelligent man will be content to eay ditto; it would seriously compromise his intelligence to say more. All the same, when spiritists and ibeosophists proclaim their faith in the inherently impossible and incredible I admire and envy. In a sneaking way, of coarse, —hardly daring to confess it; yet thinking how pleasant it would be to be able to believe at will. There are so many things in which I should like to believe, and can't. Not merely the romantic fictions of the poets—the Siege of Troy, the wanderings of Odysseus, Aiaddin and his Lamp, Arthur and his Table Round, Camelot and Lyonesse, Oberon and ritania, and Magic casements opening on the foam Of perilous seas in faery lands forlorn; —not merely do these far-away things of dream and fantasy lie beyond my faith, but also things of to-day and of the world we live in. For example, the political transparency of Sir Joseph Ward at the present juncture, —that we see him through and through, that we penetrate his motives, that we understand precisely what he wants and how ho means to get it. .Horace's Jew Apella might believe this, sed non ego. I should dearly like to believe it, but am stuck up by a total incapacity. To be able to believe a thing for the delightfully insufficient reason that you want to believe it —for that reason strictly and solely, and for no other reason—you. should be a epiritist or a theoeophist. Just at this time a number of estimable Persons—Mrs Besant at the head of tbeui, New Zealand citizens (a few) at the tail — believe that a Great Teacher is about to appear, Buddha, to wit, re-incarnated. Ground for this belief they have none. of .evidence justifying it not a shred. Where do they find it ? They find it where the German found the camel. An Englishman, a Frenchman, and a German were severally commissioned to write the natural history of the camel. The Englishman departed for the East; the French- | man strolled out to- the Paris Zoo; -the j German shut himself up with beer and tobacco to evolve the primary idea of a camel from the depths of Ins moral consciousness. Out of a similar abyss of nothingness lias been evolved the idea of a coming Great Teacher. Miss Hunt, of Christchuich, organising secretary of the Order of the Star in the East, lecturing in Dunedin, is reported thus: No ono has said who He will be, but a great number of us believe that cur head, Alcyone, is at the present day what Jesus was in th© past. Jesus, we are told, was the disciple who prepared the body for Christ when He came before, and Christ took the body of Jesus and taught for three years. Manv think to-day that this Indian boy, Alcyone, is the one whose body is being- prepared for the Christ. This irreverent nonsense, based upon nothing, "a great number of us believe," says Miss Hunt. They relieve because they want to believe There is nothing more in it than that; —"Stat pro ratione voluntas !''—the wish to believe is the believer's sole warrant for believing. Dear " Civib,"—There is much that is disheartening in the present condition of British affairs —class embittered against class, and self-seeking the inspiration on both sides. As a set-off, I think the fact worth noting that at the end of April the total of the va-ri-ous "Titanic" relief funds had reached £310,000. This, it is true, included

the Mayor of New York's fund, £22,000; but the British lists were not closed, and the total has no doubt since gone higher. I take these figures from the Westminster Gazette of April 30. On the game page of the same newspaper the Church Missionary Society—one of many such societies that would be reporting at the annua) May meetings — reports an income of £400,674 —a record, the last £BOOO, to meet a deficit, subscribed witl in a week. May we not Bay, spite of all. There's Life in the Old Land Yet? We may. I approve the sentiment and entirely agree. We shall not require, let us hope, that chastening and purifying war which a Japanese adviser prescribes as the one cure for our internal maladies. The pain and grief and loss entailed by the great Atlantic tragedy seems all the chastisement we have any uee for at the present, and must have tended to draw the nation together. Confidence in the immediate future would be easier if Mr Ben Tilletfc were sent to share the durance vile of Mr Tom Mann

Mr Filson Young, a London journalist of distinction, protasts against " the story of Captain Smith shouting through his megaphone 'Be British.' " It is obviously a lie, he says, presumably the invention of an American reporter. There are three reasons why it must be a lie. First, because it is entirely outside the character of Captain Smith that he should make dramatic exhortations: secondly, because if he had, he would have had more tact than to invite the Americans and Jews, who were the most conspicuous people on deck at the last, to bo of any nationality other than their own; thirdly, and most finally, because no Englishman would ever dream of using the word " British " in 'the sense in which the captain is alleged to have used it. Its use as an adjective donohing courage is purely American. One can understand an Englishman saying, if the occasion arose. "Bo men," or "Behave like Englishmen"; but "Be British," no. We may be sure the words never passed the captain's lips The desecrating absurdities perpetrated by " the American reporter " would fill columns It is impossible to quote them; the subject is too grave. Nor is it possible to quote the amazing cantrips of Mr Senator Smith. I give a single specimen, the latest to hand : Senator Smith said that he had received scores of telegrams from relatives of the drowned, urging that divers should be sent by the Government to explore the ship. He asked the witness if he did not think that every sea-going vessel should be fitted with a buoy attached to a long cable, which, in case of the ship sinking, would mark the spot. Captain Moore did not believe that such an idea would be practicable. It was an unhappy mischance, that placed at the head of the American Committee of Inquiry this grotesque ignoramus. Civis.