PASSING NOTES.

Otago Witness, Issue 3655, 1 April 1924, Page 3

PASSING NOTES.

(Prom Saturday’s Daily Times.) Labour at the Antipodes to the Head Boss in London: Mr M. Charlton (Commonwealth). — “Labor opposes Mr Brnce committing Australia to Singapore.” Mr Holland (New Zealand). —“The Labor Party is completely opposed to the Singapore scheme.” “Thank you for nothing 1” replies the Head Boss courteously; (this is not by cable, but by private radio)—“lt was thanks to the Asquith crowd that we could jettison Singapore and sweeten our Clydesiders. Break up of the Empire, maybe. But mum’s the word 1” A needful caution. One of Mr Holland's henchmen had it in print the other day that the Labour party stood for an Independent Ireland, an Independent Egypt, an Independent India, —and at that point he stopped. Whether an Independent New Zealand was among the objects the Labour party “stood for,” how soon New Zealand might hope to cut the painter, whether wo should get due notice, —these questions were left to conjecture. Mum’s the word. There are other matters on which the Socialist Clydesider will need, sweetening. In the House of Commons a vote was carried increasing Mr Clynes’s salary from £2,000 to £5,000, after a warm protest by the “Clydesider,” Mr Buchanan, that the proposal was a hollow mockery when men were trying to live on 16s a w’eek. This argument may .be pushed further. To the man trying t-o jive on 16s a w r eek how will Mr Buchanan’s £4OO a year honorarium look? Nearly as iniquitous as the £SOOO of Mr Clynes. I myself fail to see why Mr Clynes should embarrass himself with £SOOO a year. There is nothing he can do with it but buy into joint-stock companies and become a hopeless capitalist. He is a Labour leader, and member of a Socialist Government! Put your Socialist into office and straightway his Socialism evaporates. So it has been with Mr Lloyd George. Recall his Limehouse phase in the years gone by. Who so valiant an anti-plutocrat as he? Then came office and £SOOO a year. At the time of the Marconi scandal he pleaded poverty —had only £4OO a year from investments. Of course the official £SOOO a year was transitory and came to an end. But 10, there dropped upon him from the blue h permanent annuity of £2OOO a year, the gift of Mr Carnegie. Add the original £4OO from investments, -and another £4OO as M.P., together with the right to a pension from the State so soon as one becomes vacant, and we understand Mr Lloyd George’s present attitude towards

Socialism. Can we forget how he pilloried and gibbeted Socialism in his speeches of a year ago ? A vain thing and a frail is human nature.

An article headed “Marketing New Zealand Produce; by Mr W, Quin” (Daily Times, Monday) offered reading- of a kind that I usually avoid. Except in this column and in similar bypaths of literature I am not a New Zealand producer; money interest in marketing have I none. But a glance down Mr W. Quin’s article left me fascinated (I think fascinated is the word)— unable to look away from a horrible picture of lambs crowded into railway trucks and kept live days without food or water. This in the process of marketing. The remedy, says Mr W. Quin, is to kill them before they start —kill them to save their lives, or at least to spare them a torture that should set the Society for the PTevention of Cruelty to Animals raving. Parallel with the revelation of Mr Quin is an Ashburton court case in which two young men were charged with crowding into a railway truck three big cows, two heifers, and eighteen calves, consigned from Hinds to Addington. Two tracks had been ordered, the railway by “an error” provided only one. At Ashburton it was noticed that several of the cattle were down; the truck was therefore detached, and- “matters remained thus all night.” Next morning a constable found that three calves had been trampled t‘o death, and that six or seven others were half dead.

The two young men were acquitted handsomely;—“free from all blame,” said the magistrate. But over the delinquency of the railway it was necessary that he should shake his judicial head, —that at least. “It seems to me that the Railway Department does not come out of this matter as clean as it might have done it might be that the Railway Department at Ashburton has not time to attend to these matters.” Truly a Daniel come to judgment! It would be delightful to see the Railway Department in court to answer a charge of cruelty to animals. Coming back to Mr W. Quin, read the following :

Any ono interested in beef should go to Burnside or Addington on sale days and see the desperate state of the un-

fortunate cattle —a mass of blood and bruises caused by frightened animals horning each other in trucks and driven

to madness. Such animals kill covered with bruises and full of black blood. Are these things so ? Then my word to Mr Quin is, Almost thou persuadest me to he a vegetarian.

The Bishop of Nelson, who is building a cathedral, has refused—say the papers—the offer of a £9OO motor car to be raffled for the benefit of the building fund. Rather than that, said he, no cathedral at all, —he would prefer that not a brick should be laid. Good man. I entirely agree with him. Towards the building of St. Paul’s, London, nearly a million sterling came from a coal tax; towards the restoring of St. Patrick’s, Dublin, £130,000 came from -the profits of Guinness’s brewery (“the biggest fire premium ever paid,”- said the scoffers) ; but a cathedral founded on lotteries would be a new thing in the earth. Yet a one-time Melbourne bishop, whose name in Melbourne is still a name to conjure with—Moorhouse—laid it down that bazaar raffles might be defended. “Joint purchase and assignment by lot, what is wrong in that?’’ he asked. But he would have jibbed, ,I imagine, at a £9OO motor car. A bazaar raffle might escape under the “only a little one” excuse of the maid servant in Marryatt, or, putting it more learnedly, under the law maxim “de minimis non curat lex.” It is idle to pretend that a bet is intrinsically immoral. Have we not on every racecourse in the country a betting machine by law 'lktablished ? “The Bishop of Nelson”—says the newspaper I have quoted—“is a strong opponent of gambling in any shape or form.” But “gambling,” with its bad connotation, is a question-begging word, even as “in-

toxicating” is in Pussyfoot's talk about “intoxicating drinks.”

A glass of beer is not an intoxicating drink, n<Jr a glass of wine, nor even a glass of whisky. Intoxication, or poisoning—which is what the word “intoxication” means—comes with excess: and the same may be said in relation to the contents of a salt-cellar. Common salt is a poison—if you take a poisonous dose; but I don’t for that reason say at table when I want the salt, “Please pass the poison.” Professor Saintsbury, of Edinburgh, at one time editor of the Saturday Review, at all times a literary critic of note and the writer of many books, hits out fiercely against the moralists who would save men from the ruinous vice of gambling by telling them that to bet is a sin. “Where on earth or out of the earth is the conceivable wickedness, or even naughtiness, of saying, ‘lf Pharos wins the Derby you shall give rne six shillings, and if he doesn’t I’ll give you one’;” Not that Saintsbury himself is a betting man,- —far from it; “hasn’t made a bet for fifty years:” Rut he is indignant at the wrongheadedness of well-meaning reformers who find sin where there is no sin,—including “the Pussyfoots who blaspheme the gifts of God.” If only Pussyfoot would content himself with denouncing drunkenness as a sin ! But Saintsbury’s analysis of drunkenness as a sin would set Pussyfoot dancing :

Drunkenness is a sin because, as the Scripture says, it is excess—a disproportionate, covetous, and unseemly consumption of one of the best gifts of God, of which other good people have not nearly enough. It. incapacitates in all sorts of ways, not the least bad Being the sin against yourself of consuming, with unpleasant results, what, divided, would supply you with wholly good results twice or three times over. I could preach against drunkenness for a month of Sundays and hardly repeat myself.

“ ‘Preach against drunkenness!’ ’’—shrieks the scared and horrified Pussyfoot: “Heaven forbid! This specimen is enough.”

Erom Invercargill : The Sunny South, Dies Lunae, 24/3/24. Dear “Civis,” —You, I hear, will be the only one who will be able to supply the information I seek. I have applied To Law, Education and the Fifth Estate, viz.: —a magistrate, a school inspector, and the editor of our leading papers, and heaps of others. “Ouida,” in one of her charming books, “Two Little Wooden Shoes,” alludes to “every woman sooner or later swallowing the Red Mouse.” I understand what is meant but from whence the allegory of the Red Mouse? For years I have intended asking you. No one knows, if you don’t, except our poetic friend “Marsyas,” but I am not sure where he is. In Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, the latest edition and the biggest, a meritorious compendium of untrustworthy information, under the heading “Mouse” you will read: The soul or spirit was often supposed in olden time to assume a zoomorphic form, and to make its way at death through the mouth of a man in a visible form, sometimes as a pigeon, sometimes as a mouse or rat. A red mouse indicated a pure soul, a black mouse a soul blackened by pollution, a pigeon or dove a saintly soul. Here we have a red mouse passing through the human gullet, but m the wrong direction, —exit it makes, not entrance. Of course “Ouida” is talking metaphor; “swallowing” the red mouse, whatever the red .mouse represents, may have meanings diverse as the poles. If you swallow an unlikely story you accept and believe it; if you swallow an affront you ignore it; if you swallow your pride you suppress and sacrifice it; m “Measure for Measure” there is a villain who by breaking faith with a woman ho promised to marry is said to have “swallowed his vows whole.” So my Invercargill friend has a .choice. And if, as is likely, this lame exposition fails to please, he has an oracle in reserve, “Marsyas” to wit, only he doesn’t know where to find him. But. as I have reason to know, “Marsyas” is always within cooee of this column. Let us leave it to “Marsyas.” Two' inquirers : Dear “ Civis,” —Could you kindly give me the poem that has this line: “Little Willie opens his eyes”? No anthology in/my. possession contains this line. I must throw myself on the uncovenanted mercies of the general reader. Next:— c . Dear “Civis,”-—Pad-geant or paygeant, which? Is the “a” long or short you mean ? Why not take counsel, with the dictionary as I myself must do? As I cast about for Slceat or the Concise Oxford there flits through my mind the word “ pegnumi to fix. I have no way of showing the long “e” of “pegnumi”; but from “pegnumi” with its long “e” “pageant” must surely come. Then what is the Latin for “ platform ”?—“ pagina”?

* “ compages ” ?—both with a long “a.” On the other hand what of our English word “ peg ’’ and its short vowel ? Speculations these of the half-informed!

‘ ‘ Peg ” I find is not related to “ pegnumi,” but “ pageant ” is. Nevertheless the Concise Oxford gives you a choice between the long vowel and the short; — you may say “‘ pay-geant ” or “ padgeant ”: either is right. As our talk is of a military display to raise funds for the War Ylemorial I suggest that you make it “ pay-geant,” and, as Kipling says, pay, pay, pay. Civis.