The Club Smoking Room

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XLI, Issue 23, 2 December 1908, Page 4

The Club Smoking Room

By

HAVANA

THE smokingroom was not very full, and most of the men in it were lazily scanning the various papers that lay scattered about.

We still kept our charter, and one or two were taking advantage of this fact in a practical manner; but general conversation seemed to flag now that the excitement caused by the elections had subsided. The journalist broke in upon the general silence by remarking: "That merry monarch King Charles the Second of pious memory has provided a nice legal puzzle for the lawyers of New South 'Wales. His Majesty 'Was deeply concerned for the spiritual welfare of his subjects, and he was much shocked, as well as pained, by the thought that so many of his people neglected to keep holy the Sabbath Day! He therefore enacted that any person pursuing his ordinary work on that day, or doing any worldly labour at his trade, should forfeit ' five lovely shillings, or spend two hours in the stocks. An excellent enactment, dictated, we may feel sure, by the best and most religious of motives. But two carpenters at Armidale, convicted under the Act, chose the stocks in preference to the fine, and as there are no stockp, the question is, What are the authorities to do!” © © © “The answer is simple,” replied the lawyer; "the authorities must provide them. The Act known at 27 Car. 11. in the statute law operating in New South Wales is quite clear and definite. It is entitled an Act for the better observance of the Lord’s Day-, a matter in which the merry monarch took a deep and pious interest. The Clarendon code, by which people were compelled to take the Sacrament, showed the value that was attached even in that day to compulsory goodness. It is, of course, quite legal for you to play cards on Sunday, or even billiards and devil’s pool, but for a market gardener to attend to his vegetables is a heinous sin. especially if he is a Chinaman or a Seventh Day Adventist. The Act states that the offender must be set publicly in the stocks for two hours, and the authorities should see that thin is dome. Gulliver said it was the sight of the gallows that first convinced him he was in a Christian country, and the sight of two men in the stocks would probably tend to reassure the good people of New South Wales on this point.” © © © "I am glad to hear a lawyer supporting Sabbath observance,” replied the dominie. "In my own line the reformer is at work, and he proposes to abolish the time-honoured school hamper. No one has so far proposed to legislate in favour of protecting the schoolboy’s digestion, and it is high time the matter was taken up in earnest. Think of the horribly indigestible stuff provided in these things. Rich cakes, sticky sweets, oily sardines, mince pies, the cloying nougat—these are only a few of the horrors provided to help to ruin Tommy's inside. The hamper must go, it is doomed, and no more will there be the surreptitious delights of the midnight supper, or the unholy joys of the dormitory feast. The schoolboy is to be cured of his greediness, and Will early learn the Benefits of enforced virtue.” © © © “1 am very much interested in a subject which you good people seem inclined to treat as a joke,” put in a visiting member. "We are on the eve of a new revolution. These things are only the signs of the dawning of a golden age for mankind. Perhaps what I am going to say doesn't apply do New Zealand. and perhaps it does. At any- rate, it will apply some day, and the principle i« a sound one. I want to say a little about the awful poverty at Home. When I left England there wore 20,000 people

in Manchester alone on the verge of starvation. You could have found ten times that number in London, and in the United Kingdom you eould have found over a million. Our Police Courts are filled with men and women who have stolen to feed their starving children. The rich say that the poor are poor because they drink, -but this is not true. They are poor because their labour is shamefully underpaid, and because the law allows the rich to accumulate riches without let or hindrance. © © © "But,” he went on, “what I want to emphasise is this. The workers have now got the power to alter things. They have their vote and they are going to use it. The movement for their emancipation is just beginning. The Socialist vote is* small and hardly counts. Your No-license vote was small once, and hardly counted. But see how it has grown and will grow. Why? because people realise the power of the ballotbox. Now the evil of drink, great as it is, is as nothing compared to the evil of private property. What makes men murderers and thieves? What makes the degradation of women, and the selling of children to the slavery of the factory? It is not drink, it is the desire for money-, for jewels, for private property. We propose' to nationalise all property, to have no private ownership to tempt men and women to sin, we propose to sweep away in one act all crime from the earth. In sweeping away drink you only touch the -surface, you show us what legislation can do and so far you help ns, but you do not go to the root of all evil—-the love of money.” “My dear man,’’.interrupted the padre, "you carry us away- with your torrent of words. Your argument is absurdly logical. Private property is admittedly the cause of much, if not most of the evil in the world. Abolish private ownership and you abolish theft, and the oppression of the poor by the rich, and the horrible murders committed for lust of gain. But against this you must set two things'. First, there is the love of liberty. It may be wrong, it may be a sin, but it is there as an integral part of the national character. Secondly, you have this fact: God placed man here with temptation surrounding him on every side that man might learn to over, come temptation. S. Peter was tempted and he fell. But he was the better man

afterwards. Character is formed by overcoming. I don’t deny, mind you, that the immediate good effect of Socialism would be immense. Many admitted evils would disappear as if by magic. But what would be the ultimate effect on character? The politician looks for immediate results and gets them, the stateman looks at ultimate results. That is the great danger of popular movements. The best nations arc those braced in a hard school, those who have met difficulties and conquered them. The capitalist, -you say, is in a minority, the day must come when he must go. But true liberty is where the rights of a minority are respected. A few, or even a considerable number of capitalists, have abused their rights, therefore you say penalise the rest for the sake of those who fail to use capital wisely. Where are you going to stop? You pull up the tares,' but you pull up the wheat with them.” © © © "Our worthy padre,” explained the cynic for the benefit of the visiting member who had spoken so eloquently, “is really too absurdly old-fashioned, and you must not take any notice of him. A minority has, of course, no rights, why should it have ? If there were no gold watches people would not be tempted to .steal gold watches. Therefore abolish the gold watch. Only a small minority of people would be affected in any case, If there were no school hampers there would be no greedy schoolboys. Therefore away with the accursed things!: They- are no good anyway. Light, as you say, has dawned at last. Let us emulate the placid content of the ox in the field. Tie, blessed bovine, feeds placidly on, he quenches his thirst at the crystal creek, he steals not, neither doth he know temptation. He has no incentive to effort, and in his peaceful, blameless life he offers an example we all might well copy’, and which we assuredly will copy-, whe/1 pious monarchs, like Charles, and Equally pious majorities', have regulated all out acts from the cradle to the grave.”