TOPICS OF THE WEEK.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XIV, Issue XXV, 22 June 1895, Page 578

TOPICS OF THE WEEK.

ALTHOUGH within a week of the session, we have no news of any special gaieties in Wellington. The fact is that the present day politicians very slightly affect Society. In the old days people looked to members of the Ministry, and more especially to the Speakers of both Houses, confident of a certain amount of entertainment emanating therefrom, and many still remember with gratitude the free and generous hospitality enjoyed under the roof of Ministerial residence and private members’ houses in the days of the old regime. This custom was more in keeping with similar seasons in London, where the ‘powers that be’ entertain their friends very frequently in the precincts of the House, and it is much to be regretted that the English custom does not find root in more congenial soil in the colony. Thearrangements at Bellamy’s offer every facility for tea and supper parties, the latter taking place during the 10.30 adjournment, when members, fresh from the scene of warm political debate, may find invigorating reaction in the easy flow of friendly converse with their friends, both stern and gentle.

But now, alas ! democratic principles of co operation and equality have made their way even into the playroom. Most of the members prefer to divide expense and responsibility by sharing everything with others of the same mind who wish to treat their friends, and consequently a musical evening or any other festivity partakes too much of the flavour of ‘ a shilling a head and a hired piano ’ to find favour in many eyes. The only political entertaining now is left entirely in the hands of our local representatives, consisting of Sir Patrick Buckley at the Hutt, the Hon. C. J. Johnston, and Messrs Bell, Duthie, Newman, and Hutchison in Wellington, who dispense hospitality with a lavish impartiality, and whose guests are by no means selected from the ranks in which they themselves take place, though it is of course inevitable that there should always be a preponderance of one ‘colour.’ The only purely colourless parties are those at Government House, where all sides meet as on an equal platform.

rpilE session now commencing promises, so we are -L daily informed, to be an exceedingly quiet one. ‘So mote it be.’ The quieter, the more uneventful, the better. Let the Parliamentary reports be as dull as they please, none of us will complain. If only the good people who do the talkee-talkee down at Wellington would be content to let well alone for a year or so, to give law-making a rest for a time, what a happy land this would be to be sure. Unfortunately, they will do nothing of the kind. The fact is, of course simply this, that they are all too honest, too conscientious. ‘We are paid to make laws,’ they say, ‘ and by all that's powerful we’ll make ’em. If we can’t make good one, it can’t be helped ; we're bound to make some of one sort or another.’ This is very creditable, no doubt, but a great mistake. If they would only stick entirely to the business of abusing each other and advertising themselves, which occupies so much of the earlier part of the session, the country would be grateful enough to vote them another hundred a year apiece. Let some enterprising member introduce a bill for an increase of honorarium on the condition that there will be an entire session of law-making for five years. See how delightedly the colony would receive the proposition.

riMIE awful disclosures of the evidence in the baby1- farming murder case, in which Mrs Dean plays so terribly prominent a part at present, still form the subject of horrified conversation in all parts of the colonv, and is likely to continue to do so till the infamous and cruel series of crimes has been sheeted home and the dastardly perpetrator has paid the severest penalty which the law can inflict. Until Mrs Dean has been proved guilty she must of course be regarded as innocent, but should she or any other woman be found guiltv of the murder of the unfortunate children found in the garden of the Larches, one hopes no maudlin sentiment will even suggest any modification of the death penalty. Were it not for the mental punishment inflicted with the death sentence, hanging would be no adequate penalty for such crimes as those with which Minnie Dean now stands charged. But the mental punishment is in most cases severe. The actual physical suffering ismerely instantaneous ; it isthe fearof death, not the death itself, that is terrible. And it is not altogether unsatisfactory to reflect that some considerable amount of mental suffering and mental penance will be the lot of those who trusted children to the care of strangers, knowing, as without doubt many of them did know, that all the probabilities were in favour of the helpless little creatures being grossly neglected and cruelly misused. Those parents who have come forward are, of

course, those who were probably innocent of the dangers to which they were exposing their offspring, but one cannot help believing that the others —the unknown parents of unknown murdered babes—were more than half aware that the children would piobably disappear, and were prepared to hold their tongue and say nothing about that event when it should take place. One can only hope that these will share the mental tortures which must assuredly be the lot of whatever person is condemned to die for these murders. One trusts they will realise that, though innocent of murder in the eyes of the law, they are in the eyes of God and the world, equally guilty with whoever carried out the sentence of death, which they themselves pronounced on their children when they sent them to the baby-farm.

WHAT wouldn’tsomeof our New Zealand ‘Johnnies ’ have given to have been present at the theatrical carnival recently held in Melbourne. The gate money was only one shilling, and (says a local writer) the nimble ‘ bob ’ went a long way. In the concert hall a variety show was available for anyone who could get there ; a programme of sports, commencing with a children’s race and ending with a costume football orgie, kept the quadrangle crowded from two to five o’clock. Until four o'clock, or so, it was even possible to make a round of the pavilions, and get occasional glimpses of Beauty without paying a sixpence toll. Blanche Massey and Florence Lloyd were included in the legitimate shillingsworth of joy all the time, and this for sound financial reasons. They conducted a Monte Carlo establishment, with the assistance of three other ladies, and pushed the sale of metal tickets over a circular counter. Blanche Massey, with her fair young head tilted to one side, and a beseeching smile in her business eye, travelled round and round the inner ring lisping, ‘ Two Shillings to Win Sixteen.’ When about 16 metal tickets had been sold (for 325) somebody set a race game in motion, and the winner got half the stake at one fell swoop, the other half remaining to aid the good cause. The tickets were then gathered in and Florence Lloyd took up the syren song, ‘ Two Shillings to Win Sixteen '.’ Monte Carlo offered no hope for a man who wishes to break the bank, but it was a very fashionable slaughtering place for three and a-half hours. A more primitive sort of race game, known as a ‘ doodlembuck,’ was on tap elsewhere. Twelve gamblers staked a shilling apiece. The winner netted six shillings profit and the doodlembuck carried over a balance of six shillings to its next account with no more compunction than a bookmaker feels under similar circumstances. However, the girl who gathered in the spoil was nice enough to eat, which Ikey Mo isn’t.

The main hall of the Exhibition Building contained 11 pavilions, large or smaller, so there wasn’t too much space left for several thousand visitors to walk about in. Important personages found themselves shoving one another unorthodoxically in the main hall. James Service and Justice Webb got jammed at the opening to Decima Moore’s pavilion, along with the sheriff’s officer, who had come to the Carnival on the off-chance of being able to stick a formal demand for ‘ costs ’ into a certain divorce court petitioner. Lady Clarke and her prettydaughter were so tightly drawn into a vortex of influential citizens on the threshold of Louis Bradfield’s enclosure that they had to enter ‘ on the nod ’ and pay when they came out, Lady C.’s credit being good at charity fairs. It cost a shilling at first, and two shillings as time wore on, to hear Bradfield give a few imitations of actors and sing a little in his private tent. He wasn’t an ‘ astounding bargain ’ at the price, although he had a splendid sale. In the tent immediately opposite Johnny Gourlay and Co. played the fool at brief intervals for sixpence, and Benno Scherek, the n usician, treated waiting audiences to some of his card-tricks. Scherek’s tricks leave a smell of brimstone behind them. One feels that the gifted Pole may be called for at any minute by a tall, dark gentleman in a red suit. At four o’clock or thereabouts, the rush of humanity to the choicest Beauty pavilions was arrested by a well-thought-out system of sixpence to go in. Maud Hobson’s bower was free to gentlemen because that stately Hebe dispensed drinks from a bottle, and the male sex is supposed to mean business when it sniffs pizen. Ladies had to pay sixpence for the privilege of viewing Maud at close quarters, also they ran a serious risk of being lured into ordering lemonade at a shilling per glass. Consequently, they preferred, as a rule, to stay outside and gnash their little teeth. Grace Palotta, in another shop, sold tea and cake, therefore women were allowed to gaze upon her gratis, whilst men dropped another sixpence into the fund. Miss I’alotta’s pavilion seemed to be the particular haunt of coupon-sellers. The pleasure of buying a Beauty Prize coupon was intense. You got one for sixpence, and, having got it, filled in the name of your idol and posted the document in a box. No charge for postage.

THANK goodness there is at last one topic less on which goody-goody harangues can be inflicted on those of us who are inclined to feel and to maintain that the world is not half so bad as it is made out, and that the whole population of God’s earth is not made up of such miserable sinners as certain good parsons would have us believe. The anti-opium people have, to be sure, not troubled us very greatly with their outcries in New Zealand, but even in this ultima thule we have at times been lectured on the heinous sin of the British Empire in allowing the opium traffic in our Indian Empire. Ghastly pictures have been drawn of the awful ravages for which opium, and opium alone, was responsible. Thanks, however, to the investigations of the Royal Commission on the opiumtrade, which has just concluded, it has been conclusively proved that the Anti-opium Society, having started from wrong premises, were absolutely and entirely incorrect in their conclusions. Happily there is no room for doubt.

The Commission was appointed at the request of the Anti-opium Society, the composition of which was such as to command their approval, and has practically put an end to the labours of the Anti-opium Society. With one exception—that of Mr H. J. Wilson —every member of the Commission has, according to the Speaker, agreed to a report that is absolutely hostile to the policy of the Society. The significance of this fact is increased when we remember that Mr Wilson was not the only representative of the Society upon the Commission. He had a colleague in Mr J. A. Pease, whose name is a sufficient witness to his natural and creditable prepossessions on the Opium question. When Mr Pease first took part in the labours of the Commission he was just as strongly convinced as Mr Wilson himself was of the righteousness and necessity of the programme of the Anti-Opium party. But the knowledge which Mr Pease had gained as a member of the Commission has caused him to change his opinions, and his signature is appended to the report which condemns emphatically, though not in express words, the whole policy of the Anti-Opium Society. We are not going to insult either Mr Pease or Mr Wilson by drawing any comparisons between them. They are both men of high principle, and neither would consciously swerve by so much as a hair’s breadth from the standard of rectitude. Mr Wilson, we need hardly say, in dissenting from the report of the majority of the Commission, has acted with absolute integrity of purpose. But he must, we think, acknowledge that his testimony alone is not sufficient to outweigh that of his distinguished colleagues. Those colleagues, it must be remembered, included some men who entered upon their work with minds free from prepossession of any kind. If they had seen that the opium trade was the horrible thing that the Anti-Opium Society has declared it to be, they would undoubtedly have given voice to their opinions. This argument applies still more strongly in the case of Mr Pease, who, when he entered upon his official work, was in full sympathy with the Anti-Opium Society. Yet neither Mr Pease nor those of his colleagues who began the inquiry without preconceived opinions could resist the weight of the evidence laid before the Commission.

THE New Woman, who is omnipresent nowadays in literature and conversation, was under discus.ion at the Wellington Union the other evening, and formed the basis of some good speaking. It being an open night, there was a considerable number of visitors, including many ladies, present. Mr Bridge (author of a clever little farce entitled ‘ The Ladies Paret,’ and other short plays) led the debate, maintaining that the New Woman is justifiable. He drew a distinct line of demarcation. however, between the man-apeing, unsexed, advanced female, the woman as represented by modern authors like Sarah Grand and ‘lota,’ and the free woman, who uses her newly-acquired liberty not to develop her physical animal instincts, but rather those powers of intellect so long crushed and overshadowed by the strength of the man’s. The subject was treated most ably, and drew forth much interesting argument on both sides. A lady in the audience rose and gave voice to her views on the question. She asserted women would willingly forego their privileges, if given their rights, a remark which was greeted with many shrill ‘ hear hears.’ The speaker Miss Leigh, enjoys the honour of being the second lady who at the Union meetings has possessed sufficient courage of her opinion, and power to give expression thereto, to ‘ stand up and hold forth,’ in fact. We hope the kindly, warm reception accorded her, will encourage the others.

Misleading the public with Frossard’s Cavour Cigars is impossible ; they are sold in original packets, 8 for is 3d. (Advt. I)