HERE AND THERE.

Otago Witness, Issue 3111, 29 October 1913, Page 77

HERE AND THERE.

—Temperance Drinks.—

Many profess to take no alcohol, believing that it is a poison, which is quite tme. Others take alcoholic drinks as a pleasant stimulus, well knowing that many things add to one’s happiness that, strictly speaking, are not good for them. But there are facts concerning alcohol that deserve to be better known. Two per cent, of alcohol is allowed in so-called “temperance drinks.” It appears that one-fourth of those sampled in Britain by the analysts last year revealed an excess. Certain ginger beers contain 11 per cent. When one considers that regulation beer contains from 3 to 6 per cent, of the poison, English temperance friends seem to be having a fairly merry time. Further, under recent English legislation, alcoholic strength is not guaranteed by publicans. So that we get on the one hand windy and washy beers, and on the other “temperance drinks” that contain more alcohol than any normal person can stand. The matter is a serious one, viewed from either standpoint. The total abstainer should be protected, and the man who wants real beer should be able to get it. At present, the state of things is highly immoral. In Germany beer is inspected rigorously and continually • And woe to those who try to poison the Kaiser’s subjects. Here one is not safe unless one drinks certain special brands of liqilor, or of prepared natural waters. —Why Men Don’t Marry.— “Statistics published by the Equitable Life Assurance Society,” telegraphs The Times New York correspondent, “ show there are 17,000,000 unmarried persons in the United States, and that 39 of every 100 male adults are unmarried.” The inference drawn by compilers of these statistics is that an enormous number of men simply lack the moral fibre and courage to marry and to take a man’s ' part in human affairs. The statisticians remark : “While the army of single men are lavishing their earnings and affections upon themselves, and many of them are developing extravagant and often vicious habits — an existence which they prefer to orderly economical married life—another great army of young women are forced to toil in factories and business houses for the necessities of life. Mrs Anna Dowling, a leading New York editress, says that her observation of New York forces her to the conclusion that women will not marry because thev do not want the bother of having a man around all the time. Those girls who refrain from marrying because they are comfortable in business life are quoted in New York as 30 per cent, of the city’s unmarried women —Squandered a Fortune. — The career of a Russian, Vladimir Njedoohin, who dissipated a fortune in a year and is now a crossing-sweeper, is told in the Wiener Journal, Vienna. He was determined to live either at the top or at the bottom of the ladder. Unaccustomed to wealth, he unexpectedly inherited £62,500 from his mother a year ago. He began to Jive in the most ex- ■ pensive manner in St. Petersburg, keeping a yacht and racehorses. He gave the finest entertainments to his friends, in the course of which mirrors in the restaurants were frequently broken through the throwing of champagne bottles and glasses, but he cheerfully paid the bill. Last month, discovering that he had come to the end of his money, he invited all his friends to a fete in an island, whither they were taken in his yacht. The day was passed in r.-velry. When the last visitor had been landed on the way home, Njedoehin sank his yacht so that no one should use it after him. He then applied to the municipality of St. Petersburg for a job as crossing-sweeper at £3 a month, and got it. The Dunboyne Peerage.— The Daily Telegraph recalls the strange storv of the peerage of the late Lord Dunboyne. The title was forfeited in the eighteenth century, the holder bavin*; shown fidelity to the cause of the Stuarts, and in 1785 it fell to the Catholic Bishop of Cork. The bishop, anxious to preserve the title (then held by courtesy only) appealed to Pope Clement XIII for a dispen•sation to enable him to resign his episcopal office and to marry. The Pope replied bv a stern refusal, whereupon the bishop recanted the doctrines of Catholicism in the parish church of Clonmel, and shortly thereafter married a young lady, a cousin of his own, daughter of Theobald Butler, of Wilford, Tipperary. But there was no issue of the marriage, and a few days before his decease, in 1800, the twelfth Baron Dunboyne, as he was called, professed repentance, and was again received into the Catholic Church. His widow survived him 60 years, and the title descended to his cousin (grandfather of the peer whose deatii took place so recently). The Loom of Empire.— “It is happily becoming much more the custom for people in society to go out of their way to be civil to Antipodeans,” writes Bishop Frqdsham In the Post. “ This is chiefly duo to a sincere desire to draw together the threads of humanity into the loom of Empire. It is also due to an equally sincere wish to make a- return for the warm welcomes many have received during their travels. It falls out, therefore, that some Antipodeans, among others, are invited to social functions to which they would probably never receive the entree but for the fact of their residence outside England. This is excellent. but the ‘ free and easy ’ way of conducting such social functions does not a little to destroy the excellent purpose which is their raison d’etre. After the guests have been received, and have shaken hands with their host and hostess, generally they are left to wander about like lost souls, This state of affairs is no hardship to ‘ society,’ who chatter together in contentment, but a more punctilious regard to ceremony would , have shown far more real cordiality to strangers.”

What America Spends on Music.

If expenditure of money is any gauge, America can certainly claim the credit of being a musical country. According to a carefully-compiled estimate by Mr John P. Freund, published in Musical America, the United States spends no less than £120,000,000 on music every year. This is three times as much as the same country spends on its army and navy, ■while “ musical Germany,” it is pointed out, spends ten times as much on its army and navy as on its music. In the American total, church music accounts for £10,000,000 a year. The sale of pianos reaches £27,000,000. of organs £2,ot>u,ooo, of gramophones and records £13,000,000, and of sheet music and music books £2,100,000. Mr Freund adds that from 70 to 75 per cent, of the total is spent by women.