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Typo: A Monthly Newspaper and Literary Review, Volume 5

Ex Cathedra

page 91

Ex Cathedra.

Logic is logic, as the celebrated deacon demonstrated in the case of his one-horse-shay. And the Rev. R. L. Stanford, of Dunedin, who has given up the Gospel for the Law, may be presumed to know something of the science. If so, his ideal of the Perfect Man is that much-abused and somewhat unlovely type, the Drunkard. This is what the Reverend and Learned Gentleman says, writing to the Daily Times on the subject of the licensing elections: « I have long since come to the conclusion that, as between the extremes of total abstinence and drunkenness, the drunkard is on the higher moral platform. » Passing over the writer's confusion of the comparative and the superlative, let us see what his conclusion involves. There are two extremes—abstinence and drunkenness. Mr S. is not an abstainer—we will assume that he does not occupy the opposite position; he is therefore on an intermediate platform. If he approximates to the abstainer's position he is on the down-grade, evidently; for the incorrigible and irreclaimable sober man is not only on a low level, but at the lowest possible depth. The drunkard, occupying the opposite extreme, is necessarily on a loftier plane than our clerico-legal friend—in fact, if he be a Drunkard of the First Magnitude, he can ascend no higher. So long as Mr Stanford, holding such pronounced views, refrains from getting gloriously drunk, and continuing in that exalted condition, he is open to the charge of inconsistency, amounting to betrayal of his own principles.

When the train goes on and leaves a passenger behind, he cannot bring it back by standing on the platform and cursing the locomotive or the Railway Commissioners. When some ancient fogey, weighed down with obsolete prejudices, finds that the world has moved on and left him in the rear, bad language may relieve his feelings, but will not check the onward movement. And Mr Stanford—appropriately selected as a candidate in the liquor interest at the late licensing election—has not been ashamed to write and publish epithets which, had he applied them personally, in a public place, would have brought him under the scope of certain Acts of Parliament which we need not particularise. All who have taken a pledge of temperance, he says, are « moral eunuchs »; to induce a child to join a Band of Hope is « moral murder, » and such an institution is « a hotbed of perjury. » (Freethinkers, by the way, have said just the same thing of the churches—and ؟what, oh what, of our courts of justice?) We look for the secret of this bitter denunciation of worthy men and good citizens, and we read: « I see with much regret a growing tendency to be ashamed of taking strong drink. Men sneak round the corner as if there was something to be ashamed of in drinking beer or whisky. » The time was when men were proud of their dram-drinking—that they are ashamed of it now is a healthy sign.

The old order changeth, yielding place to new,
Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.

Customs good in their day may outgrow their service; but there are others wholly evil and corrupt, and even these have their apologists.

It does not appear to have occurred to this pugnacious disputant that his most offensive epithet applies to every member of the community, not excepting himself. If his words are anything more than idle wind, he mnst admit that when he signed the XXXIX Articles of Belief, or the undefined number that admitted him to his present profession, he was deliberately guilty of moral self-emasculation.

And (if he be a married man) when he took upon himself the matrimonial vows he forfeited what remained—if any—of his moral virility. Not content with these repeated moral mutilations, he comes up now as a candidate pledged to a certain line of conduct if elected. As to « moral murder, » it is daily perpetrated by godfathers and godmothers, and as a clergyman Mr S. must have presided on numerous occasions of moral infanticide.

After all, it is not to either of the learned professions that Mr Stanford has adorned that one looks, as a rule, for logic, moderation, or consistency. As a sane man and sober citizen, he can never have accepted the conclusions he propounds. Finding no solid foundation for his arguments, he bases them on the idlest hyperbole. Having no case, he abuses the other side. There is something in the practice of certain professions which tends towards neutralizing those results which the preliminary mental training is intended to secure. Every experienced journalist, with the fear of libel before his eyes, knows that of all contributors, those he must watch the most closely are lawyers and clergymen. From no other class of educated men comes such loose, inaccurate, and reckless writing. At first sight this may seem strange, but the reason, after all, is not far to seek.

As Collectors of Chestnuts the funny men of the second-rate Australian weeklies would be hard to beat. One of them, after premising that « the waters of the Waitemata are prolific in eels, » tells a story of « an Auckland widow, » which is a clumsily-mangled version of the Ingoldsby Legend of The Knight and the Lady. The stale plagiarism is now going the rounds of the New Zealand press.

The Chair has been meditating on the long roll of dead and forgotten « society » papers that have run their brief course in the colony. It would be as impossible as unprofitable to make a full list of them. So complete is the oblivion into which they have sunk, as to recal a significant and suggestive proverb from the ancient classics:

Into the night
Κυα ματε κι τε Πϖ.

« Journalist, whoe'er thou art,
Answer, and relieve my heart;
؟Where have vanished—east or west—
Echoes, Tribunes, and the rest? »
Came the answer, soft and low—
« Κυα ματε κι τε Πϖ. »
« By no principles confined,
Changing with each passing wind:
Scarce of truth the faintest tinge:
Consciences that never twinge. » —
« Brief their days, and full of woe—
« Κυα ματε κι τε Πϖ. »
« Mess hashed up with shears and paste,
Sickening savor, evil taste;
Scandals foul, 'twere shame to tell;
Venomed arrows, planted well » — « Still they come—and still they go—
« Κυα ματε κι τε Πϖ. »
« Sweet relief, when all are gone!
Here and there still lingers one;
But its name is on the scroll
Of the death-predestined roll.
؟Can it 'scape oblivion? » « No—
« Κυα ματε κι τε Πϖ. »

Kua mate ki te Po—(Deceased and departed into the Night)—is an old and suggestive Maori saying. As the Polynesians possess no alphabet of their own, there is no impropriety in dressing this poetic phrase in antique garb.

A modern philosopher recommended the formula « ؟How long will it last? » as the test of value. Tried by this criterion, love-letters should be rated among earth's precious things. An Austrian woman, at the late census, returned her age as 114, and in proof, produced a love-letter written to her in 1790. There is something touching in page 92the sentiment that, through all the vicissitudes of life, could cherish an old love-token for ninety years—an amulet against Time, renewing the soul's youth, though the hair had grown gray. It is not enough to say that affection is lasting—it is the one thing that is absolutely imperishable. Age, though prolonged to the twelfth decade, cannot wither it—

Still it lingering haunts the greenest spot
In memory's waste!

The incident is not without a solemn moral, which those who write love-letters should ponder. The application is too obvious to require pointing out.

Neither the Sea Serpent nor the Big Gooseberry have as yet been properly acclimatised in New Zealand, but we can do very well without them. We have always the Old Chief and the Moa to fall back upon. « ؟What is the meaning of all that howling in the Maori pa over the river? » asks the country reporter in search of an item. « Oh, » is the reply, « O1d Te Moana is dead, and they are holding a great tangi. » Thereupon he goes home and writes something after this style: « One by one the old Maori warriors are disappearing, and now the doughty old hero, Te Moana, chief of the once-powerful Ngatirakaukahikatea-nui tribe, is dead. He was claimed to be the oldest native in the colony. His precise age is not known, but from careful study of dates it has been fixed at about 167. Yet the tough old cannibal retained his bodily and mental faculties almost to the last. He was in the prime of life when Cook visited these islands, and retained a distinct recollection of the event. He was rather proud of having been one of the band who carried off the Otaheitian boy at Cape Kidnappers. He also remembered the time, in his earlier youth, when large flocks of gigantic Moas ranged the country. His father, Kakanui (Giant Bird) was a mighty hunter of these birds, and from this circumstance the late chief derived his name Te Moana. He has given very minute and picturesque descriptions of the Dinornis. He described it as of extraordinary swiftness and agility; its plumage was beautifully iridescent like the paua shell; it specially abounded in swampy and lake districts, and its chief food was eels Its note he could not describe; but on one occasion when the old man heard the blast of a steam-siren, he said it brought back the days of his boyhood, for it reminded him of the voice of the Moa. He was the leader of the party who hunted and killed the last of the Moas in one of the deep gorges of the Maunganowhera Range, about the year 1864. The Moas have gone, and soon, like them, the race of the old chiefs will be extinct. » That is the kind of thing we come across every few weeks. ؟What need, then, have we of the Sea Serpent or the Big Gooseberry?

It is not without misgiving that we print the paragraph above. For the reputation of Typo for accuracy is such that even The Confessions of a Book-Fiend have been quoted as literal facts. Let us therefore explain that though the definitions above are quite as correct as the general average of newspaper-Maori, they are not to be relied on. Kakanui is literally Large Parrot, and Te Moana, The Sea.

In a New Zealand court lately, a boy of thirteen refused to recognize the Bible provided for witnesses. He could not undertake to speak the truth unless sworn on a particular version. A copy was hard to find, but at last a perspiring official entered bearing a ponderous family Bible, with plates, notes, and the rest of the extraneous rubbish to be found in the volumes hawked round by the Book-Fiend—and then the fastidious child was able to testify, with a clear conscience, that he knew nothing about the matter before the court. In recording this exceptional exhibition of ignorance and bigotry, a contemporary remarks (surely in sarcasm) that the boy's conscientious scruples did honor to his training.

In a gold-field township in the south, it is recorded, no Bible at all could be found, and the court copy had gone amissing. Time being precious, a volume of Interest Tables was rushed in, and did duty, none of the witnesses having the curiosity to open the book.

As the Bible of the commercial world, it was not without a certain fitness where civil issues were involved. A still stranger instance is among the traditions of the magistrate's court in Wellington. For many years all the oaths were taken on an old Johnson's Dictionary. It was all through an absurdly-sensitive witness, who declared that no oath could bind him unless there was a cross on the book. It so happened that the court Bible and dictionary were similar in size and outward form—both bound in red calf, old, shabby, and ink-splashed. The clerk hastily took the book—the wrong one, of course—bound it with red tape arranged crosswise, like a parcel by registered mail, sealed it securely, and the deponent was satisfied. Succeeding witnesses could not open The volume, even if they so desired, and for twelve or fourteen years—until the tape wore out and gave way—it answered every purpose.

The Bucolic Muse is at times irresistibly comic, and never more so than when she is in serious earnest. When she unburdens herself on a tombstone or a memorial card, one only feels pity: none but the heartless could grin in the presence of the deepest human sorrow, in whatever incongruous form it may find expression. A social gathering of a less solemn kind lately took place in the north, to bid farewell to a popular young lady on the eve of departing for the Old Land. Many kind words were spoken, and a prominent citizen read a Poem of his own composition. After drawing the familiar comparisons and contrasts between the New Country and the Old, he passed on to the personal application, concluding with the following original and striking line:

Vale! to thy native land we bid thee vale!

Which recals the old Joe-Miller: « I say, Jones, ؟what kind of Salve is that I see advertised on your door-mat? »