PASSING NOTES.

Otago Witness, Issue 3100, 13 August 1913, Page 11

PASSING NOTES.

(From -S iturday'a Daly I’imn.i

The country is glad to have Sir Joseph Ward again within its bounds; be is safer here, —safer in more wave than one Starring it on the London boards amongst other hereditary aristocrats at lev ecu. dinners, receptions; coruscating before tne British public as the “ giver of a Dreadnought,” he was in danger of forgetting the rock whence he was hewn and the hole of the pit from which he was digged. Viewed from this distance, he loomed so unnaturally big as to suggest au actual distention, fatty or gaseous, —“swoln vvit i wind,” as Milton writes. But nils well that ends well. The Return of the Native, ladies and gentlemen! whereat the country that owns him is glad and Mr Massey not sorry. Some term wm now be set to the larrikin politics of the Opposition, for one thing. For another, Sir Joseph must of necessity live up to his own stars and garters, 'the Red Fees will see to that. A right hon. baronet does not exist for purposes merely deco rative, and to improve the scenery. He exists to mark off the classes from the masses. In the approaching Day ot Armageddon Sir Joseph’s side has been predetermined for him. His future is in pawn to his past. Here interposes a correspondent whose forte is the frivolous : Dear “Civis,” —If in these non-Biblo-in-.Sehool days I remember aright, Joseph's brethren put him in the Bit as a prelude to his promotion by Pharaoh. Our Joseph appears to have climbed the ladder of success first, and to have been put in the Pit by Ids brethren of the “ Groat Liberal party ” as an afterthought. But his balloonlike tendency to go up in (ho world has reasserted itself. Whilst in England he took to aeroplaning. “ I never was nearer Heaven in my life,” ho is reported. Quito conceivably. Disregarding Dr Johnson’s dictum that the man who would make a pun would pick a pocket, I .should say that in Now /ea-. land our amateur aeroplanist was often a good deal nearer Ell. But his political Heaven is still in the future; Leave to High School Old Boys Speeches, prize funds, cups; Leave to dear James Allen Market “downs” and ‘'‘ups’ ! Let sweet B : «hop Cleary Fill (lie Daily Times; Let Adams cure “ the beery ” With the juice of limes! Till the seventh year, Massey and his millions; After that —no fear! Wo shall think in billions! The Budget, I hear, has “ no politics.” I wish I could believe it. This is a young and healthy country that needs' chietlv to be let alone. There are already laws enough to go on with. Government we must have—an administrative agency to borrow money and spend it, collect taxes, pay salaries,* carry to completion roads, railways, irrigation; vaccinate the population vi et armis in a smallpox scare, especially the anti-vaccinationists : —to do such things as these, and generally be a terror to evildoers and a praise to them that do well. In Utopia, which perhaps is another name for Heaven, there will - ’be government but no legislation. Short of Utopia, the next best thing would be the practice of that ancient Greek city which required a citizen who would propose a new law to appear in the market place with a rope round his neck wherewith to be hanged if his law were judged unnecessary. Seriously, it ought not to be assumed* that a civilised community incessantly needs new- legislation. It is the assumption underlying our whole political system; hence at Wellington the synagogue of salaried “legislators” who chiefly serve to illustrate the eternal truth that 'Satan finds somd mischief still for idle hands to do. If the Budget is barren of policies and politics, so much the better for the country, though perhaps so much the worse for the Opposition. As the American moralist remarked, nothing strains a kicker worse than to kick at nothing.

Spontaneous, unforced, exuberant, altogether delightful was the jubilating at the High School Jubilee —fun and frolic, seriousness and pathos, the grave and the

gay, all summed up in the bitter-sweet of coming back after years to

The schoolboy spot Wo ne’er forget, though there we be forgot.

There was & good deal of speeching, what of that? Nobody seemed one penny the 'worse. Virtually the audience made the speeches, and there is no better way of getting a speech made. Let the good will, sympathy, enthusiasm of the people on the floor make your speech for you, and they enjoy themselves, you enjoy yourself,' there' is enjoyment all round. The platform talk of the Old Boys was, as it ought to be, more boyish than old ; and if it contained any hackneyed poetic tags they didn’t get into the newspapers. I could have supplied a few myself; such for example as Oliver Wendell Holmes s piece “ The Boys,’’ written expressly one might say for the Otago High School Smoke Concert :

Has there any old fellow got mixed with the boys? If there has, turn him out without making a. noise! Hang the Almanac’s cheat and the Catalogue’s spite ! Old ’l ime is a liar! we’re twenty tonight !

We’ve a trick, wo young fellows, you may have been told, Of talking (in public) as if we were old That boy wo ca l “ Doctor,” and this we call “Judge”; It’s a neat little fiction.—of course it’s all fudge. That fellow’s the “ Speaker,” tHo one cn the right ; “Mr Mayor,” my young one, how are you to-night? That’s our “Member of Parliament,” say wo in chaff; t There’s the “ Reveron 1 ” What’s his name? —don’t make mo laugh! For continuation see “The Professor at the Breakfast Table.”

It was a happy thought in Christ’s College to send greetings, and it was imperative that both message and reply should he couched in nothing more modern than “ the lucid language of ancient,Rome,’’- — to use the Dunedin rector’s irony. Not for me is it to appraise the Latin sentence supplied to the Daily Times—a periodic of tea ’lines, lapidary style; —in the vernacular of Otago, “I wadna preshoom.” Nevertheless if you asked me, I should say it was uncommonly neat. Granted that in “ conccrtatoribas ” we have a phenomenon that might have made Quintilian stare and gasp, not to mention Cicero. But, limiting ourselves to the language of ancient Rome, how are we to °talk of football teams and cricket elevens? —what is the Latin for football and cricket? As neither Cicero nor Quintilian can tell us, we are left to invention. The High School boys and the Christ’s College boys when competing in athletics we call “ conccrtatores,” —a word which ;vt least the innovating Tacitus would not have disowned; and we say that their concertating is in both the winter game and the summer game, “in ludo cum hibenio turn aestivo,” —a happy turning. When presently we learn that the rivals hope to transmit the memory of their friendly contests to a remote posterity, we perceive that “traditari” is a linotype freak for “ tradituri,” and correct accordingly. For myself, I couldn’t sleep with that crumpled rose-leaf under me; removing it is an act of humanity.

Dear “Civis,” —The last census disclosed the fact that there were about 475,090 females in the dominion in 1911, and that about 270,000 of these were over 21 years of age Now, the dictionaries tell us that the word “ woman” means an fdult female, and yet, though we have 270,000 adult females somewhere in the dominion wc have no women. The good old Saxon word “ woman ” seems to have gone out of use and is displaced by that namby-pamby word “ lady.” In the days of chivalry “lady-love” and “ lady fair” were applied to high-born females whose love, and gloves, inspired the brave knights to chivalrous and heroic deeds; and there are occasions nowadays when th? word “lady” can be and is fittingly used. 1 have no wish to refer to class distinction or to level down or to level up, but the absurd and indiscriminate use of the word “ ladies” dors get on my nerves. The word “ gentlemen ” is not nearly so much abused. In tennis wo say men’s singles, men’s doubles, etc. And why, in the name of common sense, should wo not say women’s singles, etc?’ The same applies to golf—it is only ladies who can play,—women are tabooed. The railway authorities in this socalled democratic country set a silly example by labelling the waiting rooms a.nd lavatories for “ ladies” and “ gentlemen.” Surely in this case the primitive sex distinction is all that is required. In Kaiserdom they go straight to the point and, paint the Gorman equivalent for “men” and “women” on their doors. There are no ladies or gentlemen in the Bible or the Prayer Book We read and speak of the

“women of the Bible,” the “women of sacred history,” and how very absurd it would seem if the other word was used. Even the Queen-elect is only a mere woman when the Archbishop asks the King if ho will take “this woman to bo his wedded wife.” Of course, you know, I know, and we all know that there are times and places when it is meet and right to say “ladies and gentlemen,” no matter how mixed the assemblage may he. We should not like to hoar an M.C. calling out for women and men to take tneir partners, and the “ladies’ chain” in the dance sounds much nicer than “women’s chain.” It is first a matter of usage and custom, and I suppose I shall, in time, got reconciled to the fact that only “men” and “ladies” play golf and tennis, though at present it grits on my nerves.

I have no quarre] with the notions of this correspondent, or I should not allow him so much space. But he needs correcting on a point or two. He contrasts “the good old Saxon wor;I ‘woman’ ” with “that namby-pamby word ‘lady’ ’’; yet the one is just as much Saxon as the other.

Again : “There are no ladies and gentlemen in the Bible or the Prayer Book.’’ I won’t say for the Prayer Book, but he is wrong about the English Bible. For the mere pleasure of quoting some of the oldest and finest poetry in the world — older than Homer, probably, and every whit as fine—l give an example :

The mother of Sisora looked out at a window, and cried through the lattice, Why is his chariot so long in coming? whv tarry the wheels of his chariots?

tier wise ladies answered her, yea, she returned answer to herself.

Have they not sped? have they not divided the prey ; to every man a damsel or two; to Sisera a prey of divers colours, a prey of divers colours of needlework, of divers colours of needlework on both sides, meet for the necks of them that take the spoil?

It is impossible to get rid of honorific titles, descriptions, modes of address; the absurdity of the indiscriminate use may be left to speak for itself; e.g., the American “wash-lady” who looks after your collars and cuffs, and the London shop-walker (according to Punch); “Was this the gentleman that served you, Madam?” “No, I think it was a nobleman with a bald head.” At the London Savage Club recently, Mrs Alice Perrin, replying to the toast of “The Ladies,” said that she felt a difficulty. What was a lady ? They wore to d a lady was a woman who did not work with her hands. As a woman writer she repudiated the distinction. There were some people who said that one knew a lady by her pelticoate. Well, in these days they all know the answer of the school boy when asked who Salome was, “ Salome was a lady who dressed in beads and danced before liarrod’s. ”

One did not hoar of the talentcdvlady or the wicked lady, except, perhaps, the landlady. The only rule she could think of was that the one person one must always he careful to call a lady was the female who was most unlikely to be one.

A footnote may be useful here. Salome, in Richard Strauss's opera of that name, is the daughter of Herodias who danced before Herod. “Harrod’s” is a London variety More of the hugest and swellest, a superior Whitelcy’s. “To know a lady by her petticoats”—that is; by the “froufrou’’ or rustling when she moves; how contrived I don’t presume to say.

A correspondent, “Constant Reader,"’ sending me a print of an Academy picture —“San Sebastian, August, 1813,” by J. P. Beadle, R.B.A. —asks “Can you give, me any further information?” The question *s timely, for we are at the centenary of San Sebastian; tha.t is, of the tragic siege in which our hard-won glory cost us nearly 4000 men. San Sebastian, a Spanish coast-town lying under the Pyrenees where they reach the Bay of Biscay, is now a fashionable watering place," rival of the French Biarritz just on the other side the mountains. A hundred years ago this month it was a veritable inferno, spouting fire and ringed about with batteries raining shot and shell. After Vittoria, June 21, and whilst Wellington had the defeated French still on the run, General Graham, a fighting Scotchman of the Abercrombie type, old and tough and yet withal of a fiery impetuosity, was detached with 10,000 men to reduce this frontier fortress. He had done well elsewhere, winning Barossa against odds, and coming up to time in the great flank march which helped to win Vittoria: but sieging was not quite in his line. Graham’s early proceedings at San Sebastian were the proceedings of a bull at a gate. An assault prematurely delivered, July 23, issued in a bloody repulse, and it was not till August 31, and after much deadly work beneath the walls and at the breaches, that San Sebastian was ours. The print sent me shows the British stormers rushing for the breach, and has some explanatory letter press: —

The forlorn hope, escaping the action of the mine fired by the garrison, sped along the strand amidst a shower of grape and shells. The loader, Lieutenant Maguire, of the 4th Regiment, conspicuous from his long white plume, his fine figure and his swiftness, bounding far ahead of his men in all the pride of youthful strength and courage, fell dead at the foot of the great breach, and the stormers swept Like a dark surge over his body.

Later in the mouth San Sebastian must come up for mention again. Civxs.