PASSING NOTES.

Otago Witness, Issue 3756, 9 March 1926, Page 3

PASSING NOTES.

(Froin Saturday’s Otago Daily Times). Not all the Exhibition is at Logan Park. A constellation of Conferences, ranging from the University Senate to the Poultry Association, have found themselves in happy coincidence with the Great Show. Last week a T I the brass bands of the Dominion assembled to compete; this week all the Fire Brigades, and in competition with (hem for interest the Methodist Conference—specially to be noted because at one single sitting the collection plate yielded £3OOO and gyer, towards the establishing of a college. A great example. Also is it to be noted for the reappearance in these latitudes of the lion. L. M. Isitt, an old friend, with many local admirers, myself included. Oh yes;— the perusal of Mr Isitt’s Hansard record has given me pleasure, always—or almost always. Somewhere in the north Mr Isitt has been eollogueing with “ a leading editor ” who told him that ** today journalism is dead.” A played-out editor would have sounded more convincing. In the experience of this journalistic Jeremiah “ we have to write as the advertisers dictate.” That may explain why he is a played-out editor. A cursory look at the pages of this journal would suggest that it is the advertiser who comes cap-in-hand to the newspaper rather than the other way about. *

In the opinion of Mr Isitt the last thing for which people should go to the newspaper is news. How else we should know anything about the Methodist Conference he omitted to say. But, “it was unfortunate that people had to rely on the ewspapers for information concerning prohibition.” Ay, there’s the rub! It is essential to Te Pussyfoot case and cause that the Press Agencies north and south and in both hemispheres are in a conspiracy to invent lies, lies, lies, always lies, to the detriment of Pussyfoot. The American press is in it, and of cours' the Father of Lies is in it. The disconcerting cables we are getting ever othei day about Pussyfoot ups and downs in America are of Satan’s especial manufacture. Only to Pussyfoot should we go for information about Pussyfoot affairs; —it is unfortunate, says Mr Isitt, that we have to go to the ncwspapeis. From all this it mav be inferred that Mr Isitt is angry with the outcome of the late referendum, and believes that he does well to he angry. Anyhow he is in quarrel with facts, facts, facts, spite of the warning word of Robert Burns that Facts are chiels that winna ding, An’ downa be disputed. In ihcfse parts, needless to say, Burns is of a pontifical authority.

“ The very failure of the effort to deport Walsh, and Johannsen—a failure which for the moment intoxicated Labour with joy—is for both Mr Bruce himself and for his policy a happy event,” says an Australian editor. “* For if the men had been deported this would have been for Labour an asset of priceless value.” Likely enough. The Bolshevic saints’ calendar (Australian edition) and its noble army of martyrs would have been enriched by two illustrious names; and always the blood of the martyrs has been the seed of the church. Similar moralisings are suggested to the New York correspondent of a London newspaper by the State prosecution of Colonel Mitchell, an affair of which we on this side of the world know little. It was about the efficiency of air-ship defences;— Colonel Mitchell who, merely because he accused the Army and Navy of betraying the United States at all altitudes up to and including 10,000 feet, has been suspended for five years. There is now no difficulty in nominating President Coolidge’s successor. Mitchell the Martyr is as good as in the White House.

Writ satiric, no doubt. But it is a sound truth that not seldom in State prosecutions success is failure and failure success. Denied the crown of martyrdom, Walsh and Johannsen have lost no time in flying at each other’s throats a* mortal enemies, and Mr Bruce, relieved in mind, will quote to himself a very obvious proverb. No need to quote it here.

When your CAbin portholes are dark and green Because of the seas outside, When the ship goes wop with a wriggle between, And the cook falls into the soup tureen.

Could I assist in finding the author of this “ fragment,” asked a confiding inquirer last week. “ Scans rather like Kipling,” he thought. My thought was otherwise. “Kipling? no-I shake my head. The humour of the last line is the humour of a Christmas pantomime, and Kipling verse doesn’t drop to that level.” A sapient answer, —when staring me in the face, so to say, were the “ Just So Stories,” in which Kipling frankly lays himself out to play the fool. From end to end the “Just So Stories for Little Children” are a reckless pantomime in prose and verse; and there my friend of last week will find his “ fragment.” But what of my own case? It is the case of Lord Kelvin, the first mathematician of his time, when unable to add up his own figures,—bringing out a wrong result on the blackboard, to the rapturous cheering of his students. I have heard no cheering; but— Who ran to help me when 1 fell, And kissed the place to make it well, And loved me more than tongue can tell—who but correspondents from all round the compass? “I wonder how many gentle expostulations thou wilt receive over this business?” says one of them. How many? —I have not counted. He continues: “I cannot conceive that thine is a case '■‘f real nescienceness; it must be a lapsus memoriae.” Just so; that is it; and the Latin is consoling. But “nescienceness”! He would have done better to remind me in kindness that science is my forte and omniscience my foible. Kipling still: An’ the dawn comes up like thunder outer (China ’crost the Bay How and in what way the dawn comes up like thunder I do not know; nor can any one tell me. But this I know, that on these two lines (from “ Mandalay ”) genius has set its unmistakeable sign-manual. Tims in this column last week. But here is a pundit who will explain the “ how and in what way ”

“ Dawn comes up like thunder.” Light affects one like a sudden sound; it is quite a natural reaction to the sudden flash of the sun; there is no preparatory light in the tropics —the sun is blazing there and you feci a shock like the shock from the sudden rattle of thunder.

Too thin. All of us who vere not born south of the Equator have seen the dawn and the dark of the tropics. At neither extremity of the day is there any twilight to speak of; but at neither extremity does the sun pof in or out with the explosion of a thunder-clap. I prefer to put the Kipling lines in the same splendid category with Keats’s— Magic casements opening on the foam Of perilous seas in faery lands forlorn; and with Tennyson’s—

And on the glimmering limit far withdrawn God made Himself an awful rose of dawn. Of this couplet Tennyson himself, when asked by Professor Tyndall to explain it, could give no intelligible account.

For honour and for dishonour, in about equal proportions, the New Zealand totalisator has come under notice by the English press. A betting tax is proposed, there is debate, and the debate runs high. Supplementary to the account of it by ‘Our own correspondent” in Friday's Daily Times are some items worth mention here. One intelligent contributor to the discussion says: “Eleven million pounds parsed through the Now Zealand totalisators in one year; the population is about five millions/’ What is argueJ from these illusory figures we may neglect; let us pass to the moral question. Betting is a sin, announces a distinguished eccle-

siastic, putting in his word. Not so, answers another of equal distinction ; as in drinking a glass of ale, so in making a bet, there is no sin; the sin is in excess. And here the argument begins to be in wandering mazes lost. Excess in drinking is easily told, —the man is drunk. But how are you to tell excess in betting? For England three hundred millions to four hundred millions a year—so the guessing goes, there is no certainty—is that excess? It looks like it. And eleven millions a year through the totalisator looks like excess for New Zealand, even if (here were five millions of us. And there are not.

Betting is not waste; in betting there is no unproductive expenditure; there is merely the transfer of wealth from the pocket of one man to the pocket of another. In the English discussion on the ethics of betting this aspect of the matter seems to have escaped notice. Wealth spent in digging holes and filling them un again—to take John Stuart Mill’s classical illustration—is wasted ; wealth spent in extravagant luxury is wasted; wages are paid, time and energy are expended, nothing is produced. Gigging holes and filling them up again is one thing; the same time and energy spent in digging potatoes is andther thing ; you are richer with potatoes in the sack than with potatoes in the ground ; result in the one case, nullity; in the other wealth. Elementary economics, this, as understood, I hope by the W E.A. In betting there is no expenditure of labour you may be said to be buying a pleasurable excitement. There may be no thought of profiting at somebody else’s expense “Why should I deprive my neighbour of his goods against his will?”—asks the artless Dr Watts. Why indeed? “My hands were made for honest labour, not to plunder or to steal.” Quite so, and those are your principles. But if the pleasurable excitement you honestly buy when betting may end, as it often dees, in an unpleasuratle depression arid empty pockets, it isn’t worth the price you pay for it.

Here are some new howlers—in what way extorted, whether under the knowledge test or the intelligence test, we should need a professor to tell us, and he a member of the University Senate. “In his journey to Mount Zion Christian had a fight with a polygon.” Apollyon and a polygon—interchangeable because both meaningless. “Air is made up of oxygen and sanatogen.” Maybe, since no one knows what sanatogen is made up of. “Henry VIII had the prayer book put into English to spite the Pope, who wanted to marry Catherine of Arragon ” Not wider of the mark that some accepted histories. “Tertium quid is a legal term meaning six shillings and eightpence.” Quite right:—Number one, the lawyer; number two, the client; number three, or the tertium quid, six and eiffhtpence. Neither knowledge nor intelligence this ; it is inspiration. Civis.