FROM THE CLUB WINDOW

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XXXVIII, Issue 7, 16 February 1907, Page 17

FROM THE CLUB WINDOW

It was, observed the Lawyer, emphatically, exceedingly satisfactory to see in the cabl<s that a father named Clark, and an elder of the sect of the Peculiar People, had been sent to gaol for two months and one month respectively for refusing proper medical aid to the former's daughter, in consequence of which she died. 1 sincerely wish, however, the sentences had been very much more severe, and I certainly think Mr. Justice Ridley was indiscreet —to use a mild term —in saying he recognised the " conscientious convictions” of any such set of mischievous and misguided faddists. That faith plays an important part in healing is so obvious that no sane man would for a moment argue against it; but to go to the lengths the peculiar people do, and to leave a fellow creature to die for the want of the simplest precautions and remedies, is just as obviously absurd and really criminal; and to talk of respecting the conscientious scruples of persons so morally ana mentally deficient is to create a precedent which may bring about an exceedingly dangerous state of things. That liberty of thought and speech and conscience must be carefully guarded as one of our most inestimable birthrights, nobody will care to deny, but we British are, nowadays straying too far in the other direction, and are allowing liberty to develop into license of the grossest description. I think you're right, concurred the Doctor, (if course, if we say much about this idiotic faith healing, some irresponsible fool or another says it is because we are scared of losing our fees. Nothing of the sort. Fortunately for the population, the faith of the majority of these faddists breaks down after a week or so of suffering, and then, when we are sent for, the case, which might have been put right in a couple of days, takes a few weeks, so that we profit in the end. No, the man that is his own doctor is our best friend, just as is the man who makes his own will is the most remunerative to our lawyer, over there; but 1 was thinking of the broader side of the subject; the ridiculous latitude we give now to conscientious objectors. Why, if you speak of respecting the conscientious scruples of a man who refuses to comply with the social law (using social in its classic, not snobbish sense) and the law of common humannity, why not respect the conscientious convictions of the anarchist who thinks to better the, world by the murder of rulers and kings? I confess it makes me writhe in spirit whenever" I think of what we my yet see in our day over the incalculable folly of having allowed conscientious objectors to vaccination. Knowing what I know, seeing what I have seen, it is dreadful to me, to think that a silly band of faddists has been given the power to bring that awful scourge the smallpox amongst us. Out upon ‘'conscientious convictions” of this type, say I. As von are all giving a professional opinion, said the Padre, perhaps you will allow me to give mine. These people claim toleration on religions grounds, but they would be very indignant if the British tolerated suttee in India because of the religious scruples of the Hindus. No State can carry religious toleration to the point where morals or life are endangered Germany suppressed the Christian Scientists in 1902 by very stringent legislation. These people rely on a bad translation of a text in St. James. Every classical scholar knows that amongst the ancients the phrase anointing with oil meant using medical remedies. They have m* warrant for their contentions. Hearing you three gentlemen talk, mused the Cynic, reminds me of the character in a' novel I was reading, who

tabooed doctors, parsons and lawyers alike. He contended that they all traded on the misfortunes of mankind, saying that doctors made out of our diseases, lawyers out of our mistakes, and parsons out of our sins. I also think, Padre, you are mistaken as to your text. These Scientist people are probably thinking of the woman who spent all she had upon doctors, and was none the better but rather the worse. Candidly, I respect a man with conscientious scruples. The great objection to people who own anything of great value is their intolerable conceit. 1 have never met a man with an absolutely scrupulous conscience, but I once had the misfortune to know a man who owned a blue Mauritius postage stamp. Thank goodness, that’s done, observed The Irrepressible, with great, devoutness, as he got up from the writing table and showed a handful of picture postcards which he had been busily addressing. This jolly craze threatens to become a nuisance. As you fellows know, I’ve just been Home, via Suez, and back through America; and every girl I’ve met, board ship. Old Country, America, Continent, everywhere, has, within fifteen minutes of introduction, or even without, made me promise to send her postcards from wherever I went. It’s not only the bother, cither, it gets deuced expensive with these coloured cards nowadays. There can be no doubt about it. said the Family Man, with unusual gravity of expression, that this picture-post-card business, at first a m re freak of fashion, which filled the legitimate enough purpose of saving a letter when travelling, has developed, as fashions have a habit of doing, into a craze which 1 confess I regard not merely with the greatest disapprobation, but with very real apprehension. To the sending to a friend in some other part of the colony or world, a picture of the eity where you reside or of some beauty spot in the colonies, or place seen in your travels, there can be no objection whatsoever, but that phase has long since passed, and the greater part of picture post-cards now exposed for sale are of actresses, of more or less notorious demi-mondaines, of “impossible” children of the sickly sentimental type, and last but not least (and as numerous as any) those of the allegedly comic description. The waste of money on these cardboard baubles is positively shocking, for the trade done’ in them is enormous, but it is the shocking vulgarity of taste displayed that is most serious in my mind. Many of the coloured cards are passable enough, but there are others decked out in tinsel, and so called jewels which cry aloud for destruction, and unutterable abominations with ‘"real hair.” which fill any persons of artistic sensibilities with a lust for shop-window breaking. Yet these are bought at extravagant pries by '‘collectors” who boast, or bray, I should say, of the thousand or so cards they have already amassed. One in my hearing hee-hawed the fact that he had over one hundred cards of one actress alone; and fifty more of another named "Gertie Millar.” each of which had cost sixpence each, and the jewelled atrocili s ninepenee or a shilling. We have, said the Cynic, the beauties of Nature and the beauties of Art the beau monde and the demimonde. I have noticed that the more you pay for a card the more horribly vulgar it is likely to be. These people seem to have accurately gauged the taste of our wealthier classes. I believe the object of collectors is to have cards posted at the place they are meant to depict. They can then say. “ This is bound to lie a good view of Rio because it was posted

there.** just as women will tell you they know a story is true because they have seen the house it happened in. The mass of people also believe in the inscrutable, and the ways of Post Office people are so utterly past finding out that their official stamp on a card is looked upon as of magical efficacy. An institution that can send a parrel to England via Suez for 3/, and charge 5/8 if it only sends it as far as Sydney is bound to be looked upon with superstitious awe by the ordinary mortal. Picture postcards and telegrams, said the author, are killing the art of letterwriting. just as cheap illustrations are killing the art of descriptive writing. It is no uncommon thing for smaller publishers to buy second hand blocks to illustrate their books, and the author has to alter his story to suit the pictures. When, however, anything becomes the fashion, it is on the high road to being killed. Witness the bicycling craze and the ping-pong craze. What is really good in tlie postcards will remain, and collecting pictures of places you have s;en seems to me an improvement on stamp collecting. Bail postcards, however, will help to still further destroy our sense of the beautiful in art. There have always been fools, and stupid wavs of spending money, said th* journalist, and I don’t think you will scold tho-e bitten with the postcard craze out of it for a good long while yet. hut its death-day will come as surely as did that of the Valentine s-.ntimental or comic—save the mark—on which fabulous sums were spent this very month a few decades hack. But the picture postcard is certainly an evil, as you remark. The indecent or ob-ccne variety are too dangerous to peddle about in this colony, but they exist in dangerous numbers, though most of you may not be aware of the fact. Odd things come, however, in the way of newspaper men. and an individual who certainly ought to have known better, showed me last week a series from I* risen so terrible in their unspeakable, unthinkable obscenity, that I turned po-i tively and physically sick after the fir-t semi-conscious glance at two. I handed the others back hurriedly without look iug and bolted for fresh air, and 1 tell von frankly and without exaggeration. 1 have felt ‘“soiled ’ ever since by having handled, even involuntarily, such unmentionable tilth. Vet here was a man. old enough to realise he had one toot in the wrave. daring to carry such things about on his p rson. Suppose. 1 asked, you were killed by a tram car. and those things were found on your body? He couldn't see th? enormity of his conduct a little bit. I had the misfortune to know a man of that mentally unclean type once, said the Doctor. He happened to hear that I possessed in a library bequeathed to me, an original edition of Burtons “Arabian Nights,’’ which is. as you may or maynotknow.au excedingly valuable book, both as literature and from a collector’s point of view, being out of print and unprintable again. But it s a book one keeps in a locked case, you understand. Well, having ascertained it was really the absolutely unexpurgated edition, he begged the loan of it. daring, absolutely daring, to explain, he wished to copy’ out what he termed “the spicy bits” “in a book which he kept tor the purpose.” Faugh! can you imagine such a cesspit of a mind? I told him what I thought of him. and wove never spoken since. Apropos of (he art of letter-writing, which someone deplored as lost, said the Irrepressible, I notice yon mentioned the type-writer as having contributed Io that, and that’s curious, because in the very last “Daily Mail” 1 got from Home there was a breach of promise case. in which it appeared that the first rilt within the lute was caused by the young man sending his young woman type-wnt-ten love letters, a proceeding which revolted her ardent, ami. I presume, poetic soul. The johnnie. it seems, replied (hat typing, them saved him an infinity of time, to which his divinity replied, in a very tart epistle, that if she was worth wooing and wedding she was worth giving time to. The young fellow “backed down” at the time, but soon reverted to the machine-made article, and actually dictated them to n stenographer. Ructions followed, and the faithless one

eventually told the lady the engagement was terminated. Very -mall damages were awarded, judge and jury coinciding in the opinion that the lady had unjustifiably worried her swam over the small matter of the letter-, and now the correspondence columns of the ‘Mail” bristle with letters from girls who think a type-written love letter a cold-blooded insult to a girl’s warmest feelings, and others who say “rubbish” to that, and others who ’ ill, ‘Met 'em write ’em how they like so long as they write ’em.” What ho! hen* comes our latest engaged man. Conic hither, my budding Benedict.; and give this august assembly the benefit of your opinion, it told him about it last night, he explained, and told him to ask his Hancce.i You are an unmitigated, ami smnefnies rather an impertinent ass, my dear Irrepressible, and I wish you would occasionally use English in conver*j!um; one sickens of perpetual slang. But, touching type written love letter-. 1 ga ther the feminine opinnn i- taat logically there is everything to hr said in favour of the type written low Idler, if it be a love letter, ami not » mere ilow of gush, produced with th'* greatest possible despatch, and as a mere matter of form. From another point of view, however, from a woman’s emotional side on which she is more distinctly h rsclf, there is little to be said in favour of the typewritten screed. Even if it be longer, it is. at ter all. but as a gloved hand-shake, a masked kiss. In short, ii is an insulating sort of a contrivance, by which half the eh ci rival current i- arre.-ted. I should recommend it to the lai: Idcss, as a means of indicating the abatement of their ardour, or to the jealous, as a gentle intimation that “if you don t care much, neither do I.” But (with a look of satisfaction that made the Irrepressible smile) if a fellow doesn’t like tin* flavour of tulle and chenille in a kiss, why should a girl take kindis to the absence of individuality in a love letter. What are you grinning at? turning severely up the Irrepressible, if you think I wasted my time on that topic hist night you're mightily mistaken. I drew my sisters on the subject this morning. But, by (he way, it you are anxious to make the expcrimen you might just fill up your sheer with handwritten protestations of regard, and poetic references to your Angelina s hair and lips. leaving a few lines here and there to be filled in afterwards by machine, when you wish to slate how many schnappt r you caught last yachting cruise, or how many your side scored at cricket. I don’t recommend the plan on the ground of despatch. but merely as a method of introducing the practical without w holly violating the emotional. It would make reading in a breach of promise (ouct. wdiich. my dear Irrepressible, with all your impressionableness, is where I tear you will end. 'l’he art of letter writing lost! exclaimed the Dominie. The old art is certainly giving place Io something dillerent. We schoolmasters know alt about the renaissance in that direction, and I confess that the kind of thing that is going out of date has a charm of its own. Why. my mother ami her sisters indulge in the most romantic correspondence. Their letters read jus! like a book in the vulgar say. Dur cir« urnstances and doings, as described and related by my mother, for the benefit <»t her sisters in England, have all the interest of a very pleasing ami unexiitmg novel. But, letterwriting on Hr decline! You should have seen the budget I gleaned the other day. descriptive of holiday experiences. One of my young correspondent s had l>een al Rotorua. It was just lovely! made him think of “Dante’s Inferno.” When Wairoa began to play you’d just t!irnk it was a copper boiling over. Bat when she shot up, you felt as if you word looking at a glassy column. I don’t know how’ one would feel if b. holding for the first time in his life a glassy column I’m sure. But if the hoy’s similes broke down, his feelings appear to have been adequate, for he Mid it made you throw up your cap. Th* expkiinert: “’l'he lid they keep on Wairoa so tourists won’t put soap down and make her play between times, ns geysers have way of going on strike if you over* work them.”