PASSING NOTES.

Otago Witness, Issue 3898, 27 November 1928, Page 3

PASSING NOTES.

'(From Saturday’s Otago Daily Times.) Sir Joseph Ward’s view of the political situation is simplicity itself. A sound View, moreover, and I am happily in agreement. Get him off the theme of fabulous millions to be had for the asking, Sir Joseph speaks with the wisdom of Nestor advising the Greeks in their camp before Troy, ■ and with the persuasiveness of Major Bagstock piloting his friend Dombey, though the Major’s account of himself — “ J. 8., sir, old and tough and de-vil-ish sly ” —is not in the least relevant. I have always had a sneaking regard for Sir Joseph, and more than once in this column ventured the "Suggestion that Mr Coates should offer him a portfolio. But, dealing with things as they are, Sir Joseph has made a statement to the Wellington Evening Post:— v--

It is obvious that the Government is in a minority in respect of the elected members, and that it cannot expect his Excellency to accept its advice in the circumstances.

Most true. Not even for a day should his Excellency be without advisers, yet cannot be expected to accept advice from a Government in a minority. And in that we hear the knell of the Coates party. But the alternative, the Ward party, in relation to the whole House, is in as bad a minority, and again his Excellency “ cannot be expected,” etc., etc. The minority of the Holland party is more abject still. What remains but that Mr Coates and Sir Joseph should put their heads together, or that someone should knock their heads together,— that Reform should form up with the Uniteds and the Uniteds unite with Reform. The alternatives to this seem to be another general election or th? lunatic asylum for all concerned. “ Seem to be,” I say. Observe my caution. In politics one never knows.

Those illusory millions!—we are hearing little about them. The Uniteds, gloating over their unexpected success at the polls, are united in avoidance of the borrowing policy. Defend it?—they had rather not; “leave it all to Joe,” they say. A wise determination. But 1 have correspondents who are keen on the attack. One of them addresses his envelope—for the entertainment of the postman—

Mr Civis, Elucidator, Paragrammat ist, Encyclopedist, & Public Censor, O.D. Times, Dunedin. It is told of Daniel O’Connell that he once silenced an abusive fishwife by calling her a “ parallelogram,” a “ hypotenuse,” and an “ isosceles triangle.” Fortunately the epithets hurled at me carry no sting. All the same I am unable to find space for an analysis of Sir Joseph’s seventy million scheme by “ the arithmetical rule of Stocks.” It must suffice to give the conclusion, namely, that if Sir Joseph receives only £95 for every £lOO he borrows and must repay, and if he lends the money at less interest than he pays for it, the loss at the end of 32 years will be £23,312,997 —by “ the arithmetical rule of Stocks.” Likelj enough. Meanwhile the Seventy Million Loan proposal may have served its nurpose as an election squib, and can row be allowed to fizzle out.

Headed by the Duchess of Atholl and Lady Astor some half-dozen women have seats in the British House of Commons, but are not altogether happy there. One of them announces her retirement, alleging a belated recognition of home duties—Mrs Hilton Philipson, member for Berwick-on-Tweed. This lady has had a varied career. First, she was Miss Mabel Russell on the dramatic stage; next the wife and widow of ■ Mr Stanley Rhodes, who was killed in a motor accident; next the wife of Captain Philipson and his successor in Parliament when for some irregularity in his election for Berwick-on-Twecd he was unseated on petition, and the electors, resenting the decision, sent the wife into the House as substitute for the husband. The Duches of Atholl, a prosaic but dignified speaker, is fit for her prosaic job as parliamentary secretary to the Board of Education. Lady Astor, American by birth and with an American divorce to her credit, is now wife of an English peer, mother of six children, member for Plymouth, and “ the skittish Lady Astor,” who will leave her seat in the Home, run over to a tedious speaker and pull him down by tugging at his coat tails. Then there

are spinster members of the Labour Party, Miss Susan Lawrence and Miss Margaret Bondfield—flies in amber, neither rich nor rare, you wonder how the dickens they got there. And if not Alexander Pope, you quote St. Paul: “I will therefore that the younger women marry, hear children, guide the house;” also he has something to the effect that the older women should be keepers at home. There is nothing to regret in the failure of women candidates at the general election from which we are suffering a recovery. Politics are too serious a business for women, and a poor diversion. Diversion, indeed!—with memories of Goldsmith I should suggest in preference Shakespeare and the musical glasses. But a truce to politics; let us get into a purer air. This is our Summer Show Week, festival of the primary industries, primary in time and in’ importance both. Tennyson might have written, barely escaped writing— From yon blue heavens above us bent The grand old gardener and his wife Smile at the fuss of Parliament. Paradise was a garden; the primary industry was gardening; Adam and Eve. the grand old gardener and his wife, had their Eden in charge to dress it and to keep it. To-day, the industry that was first in time is first in importance. The secondary industries—mill and factory, banking house, office, shop, roads aiid railways, wharves and shipping, all derive from farmer and pastoralist, the tiller of the ground and the keeper of the flock. Town dwellers are of the secondary industries and know their secondary place. Are the primary industries prosperous? In reply, let me drop into poetry again, quoting, as I may have quoted before, Tennyson in dialect, the talk across a roadside hedge:— Eh? good daay! good daay! thaw it beant not mooch of a daay Nasty, easel ty weather! an' mea haafe down wi’ my haay ! How be the farm gittin on? noaways. Gittin on i'deead ! Why, tonups was haafe on 'em lingers an’ tons, an' the mare brokken-kneead. An’ pigs didn’t sell at fall, an' wa lost wer Haideny cow, An’ it beats ma to know what she died on ; but wool’s lookin’ oop onyhow. - There we have it. The “ needy farmer,” to whom we hear pathetic reference, and who under the seventy million loan dispensation will be mortgaged up to his Heck, may find a crumb of comfort in this fact, that wool’s lookin’ oop onyhow. See the last sales.

It is good to know that Haydn’s oratorio “ The Creation ” has been performed in one of our city churches, Dr Galway at the organ. Wherever produced, in a Dunedin city church or the Albert Hall, London, Haydn’s “ Creation ” is great music, if questionable science. Spite of Evolution and the Darwinians, all the animals come in at once, —rears the shaggy lion, with sudden leap the flexible tiger appears, the nimble stag lifts up his branching head, the lowing herds find pastures ready for them, the insect host enters with a buzz, and in long dimension creeps with sinuous trace the worm—all this with musical expression as well as in words. The “ Representation of Chaos,” with which the oratorio opens, was played by Dr Galway on the organ—musically, I don’t doubt, whereas it should have been played chaotically. Music and chaos are Music is rhythm, accent, order, logical sequence; chaos is precisely the opposite. Under the heading “ Representation of Chaos ” Haydn might have written, “ Here let members of the orchestra tune their instruments.” I once took to a performance of the “ Creation ” a country cousin to whom everything was new. When

fiva-and-twenty fiddlers began to scrape and pluck their strings as some one struck the note A upon the piano, my cousin innocently said, looking at her programme, “ Representation of Chaos.” Sir Thomas Beecham has a story of similar drift: —

I remember a great pianist who performed -a fugue at one of the Glee and Madrigal Concerts at the Antient Concert Rooms doser the late R. M. Levey a depressing experience. “ A friend of mine,” said the great maestro, “ asked a lady who had been there how she liked the pianoforte solo, when she replied: ‘There was none performed.’ My friend assured her she was mistaken, when she said: ‘The only instrumental music I heard was when someone came in between the parts to tune the piano.’ ”

One hardly expects to hear a Roman prelate fresh from the Eucharistic Congress . deploring a tendency to materialism. Devotees by the thousand were attracted to the Sydney Congress, in troops and battalions they came from all parts of Australia and from lands beyond the sea. Yet we have Cardinal Ceretti when interviewed in Auckland on his way homeward shaking his head over the growth of materialism. At this outpost of civilisation we arc addicted to the motor car and the picture theatre; also we spend much time and energy in sport. All of which falls short of a belief that nothing exists but motor cars, picture films, and other forms of matter, as Sir Arthur Keith seems to have been telling that learned body the British Association. It is the brain, he says, that thinks and knows, wishes and desires, rejoices and is sorry; the brain secretes thought as the’ liver secretes bile. When the brain dies — Puff!—“Out, out brief candle”—and there is nothing left. On this view a man had best eat, drink, and be merry while he can, “ a hog of Epicurus’ sty,” as Horace says. Or he may give himself to pale melancholy and thoughts of suicide. The world rolls round for ever like a mill ; It grinds out death and life and good and ill ; It has no purpose, heart or mind or will. While air of Space and Time’s full river flow. The mill must blindly whirl unresting sc ; It may be wearing out, but who cun know? Man might know one thing were his sight less dim ; That it whirls not to suit his pretty whim, That it is quite indifferent to him. Nay, does it treat him harshly as he saith ? It grinds him some slow years of bitter breath, Then grinds him back into eternal death. On the other side I permit myself a ({notation from Professor Henri Bergson of the College of France, an authority on subjects of this nature worth a dozen Arthur Keiths. If the facts lead us, as they do, to regard the mental life as much more ■ vast than the cerebral life, survival becomes so probable that the burden of proof comes to lie on him who denies it rather than on him who affirms it; for the one and only reason we can have for believing in an extinction of consciousness after death is that we see the body disorganised; and this reason has no longer any value if the independence of almost the totality of consciousness in regard to the body is also a fact, of experience. — (Lecture on Mind-Energy). A tone perhaps too serious for this column. But these are words that at any rate might reasstjre Cardinal Ceretti, were he not on the high seas and beyond the range of Passing Notes. Archbishop Julius in Christchurch has been unveiling and dedicating a sundial, a duty that was new to him, he said. He had never consecrated a sundial before. His address was interesting—Archbishop Julius invariably contrives to hold attention. “ The sundial was simple in structure, it needed no winding up; it never made a fuss; it was always there to do what it was intended to do. People thought that their clocks and watches told them the true time; they told only artificial time. It was the sundial that told the true tir i.” No doubt; but under conditions. The Archbishop did not quote the motto: “ Horas non numero nisi serenas ” — “ Out of the sunlight I am of no use at all.” A tact to be remembered when we have to do with the conseientiou-: objector to military training, whose conscience, forsooth, is an infallible sundial. Here I may. bring in some remarks by another Archbishop—at Perfh, Western Australia:— " Of all the humbugs in the world, the greatest are those who talk about peace.’’ said the Chaplain-general, Archbishop Riley, when addressing

the annual congress of the Returned Soldiers’ League. “ During the war these peacemongers never did a thing to fight or bring about peace,” said Dr Riley. “ Now they want to get rid of us, and do away with armies of every kind. I guarantee that if there were the slightest chance of trouble the first people to squeal and say, ‘ Where are the soldiers? ’ would be those who are talking loudest about peace.” Zhese are the people whose conscience is an infallible guide—a sundial that they keep in a cellar and inspect by the light of a lantern. Civis.