PASSING NOTES.

Otago Witness, Issue 3522, 13 September 1921, Page 3

PASSING NOTES.

(From Saturday’s Daily Times) The key to the dilatory posturings of Sinn Fein, delaying settlement and meant for delay, is, of course, a belief that delay may serve its ends. The Imperial Government will not be the first to break truce, whatever the verbal provocation. And the tweaking of the Lloyd George nose might go on indefinitely ; not thereby would hostilities be precipitated. So thinks Sinn Fein. Meanwhile there is always a chance of some new concession, intrinsically minute, blit susceptible of exaggeration in appearance for the purpose of saving the Sinn I ein face. Suppose the Sinn Fein Thugs were recognised as a regular army and their inhuman Thuggeries as acts of war. We shall never say so; but we might leave it open to the murderers themselves to say so, if it is any comfort to them. Suppose again that the name ‘‘Republic” were conceded, —that Ireland should be a “Republic” subject to the King. What’s in a name ? A Republic may be under a President, why not under a King? These fancies, it may be, are flitting through the crazy Sinn Fein brain. It would harm nobody to humour them. The .British Empire might include the Commonwealth of Australia, the Dominions of Canada and New Zealand, the Union of South Africa, and the Republic o f Ireland, tailing off-—as Mr Massey has reminded us—with forty-three Crown Colonies. But Sinn Fein cunetations are tiring out universal mankind. For lie Valera and his crew nobody puts in a good word. Tn the vicinity of Dunedin certain mud volcanoes are in eruption in the Sinn Fein interest. Rut that is a nuisance to which we are of old time hardened. The periodic stumping of the country by Labour members of Parliament—by Mr Holland, this week in Otago, for trie—is always associated with a ghoulish resurrection of two honoured personalities, Ballanee and Seddon. According to Mr Holland, the Labour Party alone lias any property or right of possession in Ballanee and Seddon. The Liberal Party (so called) “was in no way the party of Ballanee and Seddon.” On the other hand, ’’the Labour Party came as the legitimate successors of Ballanee and Seddon” ; representing not only “all tile industrial organisations of the country,” but “the best of its womanhood, and the most progressive of its intellectuals"; —mark that! When Labour came into power it would not seek to administer the affairs of the country in a narrow class in-

terest, but it would seek to build a. super-structure cf industrial democracy on the foundation laid by Ballanee and Seddon in the days of a greater past. Pity that the two lay figures Mr Holland carries about with him as patrons of his entertainments are merely stuffing. Endowed with life, they would signalise their estimate of his disloyal heresies—concerning the flag, concerning nationality, concerning our military history, which he would excise from all school books—by beating him about the head. “When Labour came into power”;— what we are to expect on the happy day thus indicated Mr Holland explains with commendable frankness. The Labour Party had a clear-cut objective, and in that it was different from any other party. . . . Every plank in its platform was a steppingstone to that objective, which —they made no secret of it —meant socialism. Exactly! x\nd what socialism means we are to find out for ourselves. Russia?—• let us not speak of Russia! —though Russia is there, evident enough, background to his “objective,” goal of the “planks” and “stepping-stones” on which he would set our feet. But we may put the thing in another way: THE EARTHLY PARADISE. “In the afternoon they came unto a land In which it always seemed afternoon.” When yours is mine and mine is yours,— (Mine a minus, yours a plus)— Hail primitive equality! A last good-bye to fret and fuss! No rent, no bills, no duns, no boss; No hours to keep for work or play; Slack or go slow on any job; Work or knock off on any day. ' To eat and drink, to smoke, to 3leep ; ■ Let parsons preach and poets dream, [ Trying to go one better than The Lubberlantl we plot and scheme; They cannot! For it suits us well . This Lubberland, where what seems odd is That nobody owns anything, ' Yet everything is everybody’s. Your farm and stock, your #shop, your ■ stoM« Your bank account, —you lose the lot. * What matter, when you get it back ' In rations from the common pot ? 1 This Gospel spread and spread, until liarl Marx is taught in Sunday i Give us' the Earthly Paradise I Be it a Paradise of Fools. It is pleasant to read in the London Times of a possible reform in dancing. Not that the waltz, the fox-trot, the onestep, the tango will altogether lose their hold ; nor that the threatened invasion of the switch and the shimmy—whatever these may be —is altogether hopeless, sad to say. But there is a revival of English .Folk-dances, under the inspiration of an 1 English Folk-dance Society. The mere sight of these dances makes us want to dance, too. That is the radical difference between them and ’ the ballet. They are by amateurs for ’ amateurs, whereas the ballet demands eight years’ very highly specialised practice to achieve its fundamental position —the placing of the feet in _ a straight line with the heels joined, involving distortion of (he muscles of the whole leg. But the , country-dance—-whoso etymology, by the way, is as hotly disputed as the chanty’s- merely asks' of every limb that it shall perform its natural function. The head preserves the balance, the trunk gives momentum, the arms give impetus, and the legs support. In the morris ; the arms and legs allow themselves a few gestures and capers, but these are only incidental. The whole beauty > of both these dances resides in two things—in the swing and poise of the i whole body and in the teamwork, as > befits a people which has a passion for outdoor games and combined play. In fact, if one described them as an atnal [ gam of prisoner s base, and “crossing,” , and three-quarter-back play and skating, provided with a plot and brought , within tour walls, it would not be far wrong. It is because all these things are in our blood that we felt as if we couldn’t sit still, and wanted to jump up and follow the dancers over that

precarious plank on to the stage and take part in the glorious “Sellinger’s round.” “The moral is’’—continues this quasieditorial Times article—join the Folkdance Society, get into flannels for a threeweeks’ course at Stratford-on-Avon, or some other centre, learn how to walk and turn and swerve and leap—for the first time in your life, perhaps—and then make a great many other people happy (and yourself in their happiness) by introducing it into your parish, or school, or factory, or regiment, or ship—where it of right belongs.” The Dunedin Presbytery has just gone out of session, or I should commend this advice—about the parish schoolroom —to the favourable consideration of the reverend fathers and brethren. A grim story of old Edinburgh is revived by a book that I find reviewed in papers by this week’s mail—“ Burke and Hare. By William Roughead,”—four hundred pages, verbatim reports of the evidence, counsels’ addresses, the judge’s summing up; also many illustrations ; 25s 6d. Which is a high figure ; but the book will not lack buyers; every Edinburgh man will want to read it. Burke, of whom Hare was merely the tool, was a monster who murdered people—usually poor people, the poorest of the poor—that he might sell their bodies to the medical professors of Edinburgh University. Then, as now, Edinburgh was thronged by medical students; human bodies for dissection were in brisk demand; for any corpse brought to the dissecting rooms £lO cash was paid down, and no questions asked. An extraordinary state of things for a time no further back than the year 1828, one would say. Burke’s method was to clap a pitch plaster over the face of his victim; suffocation did the rest. When Burke was caught in the act the whole story came out. The public suddenly realised that poverty was not merely no protection against the knife of the murderer, but was a positive incitement, to murder. The rich were safe, but suddenly the poor had begun to go in deadly peril. The insignificance and misery which had or.ce sheltered them was gone. No one any longer could say that they were not worth killing. Even the most hideous and deformed persons were valuable if dead. Can we wonder at the panic created amongst the people of Edinburgh, a city where men had to wander through narrow, ill-lighted lanes, always, as it were, carrying about them ' that fatal £10? They could not hide their treasure away. it was they themselves. At the execution of Burke all Edinburgh was there. Sir '.Valter Scott’s friends had busied themselves to get him a good place from which to view the scaffold and gallows. Burke was hanged amid execrations that rent the skies. “The night before he seemed troubled by the fact that he had not received the whole of the price paid for his last victim. He wanted to secure it so that he might buy himself a more respectable pair of trousers than his own in which to be hanged.” That was the kind of man be was. An Edinburgh man? We are left in doubt. His name points elsewhere. It is certain that he has added a word to the English language. In the Oxford Dictionary “to burke” is “to smother, hush up, suppress quietly” ; and examples are given: “Disraeli’s last speech was altogether burked in The Times.” Here is another story of the Edinburgh law courts, not of the grim and grisly kind. Few of us remember of Robert Louis Stevenson that he was an Edinburgh barrister. Lord Shaw, himself an Edinburgh “law lord,” relates that almost immediately after Stevenson went to the Bar came his first guinea, sent to him with “ instructions.” His sole duty was to ask the judge for intimation and service of a Petition on the party against whom it was directed. All he had to do was to stand up at the Bar and utter three words interrogatively, “Intimation and Service?” But he was a mass of nerves, and t hese three words he could not utter, and he besought his friend to go into Court and make the little motion for him. I never heard of his earning another guinea as an advocate. There was a feminine element in R.L.S. Effeminate is not the word ;—restless travel, knocking about the world in both hemispheres, spoko for physical energy ; as for his literary output during a life that ended at forty-four, in Quality and amount it remains an astonishment. No man of letters of his time comes near him. But he was always an invalid, and, perhaps for that reason, womanish. Not that shyness running to stage fright is uniformly a womanish trait. Just now in Dunedin we have a sanhedrin of women in session, the W.C.T.U. Hear them talk! Many of our political orators, not a few of even our pulpiteers, might with advantage sit at their feet. Here may come in another picking from Lord Chaw In Scottish Otago a Scottish story needs not to pay its footing. John Brown, the author of “Rab and His Friends,” was a physician with a sense of humour.

He used to tell with a certain twinkling humour of a certain grocer who had married three wives. lie met him. in Princes street. Unknowing that wife No. 3 had also died, lie passed the time of day, and then, “And how’s Mrs Wilson, sir?” The inquiry no more discomposed Mr Wilson than if it had been one for tea and sugar of which the stock had run low. “Oh ! well, Dr Broon, the fact is” —rubbing his hands—“the fact is, I’m just oot o’ wives at present!” This may be capped by another, con-, fessedly a chestnut. He had buried three wives ; tlieir graves, all in a row, showed neatly in the kirk yard. Walking out with a projected number four, he conducted her to the sacred spot. “Maggie,” said _ he, tenderly, “ wad ye like to lie here?” The reply was sympathetic. \\ haur’s the guid o’ askin, Mac?” she said; —“Ye ken it weil.” Dear “Civis,” —I begin to surmise that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in Passing Note philosophy, amongst them the dynamics of a wagon wheel and tiie economies cf a fish stall. You were asked to give the weight of a fish that weighed tour pounds plus a quarter of its own weight. A "problem” truly, a veritable snorter ! The question itself tells you that three-quarters of t.hej fish were in the four pounds, and it would be within your own natural common intelligence that four quarters make a whole. If the price were sixpence a pound the fishmonger would have it in a flash: Three-quarters of the fish, four pounds at sixpence,—two shillings; a third of two shillings for the other quarter,—eightpence. “Twc-and-eightpence, ma’am, and i’ll wrap it in a, sheet of newspaper.” What need of your algebraic x’s and your apparatus of plus and minus? You remind me of the pedant in Hudibras: For ha by geometric scale Could take the size of pots of ale; Resolve, by sines and tangents, straight If bread or butter wanted, weight; And wisely tell what hour o’ th’ day The clock did strike by algebra. Accept this gratefully, remembering the wise old saying— I aithfui are the Wounds of a Friend. I sit penitent as well as grateful; the more so as 1 imagined that a pound weight in fish was a pound of twelve ounces, not of sixteen. Civis.