Topics of the Week

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XVI, Issue II, 11 January 1896, Page 34

Topics of the Week

PRESUMABLY all my readers have spent a Merry Christmas, and have up to the present moment enjoyed a Happy New Year. I sincerely hope that 1896 holds a bright and prosperous future for all our race more especially ourselves, I suppose, since there are few of us so unselfish of soul that our own troubles can be easily borne, so long as we see others prosperous and happy. That sort of feeling is confined, generally speaking, to mothers, who will cheerfully enjoy all the afflictions of the world and pains of tophet to follow, if by doing so they can contribute to the health, wealth, or enjoyment of their progeny. Nay more, they are usually willing to bear uncomplainingly all the ills that flesh is heirto ifonly they can see those they love spared such troubles. While such mothers exist, therefore, the world will always afford a certain number of happy new years to a certain number of persons. Happiness on the part of the individual is always the product of self-sacrifice. It may be the actual producing sacrifice is not invariably, indeed is seldom made by the recipient of the happiness, but he or she must be capable of a certain amount of self-sacrifice if the happiness gained for them by, perhaps, heroic sacrifice in others is to be lasting, or in any way complete. An absolutely selfish person cannot be particularly or continuously happy, though he can very effectively destroy the happiness of those with whom he comes in actual social contact. Indeed, the very fact that he does destroy happiness in others is one of the reasons that he himself cannot be perfectly happy. For even the most selfish man—and it is usually men who are most supremely selfish—depends for much of his pleasure and happiness on the pleasure and happiness of others. It is true, of course, that a large proportion of his happiness is gained by the terrible misery 7 of others ; that the happiness of all of us is gained by' the sufferings of others. But for the balance—and it is a large balance, too—happiness is necessary to its own production, and therefore a selfish person’s selfishness loses him a proportion of happiness in exact rates to his own selfishness.

This, however, is not the subject on which I set forth to scribble. I was hoping we might all be in for a bright and prosperous new year. It must be admitted that at the present writing the outlook is none too cheerful. The situation in the Transvaal is such as to cause the gravest anxiety, and those who know the Boers best are those whose apprehensions are the heaviest. An ignorant, and, generally speaking, a phlegmatically cruel race, they are ill-informed enough to imagine they may again prevail against English arms, and cruel enough to perpetrate outrage and cruelty on any unprotected members of the race they so cordially dislike.

In the East, too, the future is dark with war clouds. It is, everyone feels, time for Turkey to go. Europe has, with strange complacency, endured her for longer than seemed possible, chiefly because England feared that the Russian advance to Constantinople would be attended with dangerous consequences to Europe in general, but herself in particular. The clearing out of the unspeakable Turk may very probably be accomplished with very little outward appearance of trouble. If the powers agree, as they surely will, that the Turk is to go, go he will, and without much fuss, since he will know that fuss is useless. But that will only be the preface. The trouble will come when the question of dividing the

spoil crops up. As one writer has said it is one thing to be in agreement as to the eviction of a tenant, and another to settle amicably the division of the property. War will almost surely result, and somehow I cannot help imagining that war will come, because the world is ripe for war. Human beings are a fighting race, and there has been no great war for nearly a quarter of a century. It is very evident from the unrest that appears in almost every quarter of the globe that the time has again arrived when we must fly at. each other's throats. It is a very terrible thing, no doubt, but we are what we are, and what we were made, and no veneer of civilisation can cover up our original selves for more than a certain number of years. And I am inclined to agree with one writer of courage who has boldly stated that he thinks that ‘so far as England is concerned that a stirring of its soul by the long dead music of the drum would not be an unmixed evil.’ As he observes, ‘ Give peace in our time, oh Lord,’ is a popular prayer, but it springs from the heart of a tradesman. There are amongst us even in this colony many whose hearts feel what Tennyson trumpeted forth at a time and on a situation not unlike the present :— Though niggard throats ot Manchester may crawl. What England was—Shall England's sons forget ? We are not cotton-spinners all, But some love England and her honour yet. And these in her Thermopylae shall stand. And hold against the world an honoured land.

‘ Too long a peace,’ says the writer, a couple of whose lines I have already quoted, ‘ breeds the decay of national ideals, of national ambition. To what a pass it has brought England one may show by passing notice of the fact that at the present moment its chief hero is Barney Barnato, the African speculator millionaire. In times of peace a nation comes, as a well-fed citizen, to think merely of its stomach. Trade, which, after all said and done, is merely thebusiness of filling and refilling our bellies —becomes glorified into the chief aim of man’s existence. But man, we are told, was not meant to live by bread alone. There are appetites within him that trade — even when it has spelt Commerce with a capital C—is unable to satisfy. The fighting instinct, so far as the body of a man is concerned, is his curse. It brings him sorrow and hurt. It lays waste his fields, it closes his stock exchanges. It brings him starvation, and misery and death. But it is the part of him that makes him different from the beasts of the field. What is great, what is eternal in mankind is fed by it. His hopes, his ideals, his enthusiasms, gain no strength from the soft air of peace.’

THE New Year resolutions formed with much e»ipressement during the last weeks of the dead year are, no doubt, already beginning to press somewhat heavily on the shoulders of the resolvers, and week byweek they will be unostentatiously and quietly dropped. If one or two exist when half the year is flown there will be much cause for congratulation, and the person who can carry even one single good recently-formed resolution through the year is deserving of all the admiring credit he probably takes to himself over the same. If ‘to err is human,’ anditcertainlyis.it is equally human topromise oneself it is for the last time. Our favourite sin, our pet peccadillos, our most loved bit of laziness is always committed for the last time. We are forever going to start fresh to-morrow, next week, or next year, acocrding to our strength of mind or infirmity of purpose. They say that Hell is paved with good intentions, but I think this is rather' hard talk,’ as Kipling would say in his jungle book. Good intentions are better than no intentions at all, and however weak the effort to do better may be, however backboneless the attempt at keeping a resolution mav be, it is assuredly better than nothing. A man may certainly fall fifty times, but it is surely better if he falls in trying to walk forward.

riIHE poet Laureate’s chair having been left vacant J- since the death of Tennyson, owing, it was said, to the difficulty of deciding who was worthy of the position, has been at length filled, Mr Alfred Austin being selected for the honour. The choice is so surprising and so disappointing that lovers of poesy in this colony will wait with some impatience to learn how so tasteless a selec-

tion came to be made, and on which of his past works rests Mr Austin’s claim to be considered a poet worthy to fill the high position of the poet Laureate. One can only surmise that Swinburne, William Watson, Lewis Morris, Edwin Arnold, and perhaps others of less note must have declined the position which has been bestowed so unfortunately. It is a thousand pities the office was not abolished. Swinburne and William Watson are the only men whose appointment could have been justified by their work, and to both men there were objections of other sorts. Had the post remained vacant till some great singer worthy to wear the mantle of Tennyson had arisen, the honour of the -'estowal of the Laureateship would have been enormously increased. The appointment of Mr Alfred Austin has certainly degraded it, and it may henceforward be bestowed on purely political lines with no question of comparative merit or poetical pre-eminence. Mr Alfred Austin is not a great poet; in the highest sense he is scarcely a poet at all. As a maker of verses, somewhat dull, but very correct, and in a pure style, he is and has proved himself tolerably expert, but he has never, so far as I am aware, touched the heart of the people with any splendid thought, or given the world any music of words. No ; regarded from any point of view it is a deeply regretable fact that if the office of poet Laureate could not have been filled by- a poet it should have been deemed sufficient to set in the chair a mere maker of verses.

THE successes achieved by our New Zealand lads during the holidays in the friendly inter-colonial rivalry of the cricket pitch and the athletic track can scarcely fail to afford every good and loyal New Zealander great satisfaction. There can be no doubt that when properly conducted these contests of skill serve a greater and more important purpose than appears on the surface. They certainly promote and keep alive the fraternal spirit which should reign between all members of the British race. Athletics, too, cannot be too highly prized as a moral factor. A country that can boast a bright and strong athletic race can boast a clean-lived and temperate race. No doubt there have been occasions when the honours showered upon successful athletes and successful cricketers have passed the limits of good sense and ‘ sweet reasonableness,’ and have drawn forth a certain amount of satire and ridicule, but a trifling excess in this matter is not altogether amiss. It is better that our young men should make heroes of athletes than of ‘decadents,’and it is more wholesome that they should worship outdoor exercises than indoor vices. No man can live fast and drink hard and run or jump well, and an active interest and desire for success on the running track or cricket field probably does more for the cause of true temperance in the colony than all the fanatical how-lings of the prohibition platform orators and bogey men.

\ A/HO (questions au English contemporary) are the V V six richest women in the world ? They are (it proceeds to answer itself), Senora Cousino, Miss Hetty Green, the Baroness Burdett-Coutts, Madame de Barrios (or, more properly speaking, the Marquise de Roda), Miss Mary Garrett, of Baltimore, and Madame Woleska, the great Russian landowner. Senora Cousino is a South American widow reputed to be worth /'40,000,000 sterling. This lady owns vast expanses of land, manycattle ranges, a fleet of eight steamships, silver, copper, and coal mines, railroads, and many houses, besides personal property in the form of splendid jewels. She is probably the richest woman in the world. Just how much all her wealth amounts to no one knows, probably not even Senora Cousino herself. From her coal mines alone, it is stated, her income is /’ry.ooo a month. From her silver and copper mines she receives the larger sum of /'ao.ooo net, and uses the refuse from the coal mine to smelt the ore from the mines of silver and copper. Then her stock farms, whereon she breeds thoroughbred horses and cattle, and her ranches vield about as much as all her mining property put together.

Miss Hetty Green is supposed to be worth and to be the richest woman in North America. The Marquise de Roda is the wife of a Spanish grandee. She is a Guatemalan by birth, and De Barrios, then President of the Republic, married her from a convent at the age of fourteen, disposing of the objections of the Mother Superior by locking that lady up. The tyrannous dictator made a fortune out of his presidentship, and when he was shot dead by a patriot lying in ambush in the suburbs of the capital Lis widow found herself worth / 5.000.000. Miss Mary Garrett, of Baltimore, is worth £2, 000,000, which is in stock of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. Madame Woleska iscredited with wealth to the same amount. All these ladies are, it is said, quite capable of managing their affairs, and equal to the wiles of the cleverest sharper.