A more enlightened City Council, when we get one, will order it back again.
I had never the pleasure of Captain Cargill's acquaintance; but I take him to have been an old soldier, precise and prim; a disciplinarian, if not a martinet; and the Early Otago tradition runs that Church and State alike came within his official purview.
If anything could disturb his honoured shade in its present retirement, it is the degradation to which Dunedin, the city of his own founding, has doomed him.
The consecrated trysting place of dogs, socialists, and street preachers, where always on Sunday evenings your ears are assailed by heretical ravings and the clamour of a mob, is the Cargill Monument.
See, on the other hand, how the poet Burns sits musing at his ease within the Octagon enclosure, unapproachable by the profane, and tricked about with plots of flowers.
But Dr Stuart, an ecclesiastic, is set down absurdly amid the traffic of the wharves, and Queen Victoria where no one can find her.
Reform is wanted.
The Macandrew bust should be taken indoors - to the Early Settlers' Hall, say - and all the rest to the Octagon.
The place of honour, now held by Burns, I would give to the Queen.
It should be - "Bobbie, make room for your betters."
But I would risk that then as always his back was to the church and his face to the public-house.
Similarly it has been said of Dr Stuart that he sits with his back to the Queen and his face to the sou'-west weather.
Jesting of this poor sort being cheap and obvious, other examples are not far to seek: for example, something that was said of Queen Anne, whose habits, it is insinuated, were much the opposite of teetotal.
When the original of the Queen Anne statue on Ludgate Hill was placed in position, the wits of the day noticed that it faced a much-frequented tavern, and had St Paul's at its back.
As one of them wrote - Brandy Nan, Brandy Nan, you're leftin the lurch,Your face to the gin shop, yourback to the church.
Nowhere more than in humour, real or supposed, does the maxim hold that there is nothing new under the sun. - By Civis. - ODT, 4.9.1909.
