The New Zealand Graphic AND LADIES’ JOURNAL. SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 13, 1890.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume VI, Issue 37, 13 September 1890, Page 10

The New Zealand Graphic AND LADIES’ JOURNAL. SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 13, 1890.

IE the present strikes lead to a firmer social combination and to a greater keenness of perception for the growth of abuses and the devising of remedies for them, they will not have been in vain. In fact to one who has closely studied the history of the last century, the agitations of the labour market, though lowering and thunderous in their aspect, seem to contain the elements of hope, the glimmering germ of an improved system of society, though the details of this cannot yet with any certainty be predicted.

One thing, however, is undeniable. No effort of mankind 'Can make water inn uphill, nor can any effort of man compel the capitalist to work for the employee. It is the prospect of gain which draws capital from its holes and corners, its old chests and stockings, and sets it abroad in the world stimulating labour. Without the temptation of interest there is no capitalist ; without the temptation of wages there is no labourer. We neither invest nor work for the love of others, but merely for the love of ourselves. It is mutual interest or mutual selfishness which binds us into society. Possibly the compact organisation of labour may in the end lead to a vast system of co-operation in business, where every man will be a master and every master be a man ; but in default of this no amount of socialistic legislation will do more than contract the capitalists’ margin of profit. Piolit of some sort you must leave him, othei wise he will shrink up out of sight, and consume his hoardings in idleness within, whilst without the labourers will sit down starving ami unoccupied. Then in that day men wiß practically realise the economical truth that labour is wealth, and that the community is the richer in so far as every member of it is employed usefully for his fellows. At present the waste of ability is enormous, and the possible advantages of human association are but very dimly perceived or appreciated.

Has Sir Robert Stout really the courage of the convictions which he has expressed in his letters to the daily press, or is he merely practising intellectual summersaults for the delectation of the public? If that gentleman were not a lawyer, he might perforce be excused for the illogical nature of these utterances : but in one who has had a band in the •enacting of laws and the administration of these, it is only reasonable to expect greater regard for the stability of principles and consistency of behaviour which should regulate the actions of all governments for the nonce. It is clear that in the management of all public property, such as the lailways, the government in office is bound by custom and by the spirit of justice to allow the use of them impartially and without favour to whomsoever desires to employ them in a legitimate manner. If the principle advocated by Sir Robert Stout were pushed to its logical consequences, tin* result must be either that the nation is mulcted in damages to the consignor whose goods are not transported, or in the cost of hiring extra labour to handle these, or the consignor must be specially exempted by statute from the privileges given to other consignors which would assuredly damage society by diminishing the receipts of the railway department.

I’he members of the House of Repiesentatives are clearly determined that their lights shall not shine under the bushel of non publicity. To many in <'hristtdiureh, Ihin edin, and Auckland it will seem a sort of providential dispensation in favourof these towns thatthenationalgasmeter blows itself oil in the neighbourhood of Wellington. The statute-book, that ni<tgninn and earnest of much windy

tribulation, comes to the rest of New Zealand in due course, the harbinger of untold possibilities in litigation to expectant lawyers. Otherwise, the labours of the Legislature do not trouble us much. We have so far been mercifully spared the diffusion of Hansard : but now, not to fall out of the fashion, ami the honorarium being too valuable for trilling with, the members, as a method of impressing us with their indispensability, show a disposition to ‘strike’ with their speeches. Well, it is an ill w ind that blows nobody good. <hi reading the carrying of the motion to print and diffuse the speeches of members among their constituents, there will be much rejoicing among the butchers, the buttermen, economical housewives, and the girls who put their hair in curlpapers and pad themselves out with carefully disposed arrangements of the daily journals. What the nation will pay the Government printer roundly for publishing, enterprising speculators will buy up for something considerably less than the value of the material on which they are printed, provided they purchase the speeches by measurement rather than by weight, for many speeches of honourable members, would, if discharged, be heavy enough to sink the most powerful of hostile ironclads that might be sent against these shores.

Gentlemen with baritone voices in the colony can take heart. The baritone voice is beginning to look up in the world. It is a mere straw that shows which way the wind is blowing, but in a witticism published in these columns last week a baritone is represented as singing to a young lady, ‘ Won’t you kiss me in the Spring-time?’ and she replies, ‘ What's the matter with doing it now ?’ Formerly she would only have said this to a tenor, and the baritone would have gone on warbling till the Greek Kalends before he would have been the recipient of such a delightful suggestion. It used to be the soprano who went beaming about upon the aim of the host with an attendant train of the jeunesse doree presenting flowers, or the tenor w ho, buried in a nimbus of worshipping femininity, quaffed champagne in response to the languishing eyes of his admirers. Meanwhile the baritone drank small beer, anil received the congratulations of elderly females in the cold shadow s of a distant corner. The consequence was (as Mapleson in his memoirs shows) a frightful development of conceit in sopranos and tenoi s ; while the cause of true modesty was upheld -no doubt with some reluctance by the contraltos and the baiitones.

As a matter of fact, time was, in the early part of last century, when the male orfemale soprano was the only voice to which it was considered worth one’s while to listen. Later on the tenor voice grew more into favour, and it, with the soprano —unless some portentous basso was in occasional eruption,—monopolised the glory of the operatic stage of fifty years ago. Now it seems that the exigencies of modern orchestration require the baritone. He alone has the combination of power, richness, and range capable of contending with the heavily-weighted accompaniments and declamatory solos of the latest opera and cantata. Those who heard Santley in his zenith, and not when he was the merest shadow of his former glorious self, or the great French baritone Fame, can alone conceive what the beauty of the baritone is in its perfection. But voices of such quality are even more exceptional than fine sopranos and tenors, and we in New Zealand have never yet heard a typical specimen. It is like a mixture of honey and vinegar —a quivering ring of shearing richness thrilling to the very rafters of a great concert hall, and dominating the whole orchestra.

The voice of Dunedin is exclaiming about the absence of a public library in that town. It is strange that a community which has reared so substantial and handsome a city, ami has so many fine public monuments, should have remained content with that makeshift institution, ‘The Athemeuin,’ so long. It is not even public in its nature as far as the circulating department is concerned, though the excellent reading and newspaper r< is are very liberally thrown open to mere sojourners in the town. The lingering I'alvanistie prejudices of the place insist, moreover, upon closing it, like the publichouses, during the hours of Sunday evening service, so that it is only in the afternoon of that day the necessary and whole-

some recreation of reading is practicable, even to subscribers. Canterbury College is more liberal than this, and at Christchurch throws open its doms on both the afternoon and evening of the Lord’s Day to anybody who chooses to avail themselves of the privilege. Auckland, so far, can flatter herself in having distanced her sister cities in this respect. Her Public Library, though not so effective in appearance without as it might have been, is, on the whole, a cause of legitimate boasting. The reading-room in particular is extraordinarily airy and handsome, ami would put to shame cities of many times the size of Auckland. It is, besides, open twice on Sundays, in the afternoon and evening, and serves a welcome place of resort and entertainment to persons who would not go to church, ami nevertheless find no pleasure in aimlessly perambulating the public thoroughfares.

ho form the class of persons that deface public monuments, smash the public seats, break ornamental railings to pieces, score hideous hieroglyphics in freshly-cemented walls, hack the tombstones of our ancestors, and rifle cemeteries of their immortelles and their flowers ? This theft of flowers in graveyards, as in private gardens, is very common among our population, and betokens a lamentably coarse and vulgar tone in the minds of many parents, who view such vandalism in their children with indifference or lightly-expressed reprobation. Democracy and democratic institutions are not good for much if they do not teach people self-respect in respecting the property and the memorials of others, even though these appear of a trifling value, or of none but a sentimental importance. To pick one flower off a stranger’s grave, though not legitimate, may be accompanied with a feeling of love for its beauty ami reverence for the environment in which it i found, which is pardonable ; but the wholesale and deliberate plundering of the floral treasures of the cemeteries, often from motives of vanity or gain, is an abuse so common that it ceases to attract sufficient notoriety and condemnation. Such offences as these should naturally fall more within the operation of public opinion than of the criminal law, and are rarely committed by persons who enjoy the advantage of truly relined ami elevated influences either in their homes or in their schools.

The W’oes arising out of the case of Jarudyce v. Jarudyce have long been wont to inspire in readers of ‘ Bleak House ’ feelings of the most acute sympathy with the sufferers and detestation for a now extinct condition of the law. But the leopard cannot change his spots, nor the Etliopian his skin, and ever since the time Shakespeare wrote complaining of ‘ the law’s delay,’ the question of how to obtain justice, and expeditious justice, has been pretty successfully eluded by the swarm of practitioners who buzz about the corpus juris. However, though truth be a long time prevailing, a modicum of retribution does sometimes fall upon the head of the oppressor. There is a Mr G. W. Ell down South who, in pursuit of a real or fancied grievance, lias for years been giving the legal fraternity in Christchurch some veritable Ell (with the Greek aspirate). It would be difficult to say how many lawyers in Hereford-street have ‘ sported their oak’ when they knew Mr Ell was approaching upon his diurnal rampage, or to explain the desperate and surreptitious shifts to which they have been put in evading the avenger at luncheon time. The notion of the client hunting his lawyer down the street is an interchange of parts which is the more delicious on account of its excessive rarity, and one which should entitle Mr Ell to an illustrative fresco and a statue in the Walhalla of New Zealand when that Hall of National Heroes shall take shape. As a last resort Mr El] has gone to our Houses of Parliament, at whose feast of reason and flow of soul he is in a sort of forlorn fashion exhibiting the skeleton of his troubles. One thing is certain, if he gets no satisfaction, and no plausible excuse can be devised for locking him up, it is merely a question of time about his penetrating to the footstool of the throne of < jueen Victoria or her successor. Only the arch-enemy will stop him.