“B-i-g does not spell ‘great.’ China has what most of the new countries of Oliffa are screaming for—‘population.’ Yet China is not considered ‘great.’ India, even with British rule, as a people or a race is not ‘great.’ The true greatness of a nation consists in the greatness of the individual units composing the nation, and not in their numbers. America is great as a nation, but the real average ‘greatness’ of the individual American has been declining for many years. Better travel comfortably with a select party than rush to ruin in a crowded train.
“There is no relation between size and value. Even the most ambitious Outeroo would hardly claim Lambert, who weighed forty stone, to have been ‘greater’ than little Pope, who looked like an interrogation point and weighed but eight. So, as there is no virtue in avoirdupois, there is no ‘greatness’ in mere numbers. Better flirt with one healthy girl, than take a dozen sour old maids to the pantomime.”
Mr. Oseba might have mentioned, had he known the facts, that Phœnicia, that gave to the world the ship and the alphabet, and anticipated modern commercial methods, occupied but a small strip of country—mostly sterile—from eight to twenty-five miles wide, and less than a hundred and eighty miles long; that Attica, at the feet of whose philosophers we still sit, from whose artists we still copy, and to whose orators we still listen, embraced but seven hundred square miles; and that the population of Sparta, while in her glory, probably never exceeded ten thousand souls.
“No, my children,” said Oseba, “b-i-g, does not spell ‘great,’ and any Zelanian who is caught howling for ‘population’ should be compelled to ‘shout’ for the whole crowd until he goes ‘broke,’ and has to hunt a billet to enable him to buy a beer and a bun. The desirable cannot be bribed—others should not be wanted.”
THE MAORI MAID OF ROTORUA.
Did you ever see Maggie of Rotoru’?
You would never imagine what she can do
For the mouths of hell,
With a magic spell,
This little brown maid—
As I have said—
Will lead you over, and under and through.
This little brown damsel of Rotoru’
Will laugh at the fates, and smile at you.
Like a fairy dream,
Through the caldron’s steam,
In gleeful wit.
She’ll gaily flit—
Yet careful, stranger, how you pursue.
With this little brown maid of Rotoru’
You scramble and gaze and wonder, too.
You stand appalled,
Your soul’s enthralled,
For scenes so weird,
Have here appeared—
You wonder if h—— isn’t bursting through.
While much of this danger, my friends, is sham
God tempers the winds to the little shorn lamb.
But wild Nature raves
In dark hidden caves,
And ’tis romance, you know,
To Roto’ you go,
So leave some “memory” in Maggie’s palm.