Days of future past
If the sensibilities of those inclined toward writing letters to the editors of newspapers have changed remarkably little in the last 200 years it would be fair to say that those who did so in earlier eras expressed themselves in a more eloquent – or at least more verbose – manner. In July of 1889 a correspondent of the Waikato Times composed an indignant missive of complaint seeking to counter claims made in a contemporary Wesleyan publication. The letter concluded with one of the most extraordinary sentences ever written in the English language.
The gentleman who signed himself Te Mohite took offence at generalisations made in the religious pamphlet Zeitgeist, in particular editor C H Garland’s belief that there was ‘‘proportionally more open drunkenness in Cambridge than in Auckland’’. For Te Mohite the statement constituted ‘‘one of those rash assertions made without any effort to ascertain the actual statistics of the case, that bigoted writers are often betrayed into making’’. By way of rebuttal he compared the ‘‘rioting, fighting and debauchery’’ observed on rare trips to Auckland – ‘‘especially during the Christmas holidays or on occasions when men-ofwar have been in port’’ – with a lack of such occurrences in his home town of 10 years.
Of equal annoyance to Te Mohite was the manner in which Cambridge ‘‘ministers of the Gospel’’ were seen to be complicit in the town’s sin. Garland alone saw himself as ‘‘the Hercules who can cleanse the Augean stable’’. This theme informed the last, aforementioned sentence, one that deserves to be quoted in its entirety: ‘‘If it takes so much to shock the average Cambridge resident, how much in the way of mis-statements must it take to shock the intemperate bigots who applaud the utterances of Zeitgeist, whose fertile imagination and exuberant fancy burst through the trammels that would confine them within the narrow limits of sober literal fact, until poor, plain, naked Truth, after one brief glance at her radiant rival gorgeously clothed in shoddy garments and wearing a beauteous garland of artificial flowers, hastens to hide her blushes in her classic retreat at the bottom of a well.’’