PASSING NOTES.

Otago Witness, Issue 3823, 21 June 1927, Page 3

PASSING NOTES.

(From Saturday’s Otago Daily Timas.) The cricket scoring of our team in England is of less moment than Empire affairs, but it puts a greater strain on the cables. If Blunt makes a boundary hit or Dacre is out, leg before, the fact is telegraphed to the ends of the earth. Cricket is a great game and a national institution, though in essence nothing more than “ casting a ball at three straight sticks and defending the same with a fourth,” as we read in Kipling,— who elsewhere talks in tones of contempt of “ the flannelled fools at the wickets.” Can we forgive him? But over against Kipling we may set a patriot of equal merit, the Duke of Wellington in his celebrated saying that Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton, where, as on battlefields, pluck and endurance and knowledgeable teamwork carried the day. Usually the British regimental officer, trained in manly games, has the sporting spirit. Usually the German regimental officer has not, nor perhaps the French, nor indeed any other. The rank and file at

Waterloo had it, though strangers to the playing fields of Eton. Theirs was the village green, the native home of cricket. Turn up your “ Pickwick ” for the match All Mugglcton against Dingley Dell. What could be better?

It is pleasant to find in the person of the Hon. and Rev. Edward Lyttelton a veteran cricketer who hankers after the old-time sports of the village green. “ People do not know what they have lost,” he says.

The mixture of classes, the friendliness, the humour, the frenzied enthusiasm of the spectators, the freedom from all betting and strife—these are the characteristics that I well remember in Worcestershire sixty years ago. Cricket was then a perfect pastime for everybody who had the slightest natural gift for a game of ball. . . . No out-of-door exercise has ever been devised so full of activity, hopefulness and merriment as that which is quite peculiar to. this island—the English village cricket of half a century ago.

“ Nearly all the mischief which is known to be injuring our great game would be cured,” he continues, “ by the simple expedient of treating the grounds in a more natural way, leaving a fair bottom of grass on which the bowler can make the ball bite.” On the billiard-table wicket Blunt or Dacre or Lowry or another may score a century' in the first innings and go out for a duck in the next. The great “W. G.” himself occasionally went out for a duck; and there is record of eminent batsmen achieving a brace, one in each innings, and next day receiving an anonymous benefaction of green peas “ to go with the ducks.” Billiard-table wickets are bad, test matches are bad, any match running to three days is bad;’ and not altogether good is a cricket team that goes gipsying across half the world. Our gipsies on tour in England, plodding steadily tl rough the counties, find that they are on the level of the average county team —there or thereabouts. Just so. We knew it before they went.

Our “frozen-out gardeners” are growing restive. Pity that they should, since in the last resort they and their belongings will have to be housed and fed, work or no work. In Wellington this week two members of Parliament, who introduced to the Premier a deputation of the unemployed, were unable to control them. Speaking for the Government the Premier and his colleague, the Minister of Labour, were interrupted, derided, jerred at. Finally: —

The men crowded round the Prime Minister, and when he opened his cigarette case in answer to a request for a cigarette they forced forward, breaking the table at which the Minister of Labour had been sitting, forced the Premier against the wall, and knocked over a typist, fortunately without hurting her. Excuses? —we are not to say that excuse there was none, and that next time it must be under the protection of the police that Ministers receive the unemployed. The Premier would be the first to find excuse. Some of the offenders may have been hungry, all of them -ere angry, egged on to mischief by the herd instinct and the sense of numbers—they were a crowd. It is no great shame to New Zealand or to any individual citizen that four or five in every thousand of the population should l»e out of work. In Victoria at the height of the gold fever, when Ballarat,. Bendigo, Avoca, Forest Creek were booming-, there were Yarra Bank meetings of the unemployed to denounce the Government. Employment for our own unployed, as much as we can as soon as we can, it is ours to find. Also to see that they do not starve, and meanwhile to bear with their ill-manner© in th© wilderness.

The’ Daily Times is complimented by one of my correspondents on its “very sane and sober attitude” towards the “Flapper Vote’’ that is promised, or threatened, in England. Much thanks. The ir idest virtues of sanity and sobriety we hope to keep steadily in view. What is a “flapper?” and what is the “Flapper Vote?” The word “flapper,” unknown in its present use to the older dictionaries, is thus explained by the Concise Oxford: "(slang) girl not yet out” ; —concise indeed! What precisely is meant by “not yet out?” However, the girl not yet out but 21 years of age is to be put on the electoral roll. Hitherto she has had to wait till 25.

Hysterical opponents of the “Flapper Vote,” as they call it derisively, think Mr Baldwin, who proposes it, mad. But in New Zealand we have had the Flapper Vote for a good many years without any symptoms of a revolution, or of “shooting Niagara,” as some English papers predict may follow Mr Baldwin’s reform. And what about justice? To deny women a vote till they are 25 whilst giving it to hoodlums at 21 is monstrous. Then there are political considerations. Mr Baldwin, au Leader of the Conservatives, knows what he is about. Women are naturally more conservative than men. There you have the whole thing in a nutshell.

That women are naturally more conservative than men is an interesting suggestion. Granted that at the age of 21 the two sexes differ widely. Compared with her “opposite number” the woman is the more mature of the two, and usually has very much more conscience. Later, under stress of provocation, exasperation, injustice, bad conditions generally, she may have no conscience at all.

Hell has no fury like a woman scorned. Words with a bad historic connotation are the French words “tricoteuse” and “petroleuse.’' A tricoteuse is a woman who knits. During the Terror, women such as Dickens portrays in his “Tale of Two Cities”—Madame Defarge and “The Vengeance’’—regularly took their knitting to the Revolutionary Tribunal and sat there, shrilling and squawking to help the court along in its hideous business of sending hapless innocents to the guillotine. A “petroleuse” is a female incendiary. In 1871, during the Insurrection of the Commune—tflat mad parody of t. ? Great Revolution—frenzied women went about setting alight with petrol churches, ralaces, Government offices, all the noblest buildings in Paris. And so to this day for Parisians the words “tricoteuse” and “petroleuse” wake dreadful memories. Yet woman as woman is “naturally conservative.” She may be. Is best summed up perhaps in the nursery formula—“ When she is good she is very very good; when she is bad she is horrid.”

A correspondent to whom more than once I have been indebted takes me to task for my flippant dismissal of a great man

Dear “ Civis,” —In yesterday’s Passing Notes (in the one on the anniversaries that fall due this year) I was surprised that you should ask, “ Who knows anything about Spinoza?” A rhetorical question, expecting no answer, and merely hinting of my own ignorance. Books would have told me all that is known about Spinoza, and books were at my service; but I should have cut a poor figure if myself required to tell. Spinoza was a Jew repudiated and anathematised by other Jews for his opinions in philosophy,— that was about the sum. Of his philosophy I dimly knew that he looked at things in the light that never was on land or sea—shall we say?—in his own phrase “ sub specie aeternitatis.” My correspondent sends me critical estimates by modern writers; for one of them I -find space, and with that make amends;

Sir Frederick Pollock in “ The Nineteenth Century”;—“He was an outcast from the synagogue, a stranger to the Church, a solitary thinker who cast his thought in difficult and startling forms. Notwithstanding all this, men of divers nations and of widely different opinions have joined together to do honour to the memory of Benedict de Spinoza, the philosopher whose genius has made him in some sort the founder of modern speculation, and the man who in modern times has given us the highest example of a true and perfect philosophic life.”

I am overwhelmed by correspondence on matters of controversy, bottomless controversy;—Pussyfoot and anti-Pussy-foot statistics; British-Israelism, for and against; Bible wines, could they or could they not make you drunk ? Find room for it all? That would never do. My business is to “ shoot folly as it flies”—as it flies, observe. I don’t invite folly to take a seat and argue. What would be the good?—we should never get anywhere. If on the authority of the Department of Health, City of New York, I quote figures showing that year by year since America went “ dry ” deaths from alcohol poisoning in New York have steadily increased—274, 429, 513, 082, 741—Pussyfoot would retort with figures showing the precise opposite. If on the authority of the Cambridge Professor of Anthropology I pronounce British-Israelism “ abject nonsense,” I am told in reply that when a war correspondent in Palestine visited headquarters he found General Allenby and his officers “ studying Prophecy.” What do I make of that? What indeed! Then about Bible wines, if I assert as a fact, easily verifiable, that the wine “ that maketh glad the heart of man” is the very wine (same Hebrew word) that made Noah drunk, I am v med that statements of this drift are “ next door to blasphemy.” All this in my letter box of the present week. On these controverted subjects reasons and reasoning count for nothing;—belief is a matter of preference. Each to his taste —“ chacun a son gofit ” as the French say. The old woman’s remark when kissing her cow was to the same effect.

From Croydon, New South Wales—all the way, and for that reason given space, though grudgingly:—

Dear “ Civis,” —I ran across your pet bugbear in the local paper tonight, and I could not resist the temptation of sending it to you. I have never understood the darned thing, never can, and never will, and, what’s more, I don’t want to. It always gives me the pip whenever I see it. I

expect by this time it has a similar effect on you. The “ darned thing,” my “ pet bugbear,” is that everlasting nuisance: “ Sisters and brothers have I none, but that man’s fath*-’- is my father’s son ” —with the' local paper’s solution. Since myself (“ my father’s son ”) is “ that man’s father,” clearly “ that man ” is my son. But the local paper gets the right result in the wrong way:—“The verb ‘is’ takes the same case after it as before it; therefore we can reverse the statement and say ‘My father’s son is that man’s father.’ ” Clean ridiculous. The verb “to be ” takes the same grammatical case after it as before it; but you can’t transpose subject and predicate. Every wife is a woman, but not every woman is a wife; —would that she were! Crvra.