PASSING NOTES.

Otago Witness, Issue 3338, 6 March 1918, Page 3

PASSING NOTES.

(From Saturday's Daily Times.) All customary forms and formulas for expressing bedlamite confusion being exhausted, we may now sum up Russian affairs simply and comprehensively as Devil's Delight, and Satan's Invisible World Displayed. In principle that tells everything; details are for, the cables. Logic and the fitness of things are. in this conclusion; poetical justice—more accurate than any justice doled out from human tribunal*—is satisfied., Given the factors —ignorance, anarchy, class hatred, natural human cupidity—and the result was sure; no process in the laboratory surer. Our home-grown Bolsheviks, given their chance, would land New Zealand precisely where Jtvussia is. We grow weary of harking back to the drench Revolution; yet after all the French Revolution is our nearest historical and our surest. Robespierre began as the Bolsheviks began,—in sentimental humanitarianism and protests against capital punishment. And the Bolsheviks are ending as Robespierre ended, —in civil war and reciprocal throat cutting. Both held much talk of peace among men. "Peace? 0 Philosophe-Sentimentalism, what hast thou to do with peace, when thy mother's name is Jezebel? Foul Product of still fouler Corruption, thou with the corruption art doomed !'• Thomas Carlyle, of course; Carlylese is spotted at once. His subject is Revolutionary France; but in the same words he might have written prophetically of Russia.

It may be, as the Wellington correspondent of the Daily Times says, that the big vote for Mr Holland—2s66 against the winning candidate's 2986—does not indicate '' the growing strength of Bolshevik sentiment in Wellington North." Let us hope so. Mr Holland received the distinguished support of the Hon. J. T. Paul, also of Mr A. Walker (member for Dunedin North, a silent member, not to say a dumb dog, if anybody cares to know). No one yet has suggested that Mr Paul and Mr Walker are Bolsheviks. Neither of them is a voter in Wellington North. Their intervention, like the firstlieutenant's disciplinary intrusions into Mr Midshipman Easy's affairs, is "all zeal." So with the hooligans, male and female,

who howled and hooted during the Premier's speech, and Sir Joseph Ward's speecn, and Mr Luke's speech, and the ■chairman's speech or speeches, in the Wellington Town Hall the Other night;— it was all zeal. Zeal for Mr Holland, whose principles are of such a nature as to put him on bad terms with the National Anthem. . Sing or play " God Save the King," and the British Bolshevik claps on his hat or squats on his disloyal haunches. Questions put at Mr Holland's election meetings suggested that he himself was of that type. I do not say. Mr Holland may not bo a British Bolshevik. But there is a good deal of incipient Bolshevism lying about wherever Mr Holland and his zealots chance to be.

At a "Food Economy" mass meeting in Trafalgar Square, London: " I come garbed in cassock and biretta," said Father Vaughan, "to show that, as a priest, I am an Englishman still, and no man will stand between me and my King, my country, and my flag." I take off my hat to Father Vaughan. From this type of priest no Protestant would withhold the hand of For what reason, except cussedness, our New Zealand priestly Fathers refuse to take this tone and follow this example does not appear. They have a grievance about education; —so also have the Presbyterians, so also the Methodists; both are starting, or talk of starting, sectarian schools in rivalry with the schools of the State. But none the less do Presbyterians and Methodists remain loyal to the King, the Flag, the Empire, and the righteous cause for which the Empire i 3 well nighin death throes. And both Presbyterians and Methodists are nearer in spirit to Father Vaughan than are some of Father Vaughan's co-religionists out here. At the Trafalgar Square meeting he went on to say:—"'What can I do to fight the grandest crusade in the storv of life ?' each man must ask himself. 'What can I do to keep the flag flying, not only over Jerusalem, but over the whole Christian world?'" Even at this distance let the appeal come home.

The composer of the following Hymn of Hate, a Dunedin man, sets his name to it, unashamed. I am a Dunedin man myself, but a merciful man. none the less; hence, in the spirit of mercy, limit this preacher of ill-will to anonymity. Dear "Civis," —In your Notes of 23rd inst. you say: "At his Limehouse stage Lloyd George was a malevolent portent to me, personally, an abhorrence.". Then Jesus Christ must also bo an "abhorrence" to you, for Ho would have delivered a hundred times more Radical speeoh than any speech Lloyd George ever delivered. Here are the awful facts — 1. For centuries the British people have been deprived of about half their earnings in rent paid to their landlords —economic rent, rent paid for the bare land. 2. At the samo time the people have ~ been divorced from the land, and have thus been deprived of economio freedom —the greatest loss of all. Lloyd George manfully denounced this gigantic iniquity. If you . support the .iniquity, for God'a sake don't profess to be a Christian. Can any man support such terrible iniquity and not bo a son of hell? I challenge you on the point. But it has been most determinedly supported for centuries by parliaments, by churches, and by the pre«s —to their everlasting shame, P.S.—I am not a Sinn Feiner, nor am I a Papist, nor am I a Pacifist. Quite the reverse. I am for the war. and for nothing else at present ; but when a man talks of Lioyd George as an "abhorrence" There Is measureless contempt in this sudden breaking off. It will help the effect if, with the learned, we call it an aposiopesis. I make the writer a present of this handsome word, and hope it will be a comfort to him. Clearly, however, he is of the raw

material from which the Bolshevik ia made. Rent, being a "gigantic iniquity," and the landlord, being " a eon of hell," must be sent to their own place, the nether pit; which oonceded, you proceed by the Petrograd route, short ana easy, to riot, anarchy, and reign of terror. The Founder of Christianity, it ia to be noted, would deliver Limehouse speeches in this sense, given an opportunity. lam not so sure. What about the vineyard let out to husbandmen who, in the "end, were evicted for not paying the rent?— just as though the scene wero laid in Ireland in the bad old eviction days, before the tyrannous English, lavishing their millions, paid off the rent in one shot and for ever, making the peasant his own landlord. Bolshevism, as the final damnation of rent and the landlord, is little likely to find it3 V justification in Holy Writ, and just ae little likely to find it in Lloyd George. I grant that there, are two Lloyd Oceorges, possibly more. There is the Prime Minister of to-day, the preacher of unity, concentration, self-sacrifice, and all other national virtues needed that we may beat the Hun. But there is also the Limehous~e demagogue of an earlier day, the preacher of division and strife. Speaking for myself, I rejoice in the one and detest the other. But, if I remember well, not even at the Limehouse stage of his evolution was Lloyd George preaching down rent and the landlord, echoing his American namesake, the author of " Progress and Poverty." And it would not greatly surprise mankind to discover, that by this time he has' become a landlord himself.

From " The New Pepys," in Truth (Labouchere's Truth, not the Australian travesty), January 2:> —"At the club; where Colonell Brigstock. A mighty curious thing he mentions of the Muslims in Judaea, that they do conceive Genii. Allenby his name to be Allah-en-Bey, which is to say Allah, the Lord; and this is taken for a certain sign that Allenby is sent by God, and to punish the Turques for their selling their • realmo and their faith to the Germans." This has been improved on :—■ A strange tale is in circulation at clubs where men from the East foregather, says "A Club Member" in the Liverpool Post. It is said that, apart from General Allenby's unquestioned success, his name has had a remarkable effect* on the Turks. For Allenby is by them interpreted as Allah Nabi, which means the man from Allah, or the emissary of Allah. Therefore, his triumph has been accepted as a direct divine interposition. This was a stroke of luck which never entered the minds of the war authorities when they wisely gave him his command. Probably so. Next time, failing a general's name to suit the job, it may enter their minds to invent one. For overaweing "Muslims" something in " Bismillah " would b 8 useful, —there are plenty of Millers in the service. Also there are possibilities in "Eblis" and " Shaitan." But since the Bolsheviks, in conspiracy with the nether powers, have restored Trebizond to Islam, the Turks, alas, will conclude that Allah has come round again to their side.

" Civis," addressed as " Dear Sir or Madam," —a flattering ambiguity—is invited to attend a meeting of BritishIsraelites to be held in Dunedin "on Saturday, the Ist March, at 7.30 p.m." Saturday, as it chances, * is the 2nd of March • but that is a trifle, though significant, as trifles often are. A visionary who is loose about the almanack can hardly be trusted among the prophecies. To resume, however, —"Civis," "as a reasonable man or woman" (delightful!), "open to conviction" (charming!), "probably realising at once the importance of this wonderful truth " —that he (or she) is by race a British Israelite and doesn't know it—'' will attend, it is hoped, the next meeting of the local branch of the Imperial British Israel Association," to be held at such and such a place in Dunedin on " Saturday, the Ist March," as aforesaid. Possibly " Civis" will be there, in what sex-incarnation remains to be decided. Meanwhile I return thanks for a courteous invitation, and will address myself to the study of a British rlsraelite catechism sent along with it—" Questions for Anglo-Saxons." One thing I make out from this catechism at once—the British Israelite is not a Jew. Israelites and Jews are as diverse, it seems, as of old were Jews and Samaritans. Whether this fact—that 1 am not a Jew (or a Jewess) —is matter to rejoice and be glad over seems doubtful. Of decent Jews (and Jewesses) I know not a few and more than a few. And I also know a good many Israelites—British or other—that are not worth knowing. Use and wont, a law written or unwritten, assigns the back seats in a Dunedin tram car to smokers. But, overcrowding being a habit, it happens that sometimes an adventurous woman settles down in the sacrosanct back seat. This as an alternative to strap-hanging. Whereupon a "Hard case!" howl in the newspapers. Well, it is a hard case that a

smoker cannot deny himself for the spac« of a tram ride. And it is also a hard case if a woman must hang on to a strap whilst a man sits at his ease and smokes. The remedy either that women should take on smoking or that men in trans cars should leave it off. A writer in tho Westminster Gazette says that (uryierwar pressure) not only are women learning to smoke, but that their smoking is serious. The lady who used to produce from an elegant little case an elegant little cigarette, and take from it half a dozen whiffs before throwing it away, has given place to tho girl who enjoy 9 strong tobacco and seems to tako it in considerable quantities. I have seen her smoking on the upper deck of a" tram car, and twice, the other day, in a journey of less than twenty miles from a terminus, I found ray smokinsy : ■ carriage invaded by lady smokers. One ■ of the intruders even selected her cigarette from the familiar packet that I have heard described as tho "yellow peril," and lit it from an automatio lighter. ; - I have always said that women roayj smoke, if they %vill pay' the price. The price is an odo#ferous breath not precisely Cytherea's, and a possible old age as a crone with short black pipe in chim* ney corner. Cms./