PASSING NOTES.

Otago Witness, Issue 3495, 8 March 1921, Page 3

PASSING NOTES.

(From Saturday’s Daily Times.) The Duke of Connaught appears to have got through his Indian mission without any more serious contretemps than a certain amount of baboo insolence in dumb show. Shops were shut as the Duke passed; Mr Gandhi and the Gandhi following metaphorically rent their clothes and sat in dust and ashes. How many nations there are in India I do not know, but the millions are over three hundred, and of these millions the Bengalese, who shed no drop of blood for us in the Great War, and now incline to Mr Gandhi, are less than one-seventh. How (filings stand in India may be gleaned from a little anecdote communicated to a London paper by an Indian officer, Major-general Pilcher : Not long ago at a semi-official luncheon party in London a prominent Bengali gentleman said across the table to a Punjab chieftain of Pathan descent: “I wonder, Maior Sahib, why it is that you always take the part of the English against us?’’ The chieftain’s reply was: “I often wonder, too, why I do. It is probably because I have many friends among the English, but I am quite disinterested in doing so, for one thing is certain, and that is, that if it were not for the presence of the English in India every penny and every acre of land owned by you and yours would belong to me and mine within forty-eight hours.” It was to suit these unwarlike Bengalese, a minority of whom have been educated by us for clerkships and Government offices till they are too big for their boots, that the Secretary of State for India, Mr Montagu—si Jew, and a doctrinaire Jew—devised the Constitution which it was the business of the Duke of Connaught to set upon its ricketty legs. We now wait to see whether the Constitution will march. Dear “Givis,” —Can you tell me what the waterside strike is all'about? What do the watersiders want, and what do the shipowners refuse to give? After reading of the 9a bonus, the 3s bonus, the la an hour bonus, of extra pay being demanded for working coal that is “dirty,” and of refusal to handle coal that nas been declared “black,” bewilderment has settled down on me. Can you condense into a nutshell the demands of the watersiders ? Condense into a nutshell, forsooth! Nothing so nebulous can be condensed at all. Why he is striking the watersider himself doesn’t know; his wife doesn’t know; —and there are few things known to a watersider that his wife can’t get out

of him, if she tries. In Thursday’s Daily Times “a waterside worker’s wife” protests that she “cannot understand what this trouble is about,” and proposes to to seek more light by holding on the wharf “a stop-work meeting of waterside workers’ wives.” Admirable idea. If the waterside workers’ wives would adopt a stop-work policy for the duration of the strike, the strike would not endure another forty-eight hours. Simple souls, the Dunedin watersiders, if vou ask them, tell you that they are awaiting instructions from Wellington. Similarly interrogated, the Wellington watersiders, if candid, w-ould tell you that they are awaitino- instructions from Sydney. Principle of solidarity, you see (we like the big word) —solidarity of Labour; that over there and over here Labour is one, —one in foolishness, one in cussedness, one in wages out of pocket. I may be wrong in suggesting collusion between the well-paid Labour bosses on the Australian side and the well-Daid Labour bosses on the New Zealand side; if so, the mistake has fair excuse. So close a parallel of mulish obstinacy could hardly exist without a common understanding and a concerted arrangement. From Sydney, the native home of strikes, comes word of a novelty. A correspondent informs me that the Sydney dairymen have struck for a higher price per quart. And so Sydney has no enilk. Two remedies are possible—■ either that the dairymen should put more water in their milk and sell at the old prices, or that the Government should nationalise the whole dairying industry. Which is a happy thought;—for, indeed, dairying is precisely the one industry that ought to be nationalised. On a dairy farm things must be done at the tick. The dairy cow that would put up with go-slow, a five-day week, and stop-work meetings has yet to be Failing milk from the cow, Sydney may be driven to synthetic milk, product of the laboratory, supplied with gas and water from the Town Hall. The Sinn Feinery of letters to the editor signed “J. Robinson, St. Hilda,” is interesting in small doses; —not often does one meet with an authentic Sinn Feiner on this side of the world. There is one in this week’s Outlook—a ladv in plain hysterics, raving of “cynical treachery,” “unmasked brutality,” “frightfulness unchained” ;—“no woman or child can walk in town or country safe * from a random bullet from a Crown soldier’s gun; no girl is sure that she will not be dragged from her bed to see her brother shot by the blaze of his own rooftree” —this and worse the Outlook correspondent sees in visions and takes for reality. Poor lady ! She will share the distress of the Archbishop of Dublin, whose nerves are racked by military executions, especially by “the refined cruelty” of shooting Irish murderers in batches of two rather than in batches of six. It is indeed a painful thing to fulfil the Biblical precept: “ Whoso sheddeth man’s blood by man shall his blood be shed”—painful on both sides. In any land, in war or peace, murderers of the Irish type would be executed; and military executions are probably as merciful as any. J. Robinson’s nerves are doubtless as tender a 3 the Archbishop’s, but for the moment J. Robinson is elated by a sense of triumph. He writes to the Daily Times that “Civis” last week “failed to meet” his attempt in a previous letter to prove that Ireland is a nation; —in other words, that I passed him by in amused contempt, not consenting to bore readers of this column by ( too much J. Robinson. Quite otherwise, says he; — “Civis” was “cornered”; silence was “a tacit admission.” Why, oh why, did I “fail to meet” him? J. Robinson, in short, is the mouse in the fable—a fable that somehow has been left out of ZEsop. Which mouse, having slept next the whisky keg and inhaled at the spigot, came out into the open, prancing around in front of its hole and demanding, “Where ia that damned cat?”

Let Ireland be a nation seven times over, it would not follow that the Irish are at liberty to self-determine themselves out of the Empire. Any more than the Jew's, a people who, however scattered, are indubitably a nation. (“ The curse never fell upon our nation till now!” exclaims Shylock when his daughter runs away). It never occurred to Jews under the British flag to talk of Jewish selfdetermination. The term “nation” is of unlimited elasticity. In Aristophanes the frogs of the Acherusian lake are a nation, and, when Dionysus, the wine god, paddles across in Charon’s boat, lift up in protest their national note: This bold navigation Demands of our nation A grand demonstration Of croak! croak! croak! But limit there is and must be to selfdetermination—which blessed word we owe, I suppose, to the politically moribund President Wilson. After to-day it will be President Harding. . I should like to know what either of them would say to selfdetermination at the Philippines, or among the negroes of the Southern States. In New Zealand we are having sprung upon us self-determination in divorce'. Given time and patience, any married pair may divorce themselves. There are signs in many quarters, from the judicial bench downwards, of disquiet and disgust. Working* off a few oddments, I may notice “ B Sharp,” (Daily Times, Tuesday) who—“Civis” to the contrary notwithstanding—sees nothing wrong in the suggestion that at a War Memorial meeting the “Hallelujah Chorus” might be sung “by the whole audience.” No music is written in B Sharp; but a good deal is written in C Natural, which is the same thing. Taking a natural view, my friend will see that asking a Dunedin audience to sing one of Handel’s “ Hallelujahs ” (there are half a dozen) is only a little less absurd than asking them to sing a Beethoven sonata. This, spi®e of the fact that the Dunedin people are reckoned (ho sai’sj “the most musical in New Zealand. Queer things 1 are done at War Memorial meetings, it is true. Last Sunday at Invercargill, for instance. “ Those present ” having been assured by the Mayor that “ applause on the Sabbath might be excused under the circumstances,” a roll of honour is read: —Enlisted, so many; wounded, so many ; killed or died of sickness, so many ; “ (Applause).” A French newspaper in similar case might have the bracket “ (Murmures)” or “ (Sensation)’ ; but “ (Applause)” is bad, bad; —only a felonious attempt on the “ Hallelujah Chorus ” could be worse. Yet Invercargill is capped by Mornington, where, at St. Mary’s Hall, the unveiling of a roll of honour and the enumerating of the dead winds up with a dance,—--the Danse macabre, or Dance of Death, it should have been, a round infernal directed by Death himself, playing on a skeleton for violin and with a leg bone for bow, danced by the dead of all con ditions, kings and subjects, rich and poor, young and old. In this grim allegory, limned on the walls of churches and fro quently performed in public on holidays, the Middle Ages found great consolation, say the books. But I doubt whether the Mornington Macabrists ever heard of it. Last, for this week, comes from the backblocks an appeal to “ Dear Civis” on a cribbage problem: It is the last round of the hand; A has one card left, a 7; B two cards, a 9 and a 6; C one card, a 5. A plays his 7; B his 9; C his 5; —then, A having no card left, B plays his 6. Question: Is there a “run” of 5,6, 7? No cribbage expert am I, nor in so grave a matter would I rrly on my general omniscience. But I can quote the books: For a sequence or run the cards need not be played in order. It is sufficient if the last card played completes a sequence, np or down, in any order. But if a card not in sequence intervene, there is no run. Let mv backblocks enquirer read and per pend. In the example he gives the cards fall in the order 7,9, 5,6, and 9- breaks the sequence. Inference, no run. Civis.