A LORN FISHERMAN.

Observer, Volume XXIV, Issue 26, 12 March 1904, Page 2

A LORN FISHERMAN.

Dick's Weakened Backbone,

WHAT has come over King Dick ? He is not the man he was ten

years ago. Then he stood up like a Roman centurion or a Praetorian guard, acting on his own initiative" and willing to take the consequences, and with a disposition to take " slack " from nobody. Ten years ago, if a coterie of " meenisters " had passed a resolution condemning him for going a-fishing of a Sunday, he would have Bent them to — well, somewhere. But all that has changed. Instead of telling the parsons that if it pleased him to go fishing he would go, he looks at them in pious wonder, and asks how can they be so ungenerous as to suppose that he could break the Sabbath ! And then, when it turns out that he has been a-fishing after all, and there is no longer room for denial, he complains that the parsons are treating him with less indulgence than they showed to the Apostles, who were fishermen, and might possibly have cast their lines on a fine Sunday morning !

It is an awful drop from the centurion to the mender of nets, unless the transfer be in some way compensated for by an accession oi spiritual grace, which is hardly likely in King Richard's case. The change seems to be fuller evidence of weakness, of softening of backbone, concerning which many things have been symptomatic for a considerable time. This apologetic attitude towards the Boanerges family is of a pattern with his humble pose before the prohibitionists, and his still more obsequious posturing in view of the political females. And the sadness of it is that the change has been brought about not by conviction, not by the inward expansion of those seeds of sensibility that are selt-sown in the hearts of all men^-but by Tear !

He certainly has no love for the parsons who have made him shiver in his boots, and he even plucks up courage enough to tell them that their intolerance is keeping men away from the Chnrch. Now, does it ever occur to Richard that his own over-tolerance for the prohibitionist, the parson, and the political woman are driving away the men — that is the virile, commonsense units of the population — from his Party ? This constant truckling to those influences that make for disunion and anarchy is damaging Richard's mana very considerably, and must end in its destruction. It seems to us the Premier was a better man when he was just a simple champion of the unionists. He was merely a partisan and special pleader then, it is true, but it is better to plead for another than to be pleading for oneself, and that is what Richard has come to at last.