TOPICS OF THE WEEK.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XVII, Issue XIX, 7 November 1896, Page 9

TOPICS OF THE WEEK.

THE ATROCIOUS CHINEE. THE story of the Chinese doctor Sun-Yet-Sin, who was kidnapped by the Chinese Legation in London, reminds one of Sherlock Holmes’ adventures. If Mr Conan Doyle had related the facts in one of his tales we should, of course, have been deeply interested, but we should at the same time have smiled incrdulously at the idea of such things happening in the very heart of civilization within earshot of Oxford-street and that great river of life that flows towards Cheapside. Although there is nothing impossible in the fact of a Chinese Arch-conspirator finding his way to London, since all sorts and conditions of men gravitate towards the modern Babylon, still a Mongolian Anarchist thirsting for the downfall of the Manchu dynasty is about the last man one would expect to meet in Picadilly. One would hardly consider London the best base of operations from which to work a revolution in China. But the presence of the doctor in the British Metropolis is a matter for small surprise compared with the story he tells of his adventures there. Many a time in my young days have I passed that Legation and marked the quite aristocratically European aspect of its exterior. Often have I longed to cross the threshold where I felt certain I would find myself lifted at a step into old Cathay. I pictured myself threading dimly-lighted passages redolent of curious Eastern odours, where golden dragons ramped on ebony silk drapings, and queer josses confronted one at unexpected corners. I would have been prepared for many things rich and strange, for I knew that of all men the Chinaman was the most conservative in regard to his own customs, and as he adheres religiously to his pigtail in spite of the jeers and scoffs it draws down on him from the Western communities in which he makes his home, so he was pretty certain within the walls of the Legation in London to live as he would live in China. But I certainly never dreamt of such things as Sun-Yet-Sin relates. I had far too implicit a faith in the omnipotence of British justice and law to imagine that in the heart of London tricks could be played with the liberty of the individual as are evidently permitted in callous Canton or Pekin. Here is another argument in favour of anti-Chinese legislation. If in high official circles the Celestials can be guilty of such contempt of British law, what atrocities may they not perpetrate in lower grades of society ? How do we know what thoughts our seemingly inoffensive John may harbour beneath a smiling exterior, or whether from kidnapping his own countrymen he may not descend to kidnapping us ? HERE AND THERE. HOW tame is an electioneering campaign here compared with what it is in the United States! Our American cousins have a genius for doing things on a grand scale. They seem to have caught it from the

country which'is so stupendous in its lakes, its mountains, its rivers, its blizzards and tornadoes, and when they do anything they do it in style, from a railway accident to the election of a President. They are throwing such an amount of spirit into the latter piece of business on this present occasion that the echoes of the struggle is wafted across the Pacific to us. When will the day come that the noise of our elections will cross to the other side, I wonder ?’ Our politicians don’t know what election activity means. If they happen to have spoken twice in a week at two country schools to an audience of half a hundred men, women, and children all told, they wipe their brows, sigh heavily, and speak of the terrible strain politics is on the system. Terrible fiddle-sticks ! There is Bryan delivering a score of speeches a day. It’s only election talk, but what else is yours, I should like to know ? They know how to fight battles in the States with lungs and with purses as well as with hands. The floods of talk they have poured forth in connection with the present campaign would drown all this little country; the money they are alleged to have expended in bribes, etc., would make some of our election agents green with envy. The Democrats declare that McKinley has expended a million of money in bribery, and the fact that his party is sending governors and generals in train loads over the country gives colour to the report. You can’t send such freight through the land for nothing like so many sacks of wheat. The carriage of it costs money. There would be some pleasure, some excitement in being in the middle of a struggle like that, but in our onehorse show there is nothing, and I can’t become enthusiastic over it. A WORD FOR FOOTBALL. NOW that the football god has been deposed for a season in favour of the cricket deity it might seem a good time for me, who am no lover of the leather, to speak my mind. But seeing that he is certain to be enshrined as high as ever in the popular estimation next autumn, it might be better for me to hold my tongue. And so I am really going to do football a good turn for once. It seems there is some good in it after all, for I find on looking over a book of French sonnets that the game inspired Amadis Jamyn to write a very pretty little bit of verse. Now, no one would credit football with inspiring anything poetic much above the level of ‘ On the Ball,’ still less would you expect philosophic reflections to have their birth in a scrimmage; but read this by Jamyn. It might be agood piece for footballers to recite at their smoke concerts, the poetic literature of the ball is so meagre, and yet I am afraid that it would be rather out of place there. Here it is, however : • When I behold a football to and fro Urged by a throng of players equally Who run pell mell, and thrust, and push, and throw. Each party bent alike on victory ; Methinks I see resembled in that show This round earth poisedin the vacant sky. Where all are fain to lay each other low Striving by might and main for mastery. The ball is filled with wind ; and even eo It is for wind most times that mortals war. Death, the sole prize, they all are struggling for ; And all the world is but an ebb and flow ; And all we learn whenas the game is o’er That lite is but a dream and nothing more.’ THE SUPERSTITION OF SPECULATORS. THERE is no necessity to go to Monte Carlo to prove that gamblers are superstitious. You can prove it on any racecourse in this enlightened colony, or if you object to races and still are not convinced in the matter, nothing is more easy than to pay a visit to a Stock Exchange when a mining boom is on. Now, of course, some folks will be indignant that I should speak of mining as gambling. I assure you, gentle reader, that I have met with more than one church-going mortal who would be ready to denounce gambling with his latest breath, and yet thought it nothing to hold mining shares, to buy them when he thought they were cheap, and to sell them when he judged they had reached the top of the market. I have heard the same people object to progressive euchre as a questionable amusement, seeing that it involved playing for a prize with the devil’s own books. A prize won in any other way, mark you, was quite legitimate, but with cards—never. Mining speculation on the Stock Exchange is not gambling in the severe eyes of these righteous ones, except perhaps when they lose. To my mind, however, winning or losing, it is all gambling, and I don’t intend to argue that point. All I wished to do in this paragraph was to give an illustration of the superstitious element that is associated with even that most respectable mortal, the stock and share gambler. We have all read with a good deal of amusement the prophetic almanacs which are issued every year by our modern astrologers. What terrible things they predict for mankind in a general sort of waj ! And we have often been struck by the singularcoincidence of events which would seem to ignorant

and superstitious people the fulfilment of the wizard’s vaticinations. But a very little thought has banished from our minds any grain of confidence we might half unconsciously place in seers of the Zadkiel order. Sensible men are not alarmed when Zadkiel foretells some serious national calamity; cabinets do not order new ironclads when he predicts international war, and the world generally would not neglect its worldly affairs if he declared that the Judgment Day was just about to dawn. This indifference to the prophets exists only outside the gambling hell, the racecourse, the mining Exchange, and a few other places where men play with fortune's fickle wheel. Within, the ordinary sanity which guides the average man in his business transactions vanishes, and he becomes the sport of mere fancies, and will take the opinion of any man for gospel who seems to speak with authority. For example, it was mentioned in the columns of an Auckland paper the other day that ‘Old Moore,’ a maker of prophetic almanacs in the Old Country which find much favour among illiterate servant girls, had declared that during 1897 some rather rich finds of the precious metal would be found in New Zealand, and a fair share of English capital would be invested there. Now the thing that first amused me in all this was the excessive moderation of Old Moore. He is a careful prophet indeed, or just as likely—so far as mining matters go—a very ignorant one. Had he known a little more about New Zealand he would certainly have ventured on a bigger prediction. But what is infinitely more amusing than Old Moore’s guesses at futurity is the faith that nearly all our speculators place in his prophecy. One would certainly have thought that anybody with a modicum of common sense would have laughed at the prospect and forgotten the prophecy. They do laugh, it is true, but I can tell you they don’t forget his words. They cherish them carefully, and you would find, if you took the trouble to sift the confidence that so many place in the future of the Hauraki Peninsula, that Old Moore’s prediction is a corner stone for the whole edifice in many minds. THE TEMPLE OF JINGOISM. THE precise uses of the Imperial Institute have never been quite clear to the average Colonial mind, but the scene which took place there the other day, throws a little light on the matter. The Institute is apparently a sort of nursery for that healthy jingo spirit which regards the British as the chosen people, and everything they may do or say as incontrovertible. Such a nursery is not altogether dispensable in a great Empire like ours, where outlying parts have a tendency to lose touch of the old traditions and sentiments, and to become more cosmopolitan and less insular in their tastes and their sense of ustice and right. England needs a temple in which the sacred fires of Chauvinism and jingoism shall be kept carefully burning, and coals from the altar sent across the seas to warm with patriotic glow the lukewarm hearts of her sons ; and why should not the Imperial Institute be that temple ? It is certainly rapidly qualifying for it. I had thought that, like other institutes founded for the diffusion of knowledge, the Imperial could discuss any question in a calm philosophic spirit, and would listen to any man whatever his opinions if he carried any power of enlightenment. When the Psychical Society flourished such heterodox men as the late Professor Huxley and Bishops who had subscribed to every article of the church used to meet on the very friendliest of terms. But the fellows of the Imperial, or at least a certain number of them, appear to consider that the object of the Institute is not so much the spread of information as the spread of imperial jingoism. At any rate that is how one would judge from the recent episode when some of the fellows hissed and insulted the speaker of the evening because his ideas of imperial duty did not quite coincide with theirs. Mr Draper, the gentleman in question, is the secretary of the Transvaal Geological Society, and probably was invited to address the Institute on some geological subject. But it was rumoured about that Mr Draper had sided with the Boers over the Jameson raid, and the result was that when he opened his mouth to speak he was greeted with uproar and cries of ‘traitor,’ ‘cur,’ and ‘ruffian ’ from, it is true, a minority, but still a minority strong enough to make its influence predominant for the time. There does not seem to have been much geology that evening, and it was with difficulty that actual warfare was avoided. The jingo spirit of the young lions of the Institute was thoroughly roused, and they roared defiantly at the intruder who dared to profane the temple of jingoism with his presence. It must be gratifying to jingoists all over the empire to know in what good keeping the sacred fire is.

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