TOPICS OF THE WEEK

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XVII, Issue I, 4 July 1896, Page 9

TOPICS OF THE WEEK

THE LADY SPECULATOR. IT is amusing to note how much more circumspectly people speculate in mining shares now than they did ten months or so ago. A good many people who speculated then got more or less burned, and now, though the fire has not lost its attractions, they approach it, walking delicately like Agav. Many, I daresay, will get burned again, for wisdom dwelleth not with the multitude, and mining shares claim an extraordinary large amount of that uncertainty which characterises all mundane things. The average masculine speculator, however, does make some pretence of ascertaining for himself the merits of the particular mine, in esse or in futuro, in which he wishes to invest, and believes himself to be guided by his discoveries; but the average feminine . speculator, so far as I have been able to observe her little ways, scarcely knows whether there is a mine at the back of her shares or not All she is concerned to knowis—Will the shares rise and will she double or treble her money ? And she is ready to take as a guarantee an affirmative answer from any friend who, by virtue of his being a man, she supposes, knows all about shares and such things. And she doesn't require him to give her any reasons for the faith that is in him ; indeed, she is rather impatient of reasons, for they are troublesome things to follow. Her faith that she will make money by her shares does not need the support of reasons. It is based as firm as a rock on the feeling that not to make money by her shares when Mrs Smith and Mrs Brown have made so much by theirs would be a too impossible piece of injustice ever to happen to her.

I think mining booms must be specially sent to fill a want in the lives of that large class of ladies who feel it against their principles to do a little betting on horse races and that kind of thing—ladies who would not patronise an opera unless the proceeds were to be Tievoted to the spiritual succour of the heathen or to a similar object. These good people see only too clearly the immorality of racing bets. ‘Just thing of it! it is such a bad thing to lose money in that way, you know, and to gain it is almost as bad, for isn’t your gain somebody else's loss ? Yes, indeed, horse racing tramples Christian sentiment underfoot.’ But when it comes to gaining somebody else’s money on the Stock Exchange it is curious how blameless the transaction may become. The use of mining shares as a legitimate money investment cannot be called in question, but those pious ladies, as a rule, speculate merely on the rise of shares, irrespective of the merits of the mines they represent, and congratulate themselves when they manage to sell out at top prices before the drop. They are correspondingly disappointed if the shares continue to rise after they have disposed of them —all which manifestly demonstrates that they grudge a gain to their neighbour, and are glad when they have shifted the burden of loss off their shoulders on to his. What part does Christian sentiment play in this, I wonder ? Of course I am not wronging those ladies so far as to suppose that they see the matter in the way I have put it. I am sure they don’t, and the anomalies we may happen to see in their conduct simply arise from a certain incapacity of theirs to seize the true meaning of such speculation as I have been referring to. Pleasure and dissipation have been always bracketed in their minds with horse-racing, and these danger signals have led them to easily recognise the wickedness of losing one’s own money or winning somebody else's over a horse race, but there is to their minds a halo of sober respectability about the word

* business ’ that disarms a curious inspection of the meaning of certain transactions in mining shares which they embark in with innocent enough intentions.

THE AMENITIES OF FOOTBALL. THE oft-repeated remark of the French statesman that the English take their pleasures sadly is. singularly enough, almost as true of Britishers to-day as it probably was four hundred years ago when it was first uttered. But it is a remark that is not applicable to Britain’s sons in Australasia. Then bow, you may ask, do the Australasians take their pleasures’? Judging from a recent report of an Australian football match—football undoubtedly is the favourite game of all classes under the Southern Cross ; even the ladies delight in it, though they may not take an active part in the field—judging from the report of that match I should be inclined to slightly paraphrase the Frenchman's dictum and say * the Australasians take their pleasures brutally.’ I have often felt inclined to say it before when I have had the pleasure (?) of witnessing our young New Zealand barbarians at play. The amount of unnecessary rougbness which characterises the game as played in the northern part of the colony has called forth no end of hostile comments from visitors. One gentleman friend of mine who had endeavoured to get an inkling of the objects and methods of the game at a large town v. country match, left the field with anything but a clear conception of them. So far, however, as he could make clear, the main point of the sport was for each player first to try and secure the ball, and failing in the endeavour, the next thing was to do his utmost to kill the man who had succeeded.

But the sanguinary records of New Zealand football—they are sanguinary, to say the least of them —shrink into insignificance with the doings at that Australian match to which I referred, an encounter which may serve to warn us against the tendency to sheer brutality that is manifested more and more in our football fields. The friends of football have always contended that the game was not only healthful, but that it developed the best qualities of manliness and generosity in a lad. I was myself accustomed to defend the sport on similar grounds, but I must confess that my faith is getting more rudely shaken every season. I have long doubted whether football does not merit the epithet ‘ deathful ’ just as much as healthful, and since the news of that record Australian match I am afraid to speak of manliness and generosity. And now for that match. It was between two teams known, respectively, as Homebush and Oriental. ‘From the start,’says a contemporary, ‘ Oriental made the game very “ willing,” and the referee, Mr H. Hazel, with a commendable determination to enforce the rules regarding rough play, ordered two of the visiting team off the field. This action, coupled with the subsequent defeat of the Oriental team by 12 points to nil, so enraged the players and their supporters that they proceeded to ‘‘deal it out” to the referee at the conclusion of the match, kicking and striking him in the most brutal manner, and showering upon him mud and other missiles. In selfdefence Mr Hazel was compelled to draw a revolver, with which he had come armed.’

I verily believe this is the first appearance of the revolver in Australasian football, and the fact should be carefully noted, for it marks a new era. Henceforth in addition to the football, powder and ball may come to play an important part in our national game, and the prowess of a team be decided not by the strength of muscle and swiftness of limb of the contestants, but by a quick eye and a sure finger. And as it really appears that the popularity of the game to a very large degree depends on the chances of serious accident which the players run, there is no fear of it waning in the public favour on the introduction of a Colt’s pistol into the equipment of a first-class forward or full back. The Australasian football matches of the future will be regular gladiatorial conflicts, and the bloody encounters will apparently be as keenly relished by the ladies as the encounters of a Roman holiday were by the maids and matrons of the Eternal City. What an interest will attach to a match where the goal-keeper stands six-shooter in hand to defend any rush on the goal ! What a glorious thing it will be to behold the wounded borne from the field amid the stirring music of the • Dead March ’ played by the band on the pavilion! How the scarred veterans of

twenty summers will proudly point to their wounds received in deadly battle with a hostile team ' That will be a game worth something, then.

As yet, however, use has only sanctioned the use of pistols on the football field by referees. The players in the game must be content to do what execution they can with their hobnailed boots, and a notice will have to be posted up ‘ firearms strictly prohibited.’ It will not do, however, to take the pistol away from the referee, or if he is to go unarmed it will be necessary for him to deliver his verdict from a position inaccessible to the defeated team, or to obtain the services of a posse of policemen till the conclusion of the match. In time, of course, the natural evolution of football along the present lines will inevitably bring about a time when the employment of lethal weapons in the football field will be sanctioned by law, but at present only referees should be allowed to draw in self-defence. MARY ANN’S FRIEND. MR W. KELLY, the member for Invercargill, is ‘ a ladies’ man.’ This epithet in Parliamentary language bears a different significance from that usually attached to it in the ordinary social sphere. The ordinary ladies’ man is a gentleman who especially lays himself out to be agreeable to the sex and cultivates their society. The Parliamentary ladies’ man is cast in a sterner mould. He may be kind and courteous, but he is concerned with more serious things than the mere politenesses of life. He has dedicated himself to the canse of woman, and has joined with the close-lipped austere female whose life’s object is the emancipation of womankind. Of course Mr Kelly is not the only ladies’, or if you would rather have it, woman’s man in the House. There are dapper Dr. Newman and Mr Riccarton Russell, who have both got Bills in the interest of woman before the House. But the difterence between them and Mr Kelly is that while they have directed their efforts to the general improvement of the status of the sex generally, the member for Invercargill has taken up the cause for a humble class—the domestic servant —and is battling not for privileges, which after all may be questionable, but for a certain amelioration in their lot which a legal half-holiday per week would be.

Therefore, while woman in general blesses the name of Newman and Russell, let the voice of Mary Ann and Bridget rise in dnlcet trebles from every kitchen in the land. Occupants of the parlour may frown disapproval on Mr Kelly, who dares to introduce disturbance into the domestic circles —for women have a good deal of the tyrant in them, and are curiously blind to the injustices they themselves commit—but there are as bright eyes and as ruby lips downstairs as in the highest drawingrooms in the land, and Mr Kelly will not mind what they say of him upstairs. Besides, it is only the unreasonable mistresses who will object to their servants having a regular respite from work on one afternoon of the week, and after all is it not the object of all Parliament’s legislation to have the world conducted on reasonable lines ?

AUSTRALIA TRIUMPHANS AND AFTER. THERE has been much metaphorical weeping and gnashing of teeth in colonial athletic circles over the Lucifer-like fall of the Australian cricket team in England. The first weeks of their stay in the Old Country was a record of brilliant successes, and ardent young Australasia for a time quite forgot her worship of the great winter god. Football, to sing the victories of her young heroes of the willow. But, alas! Fate, which smiled on the cricketers at first, after wards withdrew her favour with the direst consequences. The triumphant career was suddenly arrested and crushing defeat followed. The men whose limbs were made in England reasserted their prowess in the great national game and Australia bit the dust. I for one do not altogether regret the humiliation which has befallen her. There was very great danger of her being altogether spoiled if her sons had returned to her bosom unchastened bj a single reverse. They are already inclined to entertain a much too high opinion of themselves, and to be inordinately lifted up by the contemplation of their own perfections ; but if they had overcome the Englishmen on every field we should hardly have been able to hear ourselves speak for the crowing that would inevitably have arisen from the Island Continent. Goodness only knows what Australia might not have been tempted to do on the heads of such success — anything probably between floating a big loan and renouncing their allegiance to Great Britain. It would have been a bad thing for Australia—would unqualified success. But it was uot decreed that her boys should obtain it. England has yet a few sons who have not left their mother's knee, who can uphold her name on the field of sport as well as on the field of

battle. The race is not decadent in its home, but is fresh and vigorous as of yore. And if decadence should come, which God grant it never may, we have the assurance that in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the Cape there are growing up peoples who will perpetuate the virtues which have grown to such vigour in that little island. Freedom’s abode.