PASSING REFLECTIONS

Taranaki Daily News, 8 May 1930, Page 6

PASSING REFLECTIONS

THE WORLD’S WAY. ODDS AND ENDS.

(By

S.S.)

Tlie reprints of the volumes of the Spectator between 1711 and 1715, issued in 1771 —as a bugbear, it might seem, to the schoolboys of three or four generations —do not suggest that the journalese of the present day is much - less polished than was the studied language of Addison and his contemporaries of two hundred odd years ago. “I had lon<r made love to a lady, in the possession. of whom I am now the happiest of mankind, whose hand 1 should have gained with much difficulty without the assistance of a cat,” runs a paragraph in one of the latest issues of this historic publication. “You must know, then, that my most, dangerous rival had so strong an aversion to this species that he infallibly swooned away, at the si-rht of that harmless creature. _ My friend Mrs. Lucy, her maid, having a greater respect for me and my purse than she had for my rival,, always took care to pin the tail of a cat under the <rown of her mistress, whenever she knew of his coming; which had such an effect that every time he e/.tered the room, he looked more like one of the figures in Mr. Salmon’s wax-work than •a°desirable lover. . In short he grew sick of her company,. which the young lady taking notice of . (who no more knew why “than lie did .) she sent me a chanllenge to nje/itt her in Lincoln’s Inn Chapel, which 1 joyfully accepted and have (among other pleasures) the satisfaction of being .praised by her for my stratagem.” Obviously this stpry was not furnished by Addison, ..who would have garnished it with many classical phrases and passages; but the great writer himself, , who is said to have accumulated some £lO,OOO or £12,000 from his association with the Spectator and to have employed it in the- establishment of “an estate,” does not read like a person who would have been particularly useful about a newspaper office in these later days. HASTY. CONCLUSION. The. newspapers-lately have opened their columns widely to the discussion of electoral reform, and many of their correspondents.hp<ve.. betrayed a strangely confused icle.a | 'of the meaning of the term. This is' not the ease, however, with a contributor to one of the evening newspapers, who, knowing well enough what he was writing about, strangely misconstrued the late Mr, Massey’s attitude towards the revision of the electoral laws. “There was a time,” this authority says, “when the Reform Party under the leadership ..of Mi\ Massey worshipped at ’the 'shrine of proportional representation, and when at length the party was ensconced on the Treasury Benches it did pass an Act providing for the election of the Legislative Council by the proportional representation system. The war came and ended and in the meantime the National Government, at Reform Party instigation, amended the legislation respecting th. Legislative Council by providing that proportional representation should become operative by Proclamation instead of by Order-in-Council. And that is the last ever heard of it, till some time about 1919. when Mr. Massey confessed that ‘first past the post’ was good enough for him.” This authority has wholly misconstrued the position. The Reform Party never worshipped at the shrine of “proportional representation.” In 1910 ,Mr. Massey pledged himself and his party to an. elective Legislative Council without dearly understanding what his obligation entailed. Two years later he was in office with a majority of five or six and in the first session of the succeeding Parliament, 1915, shortly after, the outbreak of the Great War, he carried his Legislative Council Bill through both Houses, only to be interrupted by the negotiations between the two. parties in which the. Liberals insisted upon the Act being suspended during the course of the war. Maybe a majority of the Reformers are glad enough to have the measure held in suspense, but Mr. Massey was not personally responsible for its absence from the Statute Book. PEDIGREES. That the war has very materially lessened the value of pedigrees is demonstrated by the fact that a copy of Burke’s “Genealogical and Heraldic Histoi ; y of the Colonial Gentry,” tin two volumes; artistically bound and elegant; ly printed, originally sold at 355, may now be purchased in a second-hand book shop for mo more than a shilling a . volume. Tha book still is of more than passing interest to New Zealanders, however, since it may reveal to any one of them that he is living next door to a descendant of one of the doughty knights who crossed to England with William the Conqueror, or boarding under the roof of a landlady, whose lineage runs back by devious lines to the primitive days of Boadicea, the “British Warrior Queen.” . . But, jesting apart, Burkes “Colonial Gentry” is a veritable treasury of pereonal information. It tells us that the Hon. William Rolleston, one of'the. biggest figures in the development-of this country, was descended from the knightly family of Rolleston, of Rollcs.ton, and that a writ still exists : in which William de Peverel, brother of William the Conqueror, makes a grant, ■of land tb ' William de Rolleston : and Amaba : hib wife. The"n there 'is Sir • Gcotge' Grey;- twice Governor of ' NewZealand'and'’ afterwards its- Prime:. Minister, descended 'from the Lords of Prados, who took'An active part in'the French wars of the fourteenth century. Again Sir ‘Robert Stout, if we must keep to politicians, is traced back to a family of Nbrse or Danish origin that has resided in the southern portion of the Shetland Islands for many centuries. Sir Charles Bowen, for some time Minister of the Crown and afterwards Speaker of the Legislative- Council, ip accredited' with ancient Welsh descent, “aa it eet forth in his pedigree, recorded in the Office of Arma, Dublin Castle”; but later, in 1578, his ancestors are found in possession of “the castle town and lands of Bally Adam.” Obviously an enterpririing family. .And so on and no on with ninety odd other New Zealandois. KEEPING TIME. In 19b8, when that most methodical of all Mirimtern of the Crown, Sir Harry Atkinson, was at the head of the Government, the New Zealand House of Representatives took to keeping time of itself. It recorded the date on which it assembled, the date on which it prorogued, the total days the asesion lasted the total days en which the House met, the hours, ft sat before midnight, the

hours it sat after midnight, the total number of hours on which it sat, and th daily average hours and minutes of its sittings. The system now has been in vogue for forty years, and. though it may not have had much effect upon those loquacious members of the House who render noise rather than service to their constituents and to the Dominion, it provides useful measure of the time that is passing. The longest session on record during thp period indicated is that of 1913, extending from June 26 to December 15, running into 173 days, 102 days of meeting, 887 hours 45 minutes of siting, a daily average of 8 hours 42 minutes. This was the middle session of the Reformer’s first possession of the Treasury Benches after a lapse of twenty-three years, and it must be eaid for Mr. Massey and his colleagues that the Opposition, which confronted them after a corresponding period of possession, did not go far out of its way to facilitate the business of the new Government. Other long sessions were those of 1927, extending over 166 day; of 1910, extending over 158 days; of 1907, extending over 152 days and of 1921, extending, with a break for Christmas,, over 143 days. The longest average daily sitting, 10 hours and. 10 minutes, recorded since the check was instituted, was in 1897; but previous to this, in 1876, a total of 853 hours 10 minutes represented a daily average of 10 hours 28 minutes. The Legislative Council conducts its business so decorously that it needs no such checks as those applied to the House.