THE new zealand graphic AND LADIES’ JOURNAL. SATURDAY, DECEMBER 12, 1891.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume VIII, Issue 50, 12 December 1891, Page 680

THE new zealand graphic AND LADIES’ JOURNAL. SATURDAY, DECEMBER 12, 1891.

It is curious to note how every year the feeling of solidaritc is growing among the English-speaking peoples. Half a century ago, when there were no Australasian colonies worth consideration, when the United States had little more than a third of their piesent population, and a sparselypeopled Canada was half in revolt against the ruling powers in England, it would not have entered into the mind of the most optimistic thinker to predict the development which would take place among the English-speaking race, and the greater good feeling which would now penetrate the whole body. At that time the Mother Country and her seceded daughter, Columbia, were not on the best of terms with one another. Isolation and estrangement had originally contributed to accentuate differences between them, and to a great extent gave rise to the war of the Revolution and that ■of 1814. On looking back in the light of our present liberality of knowledge we see how improbable such occurrences would have been under the present dispensation, and how, with more frequent intercommunication, the narrow views which tend to induce misunderstanding and rupture between those of the same blood are each year becoming loet in a wider sympathy.

Much as new countries may resent the criticism of travellers from older societies, the frequent appearance of these passing comments alone indicates the interest which is taken in them. Curiously enough, directly after the second war between England and the United States in 1814, there began to spring up a literature of travel bearing upon the latter and proceeding from the pen of the übiquitous British globe trotter, who was even seventy years ago not to be deterred from exploring the mysteries of the Unknown West by the difficulties of travel. The Americans seem for many years to have contented themselves with absorbing their ideas of the mother country through the English literature transmitted across the Atlantic ; but the knowledge of the peculiarities of America, in the absence of a native American literature and the present system of newspaper correspondence, was conveyed to the British Isles generally by one of those restless spirits animated by the old roving instincts of Raleigh and of Drake. Gradually, by this means, the growing democratic party at Home grew to take a deeper interest in their free brethren beyond the Atlantic, a process which was vastly accelerated by the growing popularity of the writings of Americans like Washington, Irving, Longfellow, Prescott, and Mrs Harriet Beecher Stowe.

It will never be known to what extent the Federal States owed the neutrality of England during the War of Secession to the influence of these writers. All well-wishers of the English race who recollect the imminent danger there was of England assisting the Confederate States to rend the I nion asunder in 1863, cannot but be grateful to the memories of the above-named authors. The penis mightier than the sword, and the human race owes a debt of gratitude to all those who have exerted their influence to link mankind together by the invisible but electrical chains of sympathy. < fnly the other day in the protest of a number of influential persons at Home against the contemplated refusal to receive the Australian cricketers we see a delightful indication of this sentiment, to which even the recently much-abused articles of these colonies by English travellers must have contributed their quota of influence.

It is a remarkable feature of the age to note the extent to which popular sports tend to create a common feeling among

those of the British race, and this tendency increases with each succeeding year. The Americans who formerly neglected open -air pastimes are fast changing in this respect, and the American papers are found rejoicing over the development of cricket in Philadelphia or the presence of a scion of Columbia in the Cambridge eight, just as might the Australian. Of course, the process does not escape the gibes of the Yankee press man, who is only too delighted to have a fresh object on which to exercise his wit, and the growing Anglo-mania in the older States comes in for some hard knocks at his hands. Similarly on the other side of the Atlantic rabid English journals, from time to time, raise a fierce tirade against or a querulous lament over the Americanising of English institutions, over the inundation of London with Yankee cousins, and the terribly free ideas which young English women are imbibing from that source, even unto revolting against chaperonage and riding upon bicycles. Assisted by a few fashionable marriages, the American girl is fast becoming the mode with the English middle-class woman, and while la belle Americaine infuses something more of dash and independence into the fair Britisher, the latter does not fail to impart something of her softness of manner and speech into her dashing cousin. Thus do the various sections of the British race scatter over the globe, and having garnered experience and developed new characteristics, come together again and exchange ideas to their mutual benefit and improvement.

* She never told her love, but sat like patience on a monument,’ says Shakespeare, and so in every generation there have been many women who have realised the fallacy of the saying that everything, comes to those who wait, who have waited in vain for a proposal from the man of their heart. If after all they have consented to link their lot with another, the recollection of the man they did not get will always loom up regretfully in moments when the existing spouse fails to realize the expectations formed of him, and he sinks by comparison with a past ideal. Hard statistics represent the existence of laws operating everywhere, even in the region of romance, and shows us bow the number of marriages are dependent upon the price of corn, and how a certain percentage of recreant bachelors and stranded spinsters can be predicted at any given period. The growing scope of science tends more and more to narrow the domain of free-will, but in the province of match-making it might still be possible for women to give a practical contradiction to the apparently inevitable by getting up and putting on the armour of ‘.cheek.’

Of cheek there are, of course, all degrees, and if a man is to be compelled to falsify the doctrine of averages in his person, the lady who is going to illustrate her superiority to the laws of necessity, and is bent upon taking him prisoner in spite of his being predestined by statistics to go free, must regulate her artillery-practice accordingly. Base figures show that after twenty-five a woman’s chances of marrying decrease by about one-third, but this still leaves a wide margin of opportunity in any individual instance, and if audacity on her part should not be productive of success, it can, at all events, afford her much more pleasure than self-suppression. Napoleon used to believe that the advantage always lay with the attacking party, and, indeed, nothing is more calculated to create faint-hearted-ness and end in failure than passivity. Unfortunately, the whole tendency of female education hitherto has been to inculcate passivity and make feigning in women a kind of second-nature. No wonder that they are at last rising and defying Mrs Grundy, and did they only realize what a coward and hypocrite that old lady is, they would have been much quicker to strike.

As for men, they are not much better than Mrs Grundy, and they are terribly frightened of the onslaught of a fascinating woman, because they know that one of that sex never wastes her strength for naught. Men can sit down and commune with the Howers and enjoy the fragrance these insensibly distil with impartiality upon all around, bnt. unlike the Howers, the lady who will condescend to charm a man for any length of time gratuitously is yet to be discovered. No bill will be delivered, no formal account presented, but after the lapse of a period of ecstasy,

mild bliss, enjoyment, or mere satisfaction, the sense of obligation will be riveted upon the unconscious dreamer, and he will be cornered in some way or another, ami made to render a passing, or posebly a life-long service. Even under the present defective system much has been effected in this way. When the new regime is inaugurated it will be a question for men to consider whether anything short of absolute flight will avail. Possibly the time may come when they will be seen belatedly invoking the aid of Mrs Grundy, and sighing for the good old times when they could dodge the ladies behind her ample skirtsand frowning brow.

Mr Rudyard Kipling was struck by the political precocity of New Zealand. Even an Englishman accustomed as he is to the excitement of electioneering, is inclined to note the ‘ liveness ’ of politics in this young land, and to an AngloIndian the tendency must seem very much more pronounced. The system of British Government in India is as purely autocratic in theory as is that of the Russian Czar or the Emperor of China, and is a remarkable example of the way in which a democratic people has been obliged to adapt its methods to the requirements of oriental nature. Since the Indian Mutiny all that is best in the British intellect has united to devise the most righteous and benevolent form of despotic government which the world has ever seen. There the most liberal views hardly won in past ages by the advanced section of mankind are enforced in so far as it is safe and equitable for the benefit of a childlike people.

Much as it is the custom to scoff at the pertinacity with which England holds on to her Indian Empire, she is so far right in that it is quite as bright a jewel in her bead-roll of fame as either America, Canada, or Australasia. If in the latter she has proved how she can successfully people the waste places of the earth, she has in the former demonstrated her capability of solving a problem in attempting which Imperial Rome lamentably failed. Compare the way in which England has treated India, even under the imperfect regime before the Mutiny, with the blood-sucking methods of ancient Rome towards her tributary provinces and the present rottenness and repression of the Russian autocracy. Persons who have lived long in India as one of the dominant race, acquire sentiments, benovelent certainly, but nevertheless despotic. Their maxim is‘all for the peoplethroughtheGovernment,’andit worksso well for every body in India that they are apt to regard the political vagaries of Englishmen elsewhere as absurd, entirely forgetting that it is through such tentative processes in the past that the beneficent spirit in which India is governed has been evolved. There are even reactionaries in our midst who are inclined to contrast the prompt and lordly methods of the Indian Government with the hamble-scramble manner in which Government proceeds here, and would have us revert to a modified form of Crown Government. This is a wild notion akin to stopping time by arresting the hands of the clock. The appearance of over-government in these colonies is a sign of intellectual life and intelligence in the population itself, who seek upon a solution of the questions which perplex them and thus work, out their own fsalva tion rather than rely upon others to do it for them.