TOPICS OF THE WEEK

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XXII, Issue XVIII, 6 May 1899, Page 588

TOPICS OF THE WEEK

A NEW POLITICAL WEAPON, PERCHANCE.

I UNDERSTAND that there will shortly be issued, by order of the Opposition, and sown broadcast over the colony, a pamphlet setting forth the sins of the Seddon administration. One would think that the warning voice of the prophets of the left had been crying loudly enough in the market place and the wilderness alike to make such a publication unecessary. But obviously Captain Russell and his friends believe that the written word may penetrate and have power in quarters the spoken word has failed to reach. Or, perhaps, they think that the latter may supplement the former generally, and confirm the hostility to Seddonism which their oratory may have aroused. Sanguine mortals that they are to put their faith in political pamphlets nowadays. There was a time when such instruments were indeed powerful. Tn the reign of Anne, Bolingbroke

seized one day no less than fourteen publishers and booksellers for issuing and selling brochures containing libels on the Administration. Buit w’hat Government in the Empire would bother its brains about such things now. The fact is that the political pamphlet is as great a drug in the market as the volume of sermons; and as instruments of conversion they are much of a muchness. Just as people can be induced to listen to sermons preached, but seldom, if ever, to read them, so a political speech may attract an audience, but a pamphlet never. Witness the fate of that paragon of political pamphlets the Hansard reports. Who reads them outside the ranks of the members of Parliament ? They issue from the Government printing press in shoals veritably, and cumber the mail bags all over the colony. One finds them in the most extraordinary places, consigned to neglect and oblivion: but to see anyone in the act of perusing a copy, or even to meet with a copy that bears the marks of having been opened except to be destroyed, is as rare a sight as a dead donkey. T have heard politicians maintain that the Hansards were read, but their asseverations, I am afraid, could only really have reference to the colour of the cover of the publication. Read in any other sense, they are not. If, then, that is the fate of Hansard, what right has any other of the political pamphlet breed to expect an audience? It, is presumption to imagine such a thing, unless. indeed and this, of course, is possible—that it is something very different from the rest of the species. I can fancy a pamphlet that would combine all the attractiveness of a comic annual with a power to influence the electors on political questions that would far surpass any campaign speech that was ever delivered. But it would require a genius to con-

coct it. Nevertheless, in spite of the difficulty of the task, it is a wonder to me that in this country the attempt has not been made. Perhaps it may be something of this kind that the Opposition are meditating, and if so, I am willing to retract all I have said about the usefulness of pamphlets until I have seen this new venture.

THE DECLINE OF THE FIGHTING SPIRIT. BEFORE the Americans can comply with Rudyard Kipling’s splendid appeal to ‘Take up the White Man’s Burden’ in the Philippines they have got to subdue the Filipinos, and that is proving a much more difficult task than the people of the Great Republic ever anticipated. So difficult, indeed, that according to the cabled information even the American newspapers, are despondent as to the war. It takes a great deal to damp the enthusiasm of any newspaper that has once written itself into a war fever, as a good many journals in the United States have done. Things must be pretty bad, one would say, when the Yankee editors cease to soule on the dogs of war. There is nothing in the whole category of human or inhuman things that seems to give more pleasure to newspaper men than battle. You can see it by the voracious way in which they snatch at mere possibilities of conflict and vague rumours of war. Had the newspapers their way of it I fear there would be but little peace in the world; and goodness only knows what is to become of them during the millennium. There will be no newspapers then, I imagine. There is something strange in this desire on the part of the American press to stop the fighting. Doubly strange, too, when one considers what it must mean to the prestige of the Republic to renounce its first intention of conquest and make terms with the insurgents. After having held the power and glory of Spain so cheap, to be euchred by the Filipinos is a sort of thing the proud

stomach of Yankeeland could hardly put up with. It is not at all clear that the Americans will do it, either, but it is significant of a great deal that they permit themselves to contemplate the possibilities in that direction. The meaning I draw from it all is that the Americans have got tired of war. They have had their fill of it. and even the newspapers, which delighted in rumours and probabilities, and gloried in coek-a-hoop fashion over the speedy downfall of Spain, are getting sick of the continuance of hostilities. One can be surfeited with battle, just as with jam, more especially if your natural taste and talent does not lie in that direction. Now, savages like our own Maoris loved war for its own sake, and our Norse ancestors could fancy no more blissful paradise than one that afforded a battle daily. But the Americans have lost that taste long ago. They are not warriors by choice, and hence the game of war comes to be much less interesting to them than that of commerce and industry.

of the first to ventilate it. and although his remarks were only made to a Sydney interviewer who ‘collared’ Mr Wilson on his arrival in the N.S. Wales capital, they had a pinch of aphoristic salt in them which has preserved them until now and given the tone to most of the criticism current here on the subject. A strong head and a weak tail was Mr Wilson’s

summing up of what bids fair to be known in New Zealand history as the Long Administration. His description directed attention to the hinder parts, and now almost for the first time the public are beginning to remark in chorus how very attenuated the tail really is. I suppose we have been so taken up admiring the briliant head of the Liberal Cabinet that we scarcely thought of bestowing a glance on the rest of it; and when we did it was to regard the tail, like that of the comet, as mere immaterial exhalations from the meteor in whose wake they followed. Now a ministry constructed on the comet principle may manage the affairs of the country very well when it has once got established if the head is strong enough. But when the stormy days of a general election come, and the searching winds of party criticism blow their hardest, it is another thing. Then the nebulous tail which in halcyon weather seemed to give balance and dignity to the head may prove an encumbrance rather than an aid. Of course Mr Seddon knows this better than we can tell him, and I do not for an instant doubt that he would willingly shed a few joints of that same tail and renew the same before the general election comes on. But the question is where to commence the amputation, and what to graft on the stump in place of the discarded members. Cutting off one’s nose has never been considered a cheerful operation, and to a man in Mr Seddon’s position the partial amputation of the hinder parts of the Cabinet is only a degree less difficult. Yet, say the prophets, unless like Tam O’Shanter’s mare he can consent to discard it that tail will be the ruin of the Premier. He will never pull it through the traps of the election, they predict, but must inevitably get caught.

THE ART OF SPENDING. BARONESS HIRSCH, who has recently died, was, we are given to understand, the richest widow in the world. Even the senior Mr Weller must have admitted that a lady with £24,8000.000, or even £4,000,000, as a. more recent message stated, was an exception to the species of marriageable ladies of whom he so emphatically told his son and heir to beware, and few men would have objected to being joined in holy matrimony by such golden bonds as she could furnish; but the baroness did not marry again after the death of her philanthropic husband. and consequently her immense wealth has gone chiefly to charities. Tn recording her decease the cablegrams I noticed dwelt lingeringly not on the persona] qualities of the lady, but on her millions, and were particular to try and express her wealth in terms that could be comprehended by the meanest intellect. To say that her income was half a million yearly could convey little precise information as to its possibilities to people who calculate their incomes by shillings per week. But to say that she had £ 1500 a day. though scarcely a

And so it is with civilised man generally. It is not that we are getting better, or perhaps even much wiser than our ancestors, that the sentiment is growing and growing in favour of peace; it is simply because we are losing the talent for fighting. Of course I do not forget our wonderful engines of destruction, our ironclads, 100-ton guns, torpedoes, and Lydite shells; but these only prove our superior ingenuity, not that we are more imbued with the war-like spirit than Berserker, for instance, whose very courage and fury stood him in place of a coat of mail.

A TALE OF WOE. THE weakness of the ministry is apparently becoming a common topic of conversation even in political circles most favourable to the present administration. Mr Wilson, the member for Wellington suburbs, was one less bewildering statement, made the financial power of this female Croesus a little more capable of being grasped. It is a common growl on the part of husbands that their wives do not know the value of money. Feminine ignorance in this connection is usually shown by an alleged carelessness in small affairs of household management. It is rather, however, when dealing with such colossal sums as are represented by the fortune of the baroness that men, as well as women, really lose sight completely of the value of money. Sit down with your pencil, you, my dear, who envy the baroness her millions, and tell me how you would get through half a million a year, for your supposition of course is that you would spend it if you had it. Then you will begin to realise dimly what a business the spending of a half million in the twelve months really is. The ladies of America have attained wonderful proficiency in the art of spending money, but notwithstanding their expertness a paltry £ 12,000 a year is sufficient for an American society woman to keep up a decent appearance. If. says a society journal, a. woman has two or three daughters on her hands it is a trouble to make both ends meet on so small a sum. The cottage at Newport, the camp in the Adirondack Mountains, a winter house at Aiken, and renting a house in New York city for the season run to about £lOO a month. Servants are the next large expenditure—no less than fourteen, including the men-servants, all of whom must be well turned out. Parties for the young daughters soon swallow up £lOO. Ordinary dinner parties run into £2O each, and those for the husband’s old friends are not done for less than £5O each. Theatre parties, with supper afterwards, cost more than a trifle, to say nothing of a box at the opera. The finest horses must come to town during the season, and for the country there needs to be a plentiful supply of traps, carriages, etc. Then there are the gowns and the other trifles that cost hundreds. Evening gowns range from £6O to £l4O each, and cloaks to about £BO. But after all these expenses are met a very small hole would be made in half a million, and like Alexander sit-

ting down to weep because he had no more worlds to conquer, the unhappy possessor of so much wealth would sink under the sense of impossibility to get through her income. It is a mercy for us all that there is little chance of our coming into fortunes like that of the baroness, or even a fractional part of the wealth she left behind her; for clearly it requires either a genius or a special education

to know how to bear the weary burden of colossal wealth or even to get rid of it.

THE QUEST OF IMMORTALITY. THAT old matter of names again. The new Costley wards in the Auckland Hospital will soon have to be christened, and the business will devolve on the Hospital and Charitable Aid Board, as managers of the institution. 1 understand that the naming of the baby often causes division in the most loving households; yet on the point at issue there can scarcely be more than two opinions. But the question of naming a hospital ward, when there are eight different gentlemen with an equal say in the matter is quite another affair, as was proved at the last meeting of the Auckland Board. The Chairman introduced the matter by moving that the wards should be named after himself, the ex-Chair-man and the Chairman of the Charitable Aid Committee, and handed down to posterity as the Stichbury, Bollard, and Bruce wards, and he indicated that in his opinion the services of the gentlemen named entitled them to the distinction he proposed. Another member, however, took strong exception to this, hinted very unkind reflections on the suggested recipients of so much honour, and concluded by urging that the wards should be named after persons distinguished in letters or for their philanthropy. Florence Nightingale, Lady Henry Somerset, and Miss Frances Willard were in his opinion much more appropriate personages to give their names to the wards than Messrs. Stichbury, Bollard, and Bruce, who after all are but local celebrities at the most. Is it to be wondered that after that the discussion was not prolonged, and that the whole question of naming the wards was deferred for a mouth ? The little incident suggests a good many things, but I only wish to refer to one. Have you ever noticed how suspicious and jealous the subject of Demos is of his brother. He will bow the knee fast enough to the aristocrat or autocrat who in a lordly fashion claims his worship as his due. but how hardly will he suffer the comrade by his side to step out of the ranks and assume superiority over him. As of old, they ask: ‘ls not this the carpenter's son, and his brethren, are they not among us?' The man who would be king in the democratic ranks has a hard enough business to get his sergeant's stripes to begin with, but the man who would grasp immortality by mere standing on tip-toe undertakes a bigger contract by far. That is first, second, or third-class immortality. If you like to make money, and die and leave it to some institution, the thing is not so unattainable, but we are speaking of getting yourself inscribed in humanity’s book of life, even in the very obscurest corner of humanity’s book of life, and ’ there only as a sort of foot-note. Perhaps, after all, if you want to get your name perpetuated, foolish son of the people, the easiest way to go about it is to invent a bicycle or a baking powder, or something after that style, or start a public-house or a brewery, or even get a street named after you.

O TEMPORA! O MORES! I HAVE always understood that America, the home of Tammany, broke the record in the matter of municipal corruption, as it has done in so many other things, good and bad. Burt that distinction must henceforth—until some enterprising Yankee city can go one better —belong to the town of Bazer, in Hungary, where the entire Town Council, headed by the burgomaster, have been carrying on a system of elaborate forgery. The cablegram which conveys the information is tantalisingly brief. It merely says that the officials were eaught, redhanded forging bank notes in the cellar of the Town Hall. But what one wants in such cases is detail; and here there must be plenty of it. Can’t you just imagine that knave of a burgomaster and his friends issuing from their weekly meetings with their pockets bulging —or more probably, their nightly meetings, for 1 have no doubt they were particujarly zealous in their attendance at the Town Hall, so that

the poor deceived citizens commended them for their interest in the welfare of the town. 1 am supposing that it was for their own aggrandisement that the Council carried on their nefarious work; but might it not have been done for the sake of the community? It is not impossible that the councillors of Bazer wanted a new water supply for the town, an electric light installation, electric tramways, and sundry other improvements, and that the ordinary finances of the town would not admit of it. Or it" may be that the Council had a big overdraft at the bank, and the municipality was groaning under an unbearable load of taxation. In either case the forgery, though certainly reprehensible enough, was not quite so bad as if it had been perpetrated by the councillors for their own personal gain. Perhaps, if we knew all the circumstances of the affair, we might even come to recognise an enterprise. a self-sacrifice, and a devotion in these councillors which it seems ludicrous to look for now. So far as T know, it has never occurred to any city or borough council in New Zealand to resort to these methods, either to save the credit of their city or borough, or enrich themselves. That, however, by no means proves that the thing has not been tried, or even now may not be going on. One can never be certain after this Hungarian case, and I would advise the people of Now Zealand to have their eves open, especially in the case of those councillors who display an unwonted diligence in the service of the town. Who knows what might be discovered in the cellars or secret cupboards of the most eminently respectable town hall if a careful search were instituted?