PASSING NOTES.

Otago Witness, Issue 3864, 3 April 1928, Page 3

PASSING NOTES.

(From Saturday’s Otago Daily Times.) The “ Silly Season ” of London newspapers—when Parliament is up and everybody that is anybody is out of town, when reporting of a Big Gooseberry or a ■farfet birth is of national importance, when - correspondents thrash out the burning question “ Is Marriage a Failure? thia Silly Season has no parallel in New Zealand journalism. We are sober and serious all the year round. So we flatter ourselves. All the same there is just now a good deal of silliness about. In Dunedin a “ Humanitarian Society,” of which I hear for the first time, has been impeaching the meritorious Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals fqr not preaching vegetarianism. A prevalent form of cruelty to animals is eating chops and steaks. Also we have had a spiritualist taking indecent liberties with the names of the airmen who failed to reach New Zealand from Australia. A '‘gentleman” .(save the mark!) “ clairyoyantly ” saw one of them, and “ clairaudiently ” obtained the latitude and longitude in which they went down ; this with other particulars. Then we have had a Labour M.P., one the baker’s dozen that acknowledge Mr Holland, re-

peating to ug the old old story “ Codlin’s your friend, not Short,” and coming all the wav from Auckland to do it. So much for Dunedin. At , Oamaru, people are buying for twopence apiece a pamphlet assuring them that “ millions of people now on the earth will never die,” and are looking for their own names in the list. A mad world, my masters. It is well that here and there a journalist keeps his head.

Dear Civis,- —As secretary of the Tiko kino Sports Club, I have been taken to task in a decent way fop advertising our sports as being held on . Easter Saturday, April 7, 1928. My critic informs me that if any day is entitled to be called Easter Saturday it would be Saturday, April 14. I have been a reader of your notes since boyhood. Would you be good enough to state in your next notes which is correct, if either ? “ Easter week ” is the week beginning with Easter Day. We speak of Easter Monday; I don’t remember hearing of an Easter Saturday. Easter week is all festival, —sport as much as you like. The week before Easter is not festival; quite the opposite. What is my opinion of spoit on the day before Easter. Better not ask. We talk of India as a nation and thereby commonly mislead ourselves and the Indians too. India has a hundred dilferent languages, not to mention dialects. In this vast congeries of races there is no bond of nationhood except that which has been provided by the British Raj. if the Pax Britannica were removed tomorrow, the more warlike races would swallow up the less warlike, who, as it happens, are the most

political. These remarks by a London editor are my pretext for illustrating once more the Kipling maxim, “ East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet.” The. attempt to make them meet in university education has produced Baboo English, of which I gave two examples last week. Don’t disdain to ponder a third—in a letter addressed to the Chief Engineer of an Indian Command: —- Honoured and illustrious sir, you will please remember me as a fifthgrade clerk in this office for which there is no scope for inflation and after all my education in Allahabad University where I passed B.A. after two sitt ; ngs. Now this mental effort demands greater area for abilities but forsooth am doomed with unlucky star in firmament and still serve unceasingly in grade 25/50 less Income Tax. I have learned much, august sir, and with tribulation acquired arts knowing in science such as “ The apple must fall to the ground” (Isaac Newton) . Now Reverend Sir I. am what dog says to rat in tight corner for domestic troubles come in plural and sometimes triplicate causing slight earthquakes in Heaven-lit household where there is shortage of coin, and to add to this my wife doth bring me in annual incremental successions to the ramplification of thia generation and by the Lord there is no end to this mischief. Reply favourably to your humble petitioner who is straining on beam-ends. Thanks to Allahabad University and similar forcing-houses that our Quixotism set up, the less warlike Indian races, as the London editor sagely admits, are the more political, demanding Swaraj, boycotting the Indian Commission, and expressing the measure of their intelligence by Baboo English. From a Scot down South;, partly dialect: — Dear “ Civis,”—On reading the first paragraph in last Passing Notes I ’could but say, “ Bliss was it in those daystto be alive, and to be young was very-;heaven! ” Yet I don’t think we

will all agree that “ it is a melancholy reflection that, barring anaesthetics and antiseptics, the gifts of modern science have added nothing to human happiness.” What do you think of the following story? Dona’u and his guidwife Jean are listening-in to a broadcast evening service'. “ Donald, you shouldna laugh on the Sabbath.” ‘’Week Jean, can ye blame me? Did ye no hear the meenister say the collection v to be taken up, and here am I sitting in ma ain hame? ” A question of bawbees, d’ye ken! Sitting by his ain ingle neuk he had heard the sermon yet escaped the collection. But hari he escaped the cost of “ listening in ” ? Maybe after all the collection would have beer the cheaper This Southland Seot has still something to say; I permit him the last word:— The ascribing of the “ Wseck of the Royal George ” to a Scot, mentioned by a contributor in the same issue, reminds me of the perfervid speaker who, dramatically exclaiming, “ Gentlemen, I was born an Englishman, I U ve .. a ? Englishman. I will die an Englishman,” being interrupted by a Sent in the audience with “Mon, hae ye no ambeetioh ? ”

From Timaru:— Dear “ Civis/’ —Will you kindly supply me with the following information? The population of the world (roughly) ; number of Roman Catholics; population of the British Empire; number of Roman Catholics in the Empire. Did Germany throw off the R.C. yoke? Do the bulk of R.C.’s belong to Italy, France, Spain, and South America? I have tried the library here, but cannot find this information. Is there no . copy of “ Whitaker ” in Timaru—Whitaker’s, Almanack, where what is known or guessed on these abstrusities is set forth from year to year? Population of the world, mainly a guess, 1849 millions; Roman Catholics, “estimated,” 324 millions; British Empire, 450 millions; Roman Catholics, :> millions, of whom over 3 millions are in Ireland. Germany has “thrown off the R.C. yoke ’’ only in the sense that England has; in both countries the priest and the -s are everywhere. The Latin populations in both hemispheres are mainly Roman Catholic; it is an affair of history and heredity. So much for “ numbering of the people ” —a vanity for which King David, it will be remembered, got into serious trouble. '

From Singapore, Straits Settlements. As it has come so far and is full of flattery I allow this letter to pass unabridged:—

Dear “ Civis,” —I have been a constant reader of the Otago Witness and, of course, Passing Notes for forty years. It is thirty years since I left New Zealand, but I have always had the Otago Witness sent to me by my people. It has helped to while away a •weary hour, in jungle and other camps, in such widely divergent parts of the world as Australia, Tierra del Fuego, Guiana, Brazil, Chile, Africa, Siberia, Manchuria, Borneo, Sumatra, Siam, F.M.S., “ Somewhere in France,” and in Old England during those years. I still read the whole paper through as eagerly as I did as a boy in Central Otago, and still find it to be one of the best publications of its kind that is to be found anywhere. These few lines were prompted by . the desire to forward you the enclosed cutting from the London Daily Sketch of Janus’"- 18th, which, if you have not happened to see the paragraph, will interest you. “Lang may your lum reek! ” —Wanderer, c/o The Borneo Company, Ltd., Singapore, S.S. The “ enclosed cutting ” t Ils of Pussyfoot .America; e.g.—“ The newest method of treating non-alcoholic beer in order to

give it a kick is to put a teaspoonful of ether into x each bottle before it is corked. The effects of drinking it are similar to those </ coming-to after an anaesthetic. A young girl may go out to dinner, take one cocktail, and be under the table—actually unconscious.” There are other details; but my Singapore friend will allow me to substitute, as more easily credible, experences gathered by Margot Asquith, now Countess of Oxford and Asquith, when on a ecturing tour through the States. She says:—“For the information of anyone who may think, as I did, that drink had decreased, and that in consequence everyone over here is wise, sober, and happy, I can only say the reverse is the case. I cannot write of the poorer classes—on whom, in any case, the law is hard—but among the rich I do not suppose there was ever so much alcohol concealed and enjoyed as at the present moment in America. Young men and maidens, who before this exaggerated interference wou’u have been content with the lightest of wines, think it smart to break the law every day and night of their lives.” She had the courage to talk in this strain from the lecture-platform in New York ipid other America e : 'ies; e.g.— I related to my audience that Mr Clemens (better known as Mark Twain) bad taken me into dinner once at the house of a namesake of mine (Mrs Charles Tennant, whose daughter married Stanley), and had told me of a great American temperance orator who, haying exercised his voice too much, had asked the chairman to provide milk instead of water at his meeting. Turning to my chairman, the Rev. Byron Stauffer, who 18 . a great temperance preacher—of which I was unaware—l said “ The chairman—probably a kind man like my own—put rum into the milk, and when the orator, pausing in one of his most dramatic periods, stopped to clear his throat he drained the glass, and putting it down exclaimed, ‘Gosh’ ' what cows! ”

Another, “-enclosed cutting," this time corroborating my doctrine that a man’s hte consisteth not m the abundance of the things that he possesseth, and that human happiness owes little or nothing to the gifts of modern science. “ Ask any man or woman past middle age whether they had. less enjoyment than the young people of the present day No do- ’t about the answer. And thei r pleasures cost them so little. One of the speakers at the Early Settlers’ anniversary the other day, speaking of the early pioneers and the difficulties they encountered, said that they ‘ were quite as happy as people are’ to-day.’ The solution of poverty and unemployment is to be found in thrift. Establish what system you may and pass what laws you like, but if men and women are thriftless, and, to use a Scripture quotation, 1 spend their substance for that which is not bread,’ those evils will remain with us Pleasure and recreation are a ’ stimulant to the business and stern side of life,’ but how sadly and disastrously they are being overdone !’’ Thanks to the contributor who sends me this.

I had already closed down for this vy-eek when, 10, a letter of half-a-dozen lines claiming admission : — Dear Civis, —A footnote to your reminiscences of Old Dunedin: Is there any remembrance of a public-house sign somewhere Maclaggan street way, ending with the Horace line, “ Non cuivis homini contingit adire Corinthum ” —“ Not to every man comes a chance such a s this”? The “ Secundo, euro ” lamp-posts of Millar, F.SA., City Engineer,—was the Latin - ever translated ?

Let anybody answer who can or will. Civis.