PASSING NOTES.

Otago Witness, Issue 4074, 12 April 1932, Page 3

PASSING NOTES.

When the proprietors of a certain famous detergent advertised its cleansing capabilities by proclaiming that “ it won’t wash clothes,” they implied that it could do everything else, and do that well. P.y (i triumphant astuteness, thej implicitly charged every other article destined to similar uses as making a quite fraudulent claim to omnipotence. They also knew human nature. For d< we not all prefer the specialist who admits his limitations to the mere general practitioner who doesn’t? I might myself be attracted to a patent medicine advertised as a specific for gout, and gout only, if it boldly proclaimed that it could not cure anything else. But in this Note I did not set out to discuss the ethics of business methods. Heaven forbid! I wish merely to imply that there may be a Close resemblance between a soap that won’t wash what it is not intended to wash and a political policy that should not be condemned as vicious merely because of a weakness or two. A specific is'none the worse for not being a panacea. Yet most of the criticism levelled against the new protective tariffs in the British House of Commons was precisely of this illogical character. Sir Herbert Samuel,

Liberal Freetrader in the composite National Government, violated the tradi tional collective responsibility of Cabinet by delivering a malignant diatribe on the. weaknesses of Protection. Mt Runciman, as an ex-Frcetrader, knew better than anyone else the defects of his newly adopted faith; and his anti-Samuel speech was a triumph. Says a London paper of last month :—

To directness, aptness of illustration, and simplicity of argument, he has long accustomed us; but there was a new quality of wit. “ No, and it won’t wash clothes,” was his sarcastic interjection when he was dealing with the detailed objections of Sir Herbert Samuel to the general tariff. It sounded like a frivolous jibe at the spirit of those objections: but, in fact, it was both serious and effective, for his case from beginning to end is that our need is entirely practical, and made by hard facts.

In fact a political theory, doctrine, ordinance, or Bill which sets out to be a panacea for all social ills is suspect from the start. We have such things all around us whose only claim to our indulgence is a certain laudable indignation which inspires them. The proponents of the merits of these all-purging soaps become a nuisance when they condemn an efficient cleanser merely because it won’t wash clothes as well. The rural settlement Bill before the House of Representatives won’t create a new heaven and a new earth in New Zealand. It was not intended to do it. But it will do what it was meant to do—relieve the present unemployment. “ What good will the new Government loan do towards stabilising our finances? ” cries one orator. That was not its purpose. It merely pays off certain Treasury bills falling due, leaving a little balance over for petty cash. And it does this very well. The observance of these pitfalls of criticism should make us more tolerant of human failings, and more indulgent towards certain political methods. Why charge the speeches of the Opposition with being unconvincing? They are not intended to be. The orators are not speaking to convince anybody. They are merely self-expressive, or are merely addressing their own colleagues, or are merely hoping that their own constituents may note the zeal they are showing and may applaud—when the time arrives. When an Opposition member hurls at the Premier’s face the expression “ clod-hopper complex,” why criticise the expression as being lacking in sense, in tact, in ? We would be condemning it for the absence of quali ties it was not meant to possess. And him too.

Columns known euphemistically as “ vital statistics ” have been appearing for weeks past in the daily press. To the man in the street they make disquieting reading, telling him of a falling birthrate, a diminishing survival rate, and the approaching end of things. Birth and death rates in England and Wales during 1931 were 15.8 and 12.3 per 1000 of the population and the survival rate was 3.5. What of it? In Tennyson’s day —for the naive simplicity of the poet" cannot help dabbling in vital statistics —the survival rate was nil! Tn his “ Vision of Sin ” he says:

Every moment dies a man. And every moment one is born. Sir George Trevelyan corrected him, saying that this left the population in a stationary position, with decay lurking round the corner. Trevelyan urged the poet to alter the lines to

Every moment dies a man, And one and one-sixteenth is born,

The exact figure, said the critic, was 1.047, but, hang it all, some respect is

due to metre. Darwinian zoologists, those men of gentle hearts but ruthless intellects, applying to humanity the lessons derived from vital statistics in the animal world, are even less comforting. For, said one of them recently:

Out .of every hundred children born in London, 75 per cent, died before the age of 5 in 1730, but only 32 per cent, in 1830. The improvement in the death rate was due to improved sanitation and methods of treatment of infantile diseases. This improvement is still going on; and consequently our very humanitarianism lias begun to be a scourge to us.

That our “humanitarianism is a scourge ” is easily proved by our zoologist in a few examples. And what method of proof is more cogent? You simply can’t escape it. A first example : —

A pair of thrushes which begin to breed at the age of one year, and produce on an average eight young during a season, will live normally for about 10 years. If all the young survived, by the time the original parents had completed their term of existence they would have given rise to a population of 16,000,000. Multiply this single pair of mating thrushes by the number of thrush-nests in one English woodland glade, and you will get a plague of thrushes and a pandemonium of thrush-notes. A second example:— If all the herring-fry survived, the herring population would increase 5500 fold every year, so that, were it possible, the sea would become a

solid mass of herrings. And an English train might go to New York across the “ Herring Pond.” Further:—

Ordinarily, the population of thrushes and of herrings remains the same from year to year because of the enormous death rate. But occasionally the population of herrings and other foodfish undergoes enormous increases. We then rejoice at a good fishing season. If the increase occurs among land animals we call them “plagues” or “visitations of God.”

Periods of great productivity among human populations have occurred in the past, sending out the mediasval Huns as a “ visitation of God,” and forcing Anglo-Saxon invaders to the conquest of Britain. They may occur again. But surplus men have now nowhere to go. What will have to be done with them ? Not being a zoologist, I shrink from making a suggestion.

Another fond conception of our schoolboy days has been shattered. Or, if not shattered, it is damaged beyond possibility of repair. According to the august Society of Genealogists in London the number of families in Britain who could claim and prove their descent in the direct male line from King William’s knights of the Norman Conquest is not as great as we thought. As a matter of fact, there are only two or three. William of Poitiers, a contemporary writer, gave the names of twelve companions who fought by the side of the Conqueror of Hastings. But, alas, no descent in the direct male line can now be traced back to any one of them. Surnames, we are told, are of no account in determining a pedigree. John may have been the son of a Norman baron. His son or grandson probably married a peasant and became a smith or a' miller. Later on, when surnames were generally adopted, we get Johnson, Smith and

Miller. Of families claiming a debatable descent in the female line there is apparently a fair number —as many as 315. But

the fat fell into the fire when the memorial was unveiled last year at Falaise to the “ knights who fought at Hastings.” The rigid pruning by expert genealogists of the many claimants for the privilege of being associated with the unveiling started a warfare of words at the society’s meeting which lasted for two hours and a-half. And the President (Lord Farrer) was driven in the end to suggest that the issue be fought out de novo on the battlefield of Hastings next July when the French historians who have admitted the claims to descent will be among the visitors to the historical pageant in the grounds of Battle Abbey.

Apropos of last week’s Note on difficult rhyming, a correspondent writes:— Dear “ Civis,”—l am largely in accord with you as to the possibility of finding rhymes to English words even the fearfulest of wild fowl; but there are, you know, what schoolboys in my young days used to call “ teasers. ’ What about a rhyme to “crocodile”? Can you, or any of your readers, rhyme it? It can be done by the invention of a farmer of the name of Dyle:— A huge ugly brute of a crocodile Frequented a pool by the rock o’ Dyle ; He had plenty to eat, For though grace before meat He said not, he fed on the flock o’ Dyle.

But this is cheap. lam sure that makers of Limericks get better fun from the quaint spelling game, of which I offer a fresh example:— The sheep were attacked by a leopard, But the watchful and valiant sheopard, He came with a run

And his grandfather’s gun. And the prowler was properly peopard. The grandfather’s gun suggests another far from easy word to find a rhyme for—“ blunderbuss.” Though I think some of the younger folk might manage a Limerick, seeing that —but there is no need to offer hints to them, I am sure, Rimer. Another correspondent adds a contribution :—

The celebrated Professor Jowett was once, at some social gathering, challenged to produce a rhyme to “month.” He speedily achieved one in the following lines:—

Young gentlemen who would famous be In Cambridge University, Must burn the midnight oil from month to month And raise binomials to the n plus oneth. The rhyme’s the thing.

Civis.