8
THE HONGKONG TELEGRAPII, SATURDAY, JANUARY 14, 1939.
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The
Hongkong Telegraph.
Wyndham St., Hongkong: 'Phone 26615 January 14, 1939
"Left, Right..
IT IS IMPROBABLE that more
than one tenth of the masses
across
of the Chinese migrating west- wards
their burned, brown plains before the Japan-: ese invaders, or cowering help- lesa in their flimsy buildings under a rain of mass murder from the sky, know much about Democracy or Totalitarianism.
Jess
Nevertheless, inarticulate as they are individually, they are collectively fighting a war that' 4 war between Democracy and Totalitarianism than is the conflict in stricken Spain.
is
no
Democracy has undoubtedly failed the Chinese, as it failed the Spaniards. But its failure!
China in
may have vastly different results to the failure' in Spain. China has not pur- chased nearly the quantities of materials she
arms or war would have liked to have pur- chased from the western world but, as a result, her taxation per head of population has in- ercased by less than 20 per cent. since the war began. In Japan it has gone up some 160 per cent.
Japan's future must provide its rulers with a dismal outlook. In July, 1937, they embarked upon the war which their gen-' erals predicted would end in victory in two months. Early in 1938 they talked about a Chinese capitulation in the sum- mer. In October, when Canton and Hankow fell, it was all over In December, bar shouting.
China could not possibly remain solidly behind Chiang Kai-shek after the flight of Wang Ching- wei. Now, despite these fre- quent predictions, Japan's new Prime Minister dolefully warns the nation that fighting may drag on for years, that greater sacrifices must be borne by the entire populace. It is no longer China who is being called upon The to make all the sacrifices. tide has turned, with China already tested and found not wanting, with Japan, her major test yet to come, on the verge of revolution and collapse.
Japan is discovering, that although governments can wage: war for a short time without gold, there comes the fatal day when creditors begin to wonder, and decide that the best plan is to play on the safe side.
nre
1908
L
Look at YOU!
IFE is a mess, and you don't have to tell me. ALook at you. Look at me."
Look at anybody.
Look at the pictures in the papers. A collection of Grim Faces, Grim Faces conducting Grim Faces election campaigns. kicking on at football matches." Grim Faces laying foundation Orim Faces holding the stones. world's largest chrysanthemums.
Look at the people opposite in the trains and the buses,
Something's wrong.
Life is a mess.
Let's go back a bit.
When I was so high Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show used to come to Twice a our town ones a year, year came the thing they called a Cinematograph. After that there was the performing bear in the street once in a while or a penny And after Magic Lantern Show.
We did that there was nothing.
Bee lile.
If we stayed in nights (and we did) we read comic papers. Our big heroes were Weary Wille and Tired Tim and
being wonderful named Ally Sloper. you're under
A
thirty
don't you know what I'm Lalk- Ing about. If you're forty you're over sighing and be- coming sentimental.
The
world isn't what it was.
You don't have to wait
for year Buffalo Bill's Wild Weat Show now. You don't have to put on stout shoes and an overcoat and a and tramp two
A
By WILL SCOTT
million-dollar film from Holly- wood. They let you sit on velvet to do it and they wash the air you breathe every half hour. They Rive you fresh doses every Monday and Thursday, Sunday, too.
What do you think we did on Sunday, when I was so high?
If you need the doctor urgently
always was.
Yet, we managed to get a laugh or two when I was so high.
Something's missing. -
Or someone
I mentioned Ally Sloper to Bome young people the other day
and they'd never heard of him. Which
in the middle of the night you',,was to be expected.
don't have to trudge five miles through the anow to get him. You lift the receiver for twopence.
Why shouldn't you look miser- abic? It's a rotten world and get- ting worse.
I remember that when I was ad high and we saw a motor-car we used to run after it and stare. We never rode in one. They were for the rich. When we rode (which wasn't often it was in a horse-bus with one oil lamp and straw on the floor. You couldn't read by the light of the oli lump and the straw always used to be wet.
I'l
If you think I'm a hundred and two and writing about the Dark Ages,
SAY
¡¡ you're that only thirty I mean the year or two be- fure you were born, Now a days you catch a bus that's like ጊ home оп wheels. Brilliantly- lighted. Warm Cushioned state. Soft tyres. Quick.
Bufalo Bill once a year.
muffler miles through
the slush when you want fun. You take your stout shoes off, get round the fire and turn a knob. Dance hands, plays, variety, spelling becs, rclays from the other side of the You globe, cricket, football. turn a knob and it's poured out all over you.
All for about the price of a cigarette. You don't have to walt six months for the Cinematograph.
You go round the corner and sit In a pink glow for three hours for ninepence, watching the latest
T
Nowadays it isn't only the rich who own motor-cars. In the good old sense there aren't so many rich left. Money's getting about more. You and I can own
In that respect
motor-cars now. we can do just as the rich did See us in thirty-five years ago.
the summer, going down to the sea every week-end in our motor-cars. Not dozens of us. Not hundreds of us. Tens of thousands of us.
I don't know what the world's coming to.
*.
Seriously, though, something's wrong. We've got most things that grandfather hadn't-and look at our Grim Faces. Life'a a mess, and you don't have to tell me. But life
Bul
I wanted to
know what they had
In his pince, and they didn't appear to have anything in his place. It's a long time since I saw Wonry
Willie nud
Tired Tim. Perhaps they've been deau and gone for years. Sloper has, I know.
I saw what was called u "children's
comic " Inst week.
1938
than ure. They're not comic..
The
Comic Man has walked
out of
No Fight
our novela. Micawbers now. The Comic Man
Jasted into the Wodehouse Age, a bit shrunken. Bindla was one of the last of him. You won't find a Comic Man in a modern novel. Nor in politics. You won't find one anywhere,
The Comic Man was us, magni- fled. Is bragging and shouting ware our own bragging and shouting, en- larged. Ilis terror of has mother-in-law was our own strong dislike,
made the most of.
Where are the Comic Ment
and it was all falries, animals in trousers and painting competi- tlons. Very nice, no doubt, but in what way comic "?
In the old days we used to make rather a god of the Comic Man. We had a need for Comte Meri. When they weren't there we used
to invent them. In the long-ago there was Falstaff and the rest. Dickens gave us Micawber. the Wellers and dozens more. We even made Guy Fawkes into a Comic Man.
Before the war the Comic Man had crept Into the advertise- ments. Are you old enough to re- member Sunny Jim?
crowded with The stage was Comic Men. Dan Leno, Little Tich, Harry Weldon; scores of them. Comic Women. too.
Marle Lloyd.
The Comic Man was bigger than life. He was an exaggeration, and on the whole a happy exaggeration. He had pretty well all our pecull- arlties. When we laughed at him we laughed at everybody.
To-day the Comic Man is no Diofc.
We've got comedians. Taken as a class they wear dress Bults and drape themselves uver pianos. Sometimes they're amusing. Bome- times not. They're never larger
Me and my girl
go to the Fair
By Spike Hughes
HE child is incorrigible. I took-that is, I went with-Maureen Angela Cairns Hughes to Woman's Fair yesterday.
The idea was to get a New Angle.
I got it. When I asked her what she liked most she replied: "Those spraying things for washing glasses
at the bar."
I pointed out that the bar was not strictly part of the exhibition, and she relorted. "Why not?"
After that I just trailed around after her.
And I'm glad it's the week-end, bo- eause I love to walk, but oh, my feet.
Of course we didn't see the half of it. ",
She tried everything, nat once, but She had her nails several times "done": she was covered with enough perfumes of Arabia to xweeten Lady Macbeth's tile hand for a lifetime.
Anything free to cat she ate, from sandwich **sprends" to chopped mw carrots,
For Laureen Angela it was a day of new experiences.
There was the wax figure lying on a couch under a sun-lamp, for instance
Her ribs had to be poked for a start to prove she wasn't real.
Then there were stik-worms, and the Coronation Robes of T.R.H. The Duchesses of Kent and Olcucester,
There was a long discussion as to which dress was the more impressive.
Eventually it was decided that they both looked like Snow White, ang- way, and could Maureen Angela go and seo "Red Riding Hood" at Covent Garden when it came on?
Also, could wo please go and see what was on the balcony?
We did. It was a little like taking coula to Newcastle, for we found out- selves in the midst of the "Mother and
Fortune of 3 Million Left to Waif
Now York.
fer
Thought she'd
like to marry a man who would buy her A houseful of them,
Child" section, and I had one of each with me.
Here we spent best part of a quarter of an hour blowing down a tube to test our lungs, in aid of a hospital.
Maureen Angela's blow-pressure WIN more than that of a powerful Adult
I asked her about this.
"Well," she said. “I paid a penny, so I got in as many blows as I could for the money."
She doesn't wear a kilt for nothing, Celtic mongrel that she is.
This acclion in the balcony provided A lot of fun. We got welghed, we watched our hearts beat, and we had a lot more free food.
went
were Then wo
back and Our weights weren't weighed again. good, but they were different.
There was still a lot to see and Maureen Angela had a date soon,
Namesakes Get Together
When we
saw the funny side of him we saw the
funny side of our- selves.
Now we have no Comic Man to laugh at. Which possibly explains the Grim Face We don't kugh at ourselves now. We take ourselves seriously. We're по longer a joke.
Well, you say, llie's such a mesa. Who could be funny about Hitler. Muscolini, Neville, the tax man? They are a serious business and serious businesses must be taken seriously.
Yes, I know. Just being alive was a serious business ten thousand years ago, and I've got an idea it still will be ten thousand years. ahead. It was a serious business
a hundred years ago, a much more serious business for the ordinary man than it is to-day, whether you believe me or not. But the ordinary man had Micawber and Pickwick and old man Weller to help him jog along.
A generation ago the Kaiser was a serious business but we made a Comic Man of him. And Little Willie. And they didn't, perhaps, seem quite such bogies, after that. Life was a mess a generation ago. But out of the mess emerged Old B.
Nobody's emerged from the Crisis. Not a single Comic Man. We no longer laugh at us. Wo just take ourselves, all the time, dead seriously,
We don't seem to have any use for the Comic Man any more. But I notice we still keep the Bogy Man.
We went downstairs again. For the third time in the afternoon we crane our necks to admire. "The Buver Lady."
And for the third time in the after- noon I insisted that it was the Venus de Milo.
But that's Venus over there," said Maureen Angela. She pointed to the enormous Botticelli bung over the main entrance. "They're quite different. looking. One's got arm3."
Logic like this defeats me, and I was glad when we used on to the dis- cussion of the rayon-hang roof.
Enough stuff there for three mil- lor dresses," anld Maureen Angela.
I'm never good on facts; but I aug- gested 300,000 as a more likely figure.
Whatever it is why don't they make dresses of it?
I muttered something about art not always being useful, and added: "It' pretty anyway."
Hm," said Maureen Angela, "I'd rather have a washing-machine."
Knowing the difficulties 'my elder daughter has in the back of her neck In the mornings, I was surprised at this Audden interest in anything to do with soap.
I cald nothing.
"Yes," she continued. "I'm going to marry a man who'll give me a whole houseful of washing-machines. or at least, a man who can fix one
the name of her husband, Finley 3.
Omaha, Neb. Shepard.
She brought up the foundling as Marian Jeanne Barry, Omaha, saw (Seward, own chlid, gave him all the Marlan Jeanette Bartle's luxuries that wealth could provida. Neb.,) plcture in the paper and up."
"pen pal" correspondence began. And when she died she left be- They have a mutual friend, Marlon can then?" hind her the Gould fortune swel-Jean Barrle of Red Oak, In.
len from £2,000,000 £14,000,- 000, from which the man who was once a homeless wulf gela a £3,- 000,000 share,
As Japan's credits dry up. PICKED up, twenty-four years China's expand. Britain and ago, on the stops of St. Pat- the United States
HOW rick's Cathedral, New York. allowing a trickle of financial A four-year-old boy with no ald to reach China. The trickle home, no parents, no money; a
becomo may
a cascade, 05 sailor suit, with a name, BOWN THE BOY'S STORY evidence grows that China, and inside, his only possession in not Japan, may win this war.
the world. This spring may quite prob ably see the open and utter failure of the Tokyo corner of the triangle formed by Germany,' Italy and Japan, nominally to combat Communism and In effect to combat established and ousy-going countries... like our own, or China's.
Later ho changed his story, omit- ting the blood and thunder and say- ing his father had brought him to New York.
Pictures and descriptions of him When the boy was found he told
were posted in schools and police the police that he lived at Philadel To-day he has a £3,000,000 phia, and he gave two nddresses
stations throughout the country, fortune.
there. But at neither address was
but
till no one claimed him. he known. The narne Austin Mc- That in the story of a founding Cleary was sewn into his sult, but he
The next year he was adopted by who benefits under the will of insisted that his real name was John Mrs. Finley J. Shepard, given a rich Doc. His parents were never found, boy's education at an exclusive
school and a university. "Big man tia blue buttons look Six years ago, while studying met Ann my papa away," he prattled. "My music in Vienna, he MKOMA WAR cavered with blood. Loraine Sheldon, an American girl, Bad boy took me away."
and they, were wed,
wealthy US, society woman Helen Shepard, who died recently.
Mrs. Shepard, who as Helen Gould was once the world's richest spinster, Inheriting £2,000,000 left by her father, adopted the boy, gave him
"You're going to marry an electri
No. Just a man who can fix up a washing-machine."-
It was time we went, and I still wanted a "line" for this article.
"What," I asked, “would you buy in thia Fair if you had an absolutely free cholce?"
2
Maureen Angela thought for
"Oh, a new hat, I suppose." moment.
Eternal Woman had spoken,--Dut not her laat word.
"And one of those things for wash- ing glasses at the bar, of course,"
-To-day's Thought- JESTING often cuts hard knots more effectively than gravity.
-HORACE.