TOPICS of the WEEK.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XIX, Issue XXI, 13 November 1897, Page 642

TOPICS of the WEEK.

THE END OF THE WORLD. EXACTLY two years from the date of this issue the world will come to an end. At least, so says a certain M. Rudolf Falb, who has made the heavens his study and reads therein the destinies of the earth. Even at this moment the instrument of our destruction, the comet of 1866, is returning on its eccentric path, refreshed by its journey through space, and seeking, like a certain personage, whom or what it may devour. Unfortunately our poor planet is in its way and can’t get out of it, so there is nothing for us but to make up our minds to be knocked into a cocked hat or swept out of existence. So far as M. Falb can calculate we had better prepare ourselves for the latter alternative. He sees no chance of our escaping annihilation unless science can devise some way to ship us all off to some other sphere, so that we are not at home when our terrible visitor calls, or can retard or accelerate the earth’s progress in its orbit so that we can dodge him. It would be a magnificent sight to witness from some, safe retreat the ruin of our old world; to see it struck fair in the midriff, double up, break into sulphurous conflagration, and with a deafening, roaring, crackling and spluttering shrivel up like a parchment and finally resolve itself into its primary gases. And yet it would be a sorrowful spectacle enough—this brave old world that has so long been the home of humanity, on which generation after generation has been born, has lived, and has been buried. 1 am not sure that I would not rather prefer to stand by the ship and go down with it instead of starting life anew in some other planet, where everything would be strange and crude. Indeed, it would be even worse than emigrating from the Old Country to the colonies. After all there would be something grand and heroic in sharing the funeral pyre of a world. There was a time when M. Falb’s prediction would have caused nearly as much consternation as the actual catastrophe; but the world was as credulous in those days as it is now sceptical, and if to-morrow an astronomer ten times as celebrated as this Parisian one were to predict the destruction of the world and all that it inherits, he would find few who believed him. However much we may talk of the transitory character of mundane affairs, the human race goes about its business as if the foundations of the planet were from everlasting to everlasting. Who ever troubles himself about the end of the world. If he is to bother himself about that, it would be much more reasonable to do the same about his own individual end, which is the eml of the world for him to all intents and purposes. When we can contemplate with such equanimity our own dissolution, which is a dead certaintv.

and may happen ut any moment, one might ask what earthly reason have we to be troubled at the prospect of a dissolution in which all are involved. And yet, to tell the truth, when one thinks deliberately of such a catastrophe as M. Falb predicts, it is not without a feeling of regret. We are not so utterly egotistical as would sometimes appear. The most miserable among us has a sort of ‘work! pride,’ just as he has a family pride, and he cannot be altogether indifferent to the utter destruction of this beautiful, wonderful world, or to the advent of a comet that writes finis in letters of fire to the history of humanity, even although these things are to happen when he has been laid in his grave. We are all interested in the future of the earth although we cannot hope to share in it. and it would certainly detract from the pleasure of life here did we know that a few generations hence, this globe, so manifoldly endowed with the accumulated inventions of the human brain, would be a howling wilderness, or its place in the solar system know it no more.

THE DEMOCRATIC IDEAL. HAS it ever occurred to you that the truest reflections of our national character and tendencies are to be found in our statute books which nobody but the lawyers or the politicians dream of opening. But surely it must be so if popular government is what it is popularly conceived to be —a government resting directly with the majority of the citizens. Under an autocracy, an aristocracy, a plutocracy, or an oligarchy, the case is different, for then the statute books express the ideas or ideals of one or a few favoured individuals who have had the power in their own hands to use as seemed best in their own eyes. These can teach us little, and that little only inferentially, of what the great mass of the people thought and how they looked on life ; so that the modern historian who wishes to find out these matters must go elsewhere for his information. It is precisely in proportion to the extent of political freedom and power that a people enjoys that its statutes will be valuable to the present and future student of national characteristics ; and that being the case it follows that in a country like this the volumes of the law'should be held exceeding precious. In a sense that cannot be said of the laws of any other people these are our historical records. It would l>e easy to point out countless illustrations of this in the legislation of this and the neighbouring colonies. Almost every page of the statute books bears the democratic stamp, so that in the case of Australia being swallowed up, holus bolus, by the Pacific, and only a few of these volumes being saved, it would be easier for the future historian to reconstruct from them a model of our whole social system than it was for Professor Owen to build up the moa from the single bone. He would have to exercise a great deal of care, however, for there are occasions on which the written law of the land is apt to convey an erroneous impression of the actual condition of affairs. Take, for instance, the tender manner in which the. problem of poverty is dealt with in these colonies. We have ‘poor laws,’ but the sentiment of the community instinctively rebels against such brutally frank nomenclature that recalls unpleasant associations, and we take refuge in a euphemism. A somewhat amusing instance of this respect which the legislature shows for popular prejudices was furnished the other day in Tasmania when the Treasurer announced that the income tax would henceforth be known as the ‘wealth tax." No government in poor little Tasmania is in a position to make concessions in the substance of taxation, but they will willingly grant any alleviation of the burden if it can be done by giving it another name. Perhaps on the principle that ‘nothing is but thinking makes it so,’ there may be a distinct advantage in substituting the name ‘wealth tax' for that of ‘income tax,' though the impost itself may be the same. If you can persuade a man that he is wealthy before you tax him. it is just possible that he may become more reconciled to the infliction. This. I suppose, is what tin* Tasmanian Treasurer had in his mind, and the device is ingenious, whether it works or not. So far as

those who do not come under the harrow of the tax-gatherer are concerned, the new designation cannot fail to be popular, and to popularise its inventor. It seems to bring them appreciably nearer to that time when the rich will bear all the taxation and the poor man go free. PERJURY NO OFFENCE. TT NCOMPROMISING opponents of I female emancipation seem to derive much consolation from the prediction that the sex will have to pay most dearly for every excursion they make beyond their own proper sphere. What they may think to gain by the bold usurpation of privileges which are the inalienable heritage of the lords of creation can never recompense them for what they must lose in the way of that chivalrous respect and consideration with which they have hitherto been treated by the male animal. The warning has not beep taken very much to heart by the ladies, however, for they still continue to push their way to the front as persistently as ever. And to tell the truth, judging by what we see round about us. there does not seem to be any immediate danger of her sex in and departing from the progressive woman if only she is not aggressive as well as progressive. The fear that the sins of the new woman against propriety and convention would be visited on the whole sex has also proved to be unfounded, for, despite the faet that certain ladies have made themselves laughingstocks and invited discourtesy by their discourteous and intrusive behaviour, men have not declined in their appreciation of and respect for women as a whole. Indeed, it is questionable whether, taken altogether. the sentiment of appreciation and respect has not very greatly increased of recent years, and that with the advancement of women we are not getting nearer to the chivalry ideal instead of further away from it. It has been customary, by the way, to place the age of chivalry back some hundreds of years ; but that, after all, was rather the age of pseudochivalry. The true age of chivalry seems to belong to a much earlier period. According to Professor Sayce, we must go back 4,000 years before Christ to the primitive communities of Babylonia to find woman occupying that place of honour which she has never been accorded since. It is not impossible that we are coming slowly back to the Aeeadian state. If that is so, New Zealand can lay some claim to having been in the van of the movement, for did we not first give to woman the right of the franchise ? Where we led. South Australia followed, and now it looks as if the sister colony was to outstrip us in generous appreciation of the sex. One, at least, is warranted in thinking so when a judge of that colony tells a jury, as Mr Justice Boncant, of Adelaide, "did the other day, that a man is justified in committing perjury to save a woman. Mark you, he did not say that the perjurer in such a case would be pardoned or even more leniently dealt with than any other perjurer. As a judge, he could not wink at perjury, whatever the circumstances. but as a man he was quite prepared to absolve the delinquent. By the law of the land the offender must suffer, but he would have the consolation that he had obeyed the law of chivalry. A good test of the force of the chivalrous spirit in South Australia should now be furnished by the number of perjury cases in which women are involved. If perjuries become ‘as common as bad pence,’ it will be rather a good sign than otherwise. But I question whether in South Australia the spirit of chivalry is yet so dominant that men will risk the pains and penalties the law provides for the perjurer to save any woman. Most of us, I am afraid, would rather be inclined to follow the example of our common ancestor, Adam, and ‘give the woman away.’ MARRIAGE BY PURCHASE. THE general secretary of the Wesleyan Foreign Missions mentioned with a good deal of triumph lately, as one of the most conclusive evidences of the civilising effect of six years missionary labour in New Guinea, the fact that the natives no longer buy their wives. ‘Now not only do the young women refuse to be sold, but the young men decline to

acquire their wives by means of purchase.’ This is no doubt very satisfactory to the missionaries, but I question very much whether the abolition of wife purchase by the New Guineans is really such an index of civilisation as is assumed. Civilisation—that is our civilisation—has rather tended to complicate than to simplify the marriage knot. It is not nowadays but long ago that Corydon and Phyllis were joined in holy matrimony for no other reason than that they loved one another. ‘Worldly considerations’ weighed nothing in the balance in Arcadia. Cupid was indeed a god and not a lawyer's clerk, and when a young swain went a wooing he did not ask to see the maiden’s bank book, and all he expected from the father was consent to the union. But that was long ago, when the world was much nearer the savage state —so we are pleased to think—than it is to-day and if there was such a thing as 'society' it was altogether different from the thing we now know by that name. To-day, among those who certainly consider themselves as the precious efflorescence of our boasted civilisation wife-purchase is just as common as it is in New Guinea The only difference is that it is not gone about in the same frank fashion, and whereas in New Guinea the young savage pays a good round sum in the currency of the country to the father of the girl of his choice, in civilised countries the girl conducts the bargain herself, and gives herself to the highest bidder. The price goes into her own pocket instead of into the paternal one. What, after all, is modern marriage, in thousands of instances, but a buying or selling on one side or on both. To associate these mercenary contracts with savagery only is absurd, for they are as much in evidence at one end of the ladder of civilisation as they are at the other. And apparently they are less confirmed in their bad habits at the lower than at the upper end, for whereas six years of missionary work has been sufficient to wean the New Guineans from their ways, we after eighteen centuries of Christianity are more confirmed in the custom than ever. I think that there is quite as much room for a missionary crusade against mercenary marriages amongst ourselves as there is among the poor savages of Papua. THE ART OF ILLUSTRATING. IT is curious how seldom the power to write a good story and the power to illustrate it go together. Du Maurier was. perhaps, a happy exception, but then a certain artistic mistiness pervades his novels, and there is a great deal of perspective in them, which it requires remarkably keen eyesight (mentally) to resolve into anything like definite objects. But take up any ordinary modern story, and see how the illustration agrees with the tale. For instance, in a recent number of the ‘Temple Magazine,’ the author of a short story therein remarks that when the hero returned from Australia he ‘was now a bronzed and bearded man,’ who says, ‘When I go back 1 shall take you with me, Marian.' A charming picture is given over these words, representing the bearded man as a youth in a straw hat with a slight moustache. The absence of the necessary hirsute appendage is further marked by the fact that the description of his personal appearance by the author comes immediately under his portrait by the artist. Either one of the three following reasons may be given for this want of sympathy between the constructor of a tale and its illustrator. First, the artist may be a very busy man who has not time to properly read the story he has been asked to beautify by drawings; or he may not at the moment, be able amongst his sketches or models to lay hands on the type of face required; or he may have just used up his last ‘bearded man’ for another magazine, and may be reluctant to re-hash him for the M.S. lying before him. But whatever may be the reason, there, are very many of the reading publie who prefer to see the pictured representation of the hero, as far as possible a facsimile of the word sketch of him given by the author. Of course, in second-rate journals or magazines, where the editor has to fit the. blocks already in his possession to any story which may require illustration, an exact harmony between the written de-

scription of the hero or heroine and their surroundings, is not t-o be expected. But in first-class monthlies, when the author says the hero has a beard, the artist should see to it that he gets one in his picture.