Things from the EMPIRE CITY

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XIII, Issue III, 21 July 1894, Page 54

Things from the EMPIRE CITY

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THE AUTOGRATIC IDEER.

It isn’t quite the thing, I think, to go to a The First i secular hall on a Sunday evening to look for the first man. In the first place, the first man won’t be found there. Nor do I know where else one should seek him. Twenty or so years ago, the first man was undoubtedly Adam ; and if one went to any Christian church at all, one could hear all about him. Recently, however, Adam as the first ot the human race is not spoken of from ecclesiastical pulpits, for the simple reason that, as Adam could not be made older than 6,000 years, and as research has demonstrated that many men were about this earth, and even working upon it (albeit in a rude way and with very primitive weapons) anyhow some 33,000 years since—Adam cannot, by any possibility, have been the first man. All the same, it isn’t, as I say, quite the thing to go to a secular and scientific lecture on the Sabbath evening to discover anything as to the real and bona fide first man, or, indeed, to trouble about him. One ought to go to church instead : to go to church and be satisfied to know that if a man called Adam did live some five thousand years ago, he was not, at all events, the first man. Who the first man really was, or if there was a first man, at all, nobody at present can prove. But quite a large audience accompanied Mr W. W. Collins, M.H.R., in his ‘Search for the First Man,’ at the Exchange Hall last Sunday evening. They were all, or very nearly all, working people. The working man has a very natural craving to know for a dead certainty how so extraordinary a creature originated, and what sort of people his first parents really were. More refined and cultured persons don’t care to go so far back ; the firm root of a good old genealogical tree planted by the Norman Conqueror A.D. 1100 suffices. Many ladies and even youths of both sexes were in the assembly. The former, I observed, were not at all sorry to get rid of Adam and his too scanty fig leaf, and I should judge that Eve was disposed of in quite as joyful a manner. However, to displace Adam from the initial position he has occupied for so many centuries is one thing—to find the man to put in his place, and who undoubtedly did live on this earth tens of thousands of years ago, is quite another thing. It’s not a bit of use putting a gorilla there, nor yet any ape : we do not find the first man in that way. I must do Mr Collins the justice to say that he didn’t attempt anything of the sort. He did not, indeed find, or even look for, the first man at all—he promised to do these things at some other time. Meanwhile he picked up some very instructive scraps of knowledge which he found on his search, and these he gave to the audience in an extremely lucid and interesting way. What everybody wants in these times is ascertained truth, and so long as the lecturer keeps to this, his addresses must be instructive and edifying. Eor instance, that account which he gave of the finding of the rude and crude representation of an Irish elk cut into the bone of an Irish elk which must necessarily have lived and died some thirty thousand years ago ! In this way, but in no other, will it be possible eventually—after a very lengthened process and period o research—to solve the stupendous problem how man came to be the wonderful, not very admirable, not very loveable, but still infinitely superior being to all others—which he is ! Mr P. J. O'Regan, M.H.R., occupied the Exwag's. charge Hall on the following night, and discoursed very differently. Although the rain descended in torrents, the learned and bold member for Inangabua had an excellent and most attentive House. A lady writer in the Graphic has, I believe, expressed a desire that Mr O'Regan should be ‘sat upon.’ I don’t know. I’m sure, why : furthermore, the thing can’t be done. Nor do I think anybody will try to do it. If anybody makes the attempt Mr O'Regan is bound to come out on top. The reason for this is, that Mr O'Regan is honest; that he has opinions ; and that he has courage to enunciate them in clear unmistakeable terms. Also be is a well read man ;

a well-informed man, and a man of considerable, and expanding, ability. He is a very young man and a New Zealander. These two reasons are quite sufficient to account for his extreme ardour in certain directions. As he grows older bis views will undergo modification—all men who have views extending beyond themselves and their own interest must, in time, declare that * all is vanity.’ But let us hope there is a wide interval to fill up with pleasant visions, and, maybe, with substantial personal success, for the fiery spirit chosen by the Reefton miners to represent them. I only wish there were a majority of just such men in our Assembly—and I am not a single taxer ! They might not, nay, it is very certain that they could not, do nearly all that they would like to do to benefit the poor and the weak and the comparatively helpless. But their efforts, methods, and measures would tend in that direction, and they would, at all events, achieve something for New Zealand humanity. Mr O’Regan's lecture was on • Wages. He hadn’t a great deal to say about wages as wages. He carried us back by dozens of different roads and routes to the source of wages—the land. Nearly the whole of his address was devoted to the consideration of land and rent, labour and wages, and capital and interest. He spoke of trade unions as selfish organisations, which enclosed a fence round certain men—shutting out all others ; and he said it was futile to look for the advancement of the labouring classes through the medium of ‘ shoddy labour bills,’ which didn’t do anybody either good or harm. Thrift was a good thing when it did not assume the nature of downright meanness—but thrift was no remedy for poverty ; if everybody was meanly thrifty wages would necessarily fall, owing to the lessened demand for hundreds of articles. The same with regard to temperance—even temperance and thrift together couldn’t make wages higher or employment more plentiful. Nor would any scheme to make the rich poor, and the poor rich, mend matters ; we would not increase wages by any such methods, nor make a fair day’s wages for a fair day’s work more certain. Mr O’Regan was quite eloquent and somewhat severe in his denunciation of the trades unionism which shut a man out from the organisation, and then called him a ‘ blackleg ’ when he went to work to earn a crust for a perhaps famishing wife and family ! This is truly honest talk. New Zealand may now, and will, I trust, certainly one day, be proud of producing so fearless, so straight, a politician. I need scarcely say that Mr O’Regan’s remedy for all our ills—all the world’s many ills—is the single tax. 1 was not aware that the single taxers were so strong, so powerful, and so increasingly active, as they apparently are. This one tax, the single-taxers tell us, is to raise wages ; to find employment for everybody ; to diminish poverty and crime ; and to do ever so many other good things. I am afraid it is too late now, to introduce this tax into the world, anyhow ; but were it adopted it wouldn’t, I think, do the great things expected from it. But were I as young as Mr O’Regan is, I shouldn’t have the smallest doubt about the matter. What's the startling and scant telegrams from the .... country which provides bewitching heiresses for so many of the peers of England, puzzle a America! great many people, who, apparently, are quite unable to understand what is really wrong in the home of the brave and the free ’ The New Zealand Times has got some glimmering idea as to the cause of the trouble; and the Evening Post, I am sure, knows all about it, and yet one meets well-informed citizens every day in Willis-street, and even in Thorndon, whose notions of what’s the matter, are of the most hazy, and even inaccurate character. The majority imagine that a strike, a week or so old, is on, and that, after a season of noise and distress, it will end—as strikes almost invariably do end—in the total collapse of the strikers. Noone can very well guess how the trouble in the great Republic may terminate ; the probabilities are not in favour of the men, but, as we are informed that the population of the States generally sympathise with the multitude which has re volted, the issue is more than usually uncertain. Yet, as" to the cause of the upheaval, some things are quite clear to all readers of books ; and let us take a man of substance to start with, in making our investigations—a man worth, say, ten millions of money. There are several such men in the United States. I hope you don’t envy them, or wish them evil, or even ill-luck—l’m quite sure I don’t. But, all the same, it is a fact that a man cannot, in three, or thirty years, accumulate £10,000,000, or even £1,000,000, without injuiing, not to say robbing, his fellows. There are all

sorts of millionaires in the United States, from the man worth ten millions to the man worth one million ; and indeed the number of the latter is so large that it is quite safe to say that never before on the face of this earth in any era whatever, were so many * disgustingly lich ’ folk to be counted, amongst a population of sixty two million souls. Then, there are the still more numerous individuals, who are very nearly millionaires, and who are straining every nerve to be able to say that they are worth £l,ooo,ooo—and this in the very shortest time possible ; maybe, too, by all sorts of crooked as well as straight means. Also, we have, in America, so gigantic a railway system, that the vast continent is a network of rails and railway tracks, and many hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children live through their existence. These railways do not belong, as with us, to the Slate ; they are owned by private individuals : in some instances one single man owns far more miles of railway, more than double the miles of railway, than are in this island ! As to the territory of the United States we, most of us, can well remember the time when it was, practically, limitless. It is limitless no longer, A vast portion of the land of the buffalo now forms private estates of huge acreage: in cases, of acreage as large as some of our English counties I But that is not all. America is the country of monopolies ; of companies; of syndicates, which regulate and control prices and payments in almost every department of life. The ramincation of these extend in all directions, and absorb interests of all kinds, however great or small. Bear in mind that the object of each one of these is to make money quickly : and I think it is fair to assume also, that these syndicates, composed of good enough fellows, perhaps, as citizens, are utterly soulless and heartless as syndicates. However this be, there are, on the other hand, the millions of wageearners who have a hard struggle to keep body and spirit together, and whose average pay is now lower than that of old countries ; while the tendency— as naturally one would expect from the condition of things existing—is a lower rate of wage still—the limit is continually descending, and there would appear to be absolutely no bottom at all in the machine which regulates the wage of the labourer, artizan, or factory hand. But an unfair day’s payment for a fair day’s work isn’t the worst of all evils—no employment at all is. There are armies of unemployed persons in the United States: not rabbles; not knotsand gangs of idle people, who, maybe, have no desire to be occupied ; but, as I say, armies : hosts : multitudes who cannot work for a living, fortbe simple reason that the work is not there for them to do. There are, of course, myriads of citizens of the Union who are tolerably comfortable in circumstances—perhaps 50,000,000 out of the total population. It isn’t at all surprising that a great number of these people view the present intolerable state of Union society with alarm, not to say indignation ; and sympathise with the oppressed. As patriotic men, and as Cnristian men, they must do so. But you see what’s the matter? Man’s insatiable and senseless greed ! It isn’t easy to contemplate the owner of millions—acquired as the American citizen acquires his gold—with feelings of equanimity, even after a good dinner. A hungry man, a famishing man, a hopeless man, burning too with an indignant sense of the atrocious inequality of things, loses his self control, and commences to destroy things. Nobody blames him very much : although breaking the law only makes matters worse for him, and strikes do him, as a rule, no particle of good, and generally end in still further disaster. Sapio-Urso commenceni ent of the season the SapioConcert Urso concerts were scarcely so great a financial success as they ought to have been. No doubt the weather, which was about as bad as it could well have been throughout the whole season, was the cause of the altogether too small audiences. The drizzling, dreary, and constant rain, the raw, chill and even bleak atmosphere out of doors, and the sloppiness and muddiness of the streets kept hundreds of people at home by the fire. There is also, just at present, a good deal of mild influenza in the city; and then again, the Sapio-Urso people rely entirely on their vocal and musical merit for patronage, and, in these times, that doesn’t seem a wise thing to do ? The crowds who blocked the passages in so many Australasian theatres and were quite content with standing room, to hear Madame Antoinette Sterling, might be rather surprised if they were told exactly how they came to be there. But then Madame Antoinette was the Talmage of the world of songsters, and as she was the rage, she got on wonderfully by singing ballads moderately well—and by saying and doing queer—l mean, of course, unusual and uncommon—things. The Sapio-Urso Company quite delighted the people who attended their excellently arranged entertainments, and their enthusiasm at times was excited in a remarkable degree, more especially by the efforts of Madame De Vere Sapio, who was thrice and even often®.-, recalled with the loudest plaudits, in almost every number in whicb she took part. The lady is of singularly striking and handsome presence : and her voice, I think, is altogether the finest I have heard for a decade. One evening she sang the air from Handel’s • Samson,’ ‘ Let the Bright Seraphim,’ with electrifying effect. The power, softness, and compass of her voice fairly startled one ; and carried people for the moment out of the Opera House and high up into the clouds. The ‘angel trumpets blow ’ rings in my ears yet! Many who were present will never forget the magnificence of the vocalization, the words of the air, probably, carrying the vocalist to the very highest pitch of her excellence :— Let the bright seraphim, in burning row. Their loud uplifted angel trumpets blow ; Let the cherubic host, in tuneful choirs Touch their immortal harps, with golden wings. Madame received a hearty ovation, thrice repeated, at the termination—and, no doubt, to morrow, many hundreds of music-loving persons will regret that they did not brave the dreary elements to listen to even that one song. Madame Camilla Urso is, of course, well-known as one of the few real violinists of the world ; and Signor Romueldo Sapio and Benno Scherek have just as wide reputations as pianists. The Dresden Company supplied two splendid pianos—two such instruments as even Signor Sapio could be altogether pleased with. Since writing the above it has been necessary to extend the Wellington season so great was the success at the end of the week. The same thing occurred in Christchurch and Dunedin, so go often and go earlv is good advice to Auckland people.