PASSING NOTES.

Otago Witness, Issue 3495, 1 March 1921, Page 3

PASSING NOTES.

(From Saturday’s Daily Times.)

The Hon. C. J. Parr as Minister of Education addressing a country school: — “Go-slow” nations will always perish. New Zealanders and Australians will not hold these new countries long by a goslow six-hours-a-day policy. The hardworking nations will take our place. Nothing surer. Let Mr Parr as Minister of Education preach these pointed truths in every school he visits. Some faint echoes may penetrate the sealed council chambers of Labour, —may reach even to the wutersiders. Not to much profit, maybe. As the watersider sees things, the “hard-working nations”—if they exist, which he doubts —are worth only a waterside curse. He cares as little for the hard-working nations as for the ancient Romans whose fate Mr Parr held up for a warning: “Ancient Rome became lazy, luxurious, effete, and she fell. History may repeat itself in the Pacific Ocean. ” “All right!” says the labour malignant;—• “Let it repeat! Historv may go hang. The immediate thing for me is a six-hour day—mitigated by go-slow,—and a five-day week.” All the wisdom of the ages is as nothing in comparison with the utterances of an oracle such as Mr Walsh, engineer of strikes in New South Wales, who recently declared, “I never read the newspapers, and wouldn’t believe them if I did.” Here’s intelligence for you! Can the blind lead the blind? Shall they not both fall into the ditch? When the hard-working nations arrive to take our place in these new and empty lands—Jap, or heathen Chinese, or resuscitated and regenerated German—they will not find in the watersider a mild-eyed melancholy lotus-eater, rotting at ease on Lethe’s wharf. It will not be as in the Tennyson lay : In the afternoon they came unto a land In which it always eeemeth afternoon. That is what they would find if they waited long enough. But they are not going to wait. They will kill our commerce by offering the world better products at lower prices, and we shall be unable to buy because unable to sell. They will come in war ships; they will land with rifles and machine guns; they will find the labour agitator preaching “go-slow” and organising strikes; they will find the conscientious objector objecting to fight. Handing over both to the drill sergeant, they will go up to possess the good land of which we have proved ourselves unworthy. It would pay the

Government to get an American company to stage this consummation for the movies, and then get it shown gratis in every picture theatre. Failing this, which is a counsel of perfection, let the Minister of Education illuminate his school walls with Hogarth’s picture series, “ Industry and Idleness,” —twelve cartoons, in which two London apprentices, starting with equal chances, pursue each his several way, the one achieving the Lord Mayor’s coach and Guildhall, the other the hangman’s cart and Tyburn tree. Jury squaring,— is it possible that this nefarious art should flourish in a civilisation such as ours? Apparently yes. The Melbourne Argus writes thus : It is lamentable that jury squaring has grown to such proportions in Melbourne that the measures taken against the evil have not been successful. When publication of the names of jurymen was stopped it was thought that something had been done, but this did not prevent jurors being marked when sitting in the box, and directly approached during intervals in the hearing of a case. The jury system as the “ palladium of our liberties ” is a common boast. It is true that juries may be bullied from the bar, or flattered and cajoled; also that they may be misdirected from the bench. And there may be truth in the opinion of Mr Perker (see Bardell v. Pickwick, report by C. Dickens) that the finding of a jury may turn on what the foreman had for breakfast. “A contented, well-breakfasted juryman is a good thing to get hold of. Discontented or hungry jurymen always find for the plaintiff.” “ Bless my heart,” said Mr Pickwick, looking very blank; “what do they do that for?” “ Why, I don’t know,” replied Mr Perker, coolly; “ saves time I suppose. If it’s near dinner time, the foreman takes out his watch when the jury have retired, and says, ‘ Dear me, gentlemen, ten minutes to five. I declare! I dine at five.’ ‘So do I,’ says everybody else, _ except two men who ought to have dined at three, and seem half disposed to stand out in consequence. The foreman smiles and puts up his watch : —‘ Well, gentlemen, who do we say?—plaintiff or defendant, gentlemen? I rather think, so far as I am concerned, gentlemen,—l say, I rather think.—but don’t let that influence you —I rather think the plaintiff’s the man.’ Upon this, two or three other men are sure to say that they think so too; and then they get on very unanimously and comfortably. . . Spite of all, it is the glory of our judicial system that it gets twelve good men and true into a box, swears them, bids them hear and decide. Even the number twelve has mystic sanction. Says a seventeenth century eulogist : “ Jurymen are twelve, like as the prophets were twelve to foretell the truth; the apostles twelve to preach tlie truth; the spies twelve, sent into Canaan to seek and report the truth ; and the stones twelve that the heavenly Jerusalem is built on.” Who at this time of day would suppose that in the Australian courts there are members of the sacred twelve who can be bought by money? If it were Ireland, the happy Ireland of the Lever novels, jury-bribing would seem congenial to the soil. For defending Tim or Larry, in danger of his neck, friends club together to fee a big Dublin, lawyer. Big lawyer arrives, fee in prospect but unpaid. Nor is it paid. “ No,” say the friends, “ we spint it on the jury.” Mr H. G. Wells, although a man of genius, is no idol of mine. His novels, like those of Mr Arnold Bennett, have a disagreeable tang, and leave a bad taste in the mouth. A review of one of them by the Spectator was headed “ A Poisonous Book.” But this need not stand in the way of my quoting from his book about Russia an estimate of Marx,- —Karl Marx, who, according to Sir Robert Stout, is the subject of propaganda (delightful word, own brother in vagueness to proletariat) —the subject of propaganda in the classes of the Workers’ Educational Association,

It will be best if I write about Marx without any hypocritical deference. I have always regarded him as a Bore of the extremest sort. His vast unfinished work, Das Kapital, a cadence of wearisome volumes about such phantom unrealities as the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, a book for ever maundering away into tedious secondary discussions, impresses me as a monument of pretentious pedantry. But before I went to Russia on this last occasion I held no active hostility to Marx. I avoided his works, and when I encountered Marxists I disposed of them by asking them to tell me exactly what people constituted the proletariat. None of them knew. No Marxist knows. In Gorki’s flat I listened with attention while Bokaiev discussed with Shalyapin the fine question of whether in Russia there was a proletariat at all, distinguishable . from the peasants. As Bokaiev has been head of the Extraordinary Commission of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat in Petersburg, it was interesting to note the fine difficulties of the argument. Here let me break off to quote—apropos of this reference to Russian officials—Mr Wells’s account of an official attempt to hoodwink and befool him when visiting by arrangement a Bolshevist school. The special guide who was with us then began to question these children upon the subject of English literature and the writers thev liked most. One name dominated all others. My own. Such comparatively trivial figures as Milton, Dickens, Shakespeare ran about intermittently between the feet of that literary colossus. Being questioned further, these children produced the titles of perhaps a dozen of my books. I said I was completely satisfied by what I had seen and heard, that I wanted to see nothing more —for indeed what more could I possibly require?—and I left that school smiling with difficulty. Now let us get back to Karl Marx—and proletariat—and propaganda : The “proletarian” in the Marxist jargon is like the “producer” in the jargon of some political economists, who is supposed to be a creature absolutely distinct and different from the “ coip Sumer.” So the proletarian is a figure put Into flat opposition to something called capital. I find in large type outside the current number of the Plebs, ‘ ‘ The working class and the employing class have nothing in common.’’ The stuff is sheer nonsense. In Russia I must confess mv passive objection to Marx has changed to a very active hostility. Wherever we went we encountered busts, portraits, and statues of Marx. About two-thirds of the face of Marx is beard, a vast solemn woolly uneventful beard that must have made all normal exercise impossible. It is not the sort of beard that happens to a man, it is a beard cultivated, cherished, and thrust patriarchally upon the world. It is exactly like Das Kapital in its inane abundance, and the human part of the face looks over it owlishly as if it looked to see how the growth impressed mankind. I found the omnipresent images of that beard more and more irritating. A gnawing desire grew upon me to see Karl Marx shaved. I commend this for devotional reading in all classes of the Workers’ Educational Association. Belated, but otherwise laudable, is the movement to erect a Dunedin War Memorial. The committee to that end appointed have resolved on many things, amongst others this: “A great memorial meeting in the Drill Hall on the first night of the campaign, massed brass bands, short addresses by men who have seen service in Gallipoli, Palestine, and the other battle fronts. Two thanksgiving addresses by good speakers —one man and one woman.” And, in particular: The “ Hallelujah Chorus ” to be sung by the whole audience, led by the bands and the Choral Society. Up to this time the record performance of the Hallelujah Chorus was when Handel, after a successful season in Dublin, brought his “Messiah” oratorio to London, March 23, 1749. Let me quote from Grove : It is related that on this occasion the audience was exceedingly struck and affected by the music m general, but when that part of the Hallelujah Chorus began, “For the Lord God omnipotent reigneth ’’ they were so transported that they all, with the king, who was present, started to their feet, and remained standing till the chorus ended. The custom of rising during the performance of the Hallelujah Chorus originated from this incident. But the Dunedin War Memorial Committee is going to break all records. The Hallelujah Chorus is to be sung “ by the whole audience.” Nothing seems lacking but a jazz band, which, it is hoped, the audience will supply—tin kettles, glass bottles, castanets, mouth organs. And may I be there to see. Ct vis. From Otekaike a correspondent announces the discovery (in a Daily Times advertisement) of a rival to the Learned Pig—namely, a ram that can answer the telephone. Dear Givis, —Among the conveniences

of a bungalow house on a sheep station advertised for sale in the Otago Daily Times of the 19th inst. are “hot and cold water laid on from ram and connected by telephone.” How does it work? Evidently you ring up the ram, and the ram turns on hot or cold. Another country correspondent (Waimata this time) detects in a Daily Times advertisement ghastly suggestions of Burka an d Hare : Butchery business for sale. (In highly flourishing condition.) In one oi Canterbury’s best towns. Doing six bodies and forty sheep per week. Roger Riderhood, in “Our Mutual Friend,’* earning his bread in the sweat of hia brow, as he says, patrols the river Thames for bodies—“dem’d moist unpleasant bodies” in Mr Mantalini’s phrase—that he may appropriate any valuables there may; be about them. But the resurrectionists Burke and Hare, as every Edinburgh man remembers, operated in the interests of science. They sold their “bodies” to tha surgeons. “Waimate” would like to know whether this Canterbury butchery has any business relations with the Dunedin Medical School. One other correspondent may be squeezed into this nonsense paragraph : Wanted to know—The subject of the. following advertisement: . . . . this drink is a very wholesome and physical drink, having many excellent virtues, closes the orifice of the stomach, fortifies the health, helpeth digestion, quiokeneth the spirit, maketh the heart gladsome, is good against eye sores, coughs or colds, rhumes, consumption, headaches, dropsie, gout, scurvy, king’s evil, and many others. No,—it is not a patent medicine. “This drink” is “(he drink called coffee,” and the advertisement is from the “Public Advertiser” of 1657. Before it became a breakfast beverage coffee was a drug,— no common drug, but a panacea, a universal cure-all.