Notes and Comments.

Feilding Star, Volume VIII, Issue 2319, 25 March 1914, Page 2

Notes and Comments.

Striking a Boosting Rate. What would the members of a local body in New Zealand say if they were asked to strike a rate for the purpose of boosting their town or 'district? They'd drop dead from shock. Yet such things are done in the muchdespised, slow-going old Motherland. A London paper just to hand informs us that the Manx Legislature on February 2 decided to levy a rate of si halfpenny in the £ for the purpose of advertising the Isle of Man as a health and holiday resort.

Going to the Limit. It is astonishing how far beyond tbo limit of good taste somo Knglisb papers go in their alleged witty observations upon politicians, and bow they will taint a news paragraph with political bias. For instance, we read in a late number of tbe London Express, which is owned by Unionist Arthur Pearson, an item of news telegraphed from Naples telling how the Duke, of Sutherland, who was staying there, had been robbed of a valuable watch and chain by pickpockets. Says the message: "Two members of the Camorra called Totonno and San Domenico, who were among the prisoners in the famous Viterbo murder trial, in which a number of Camorrists were concerned some years ago, have been arrested in connection with th 6 theft, but the Duke failed to identify them." Then under this message, with the beading, "An

Alibi," there is this paragraph: "Mr Lloyd George returned to London yesterday from Glasgow." Just because the Duke is selling some of his broad acres as a result of the operation of the Chancellor's Budget and land reforms! To-day's History. Abolition of slave trade, 1807. James Payn, novelist, died, 1898. _ War declared with Napoleon, 1815. On Napoleon's arrival in Paris after his escape from Elba, the French troops utterly forsook the Bourbons and rallied round the standard of their old leader. Louis XVIII. and the Bourbon dukes and princes were, one after the other, chased out of France, and Napoleon and his army were once again the masters of their country. Early in March, before the allied Powers knew where Napoleon was or anything about him, except that he was somewhere at large in France, they drew up that famous declaration in which they declared that he had broken the sole legal tie to which his existence was attached, and that it was possible to keep with him "neither peace nor truce." "The Powers in consequence," so runs this document, "declare that Napoleon Buonaparte is placed beyond the pale of civil and social relations, and that, as a common enemy and disturber of the peace of the world, he has delivered himself over to public justice." This declaration, which had been the subject of vehement criticism, was the natural consequence of the prevailing and correct appreciation of Napoleon's character. There was not a nation. in Europe which felt the slightest particle of confidence or trust in him. A treaty was adopted on March 25 whereby Great Britain, Russia, Austria, and Prussia bound themselves to provide each 150,000 men, and. to prosecute the war "until Buonaparte shall have been rendered absolutely unable to create disturbance, and to renew attempts for possessing himself of supreme power in France." The French, or Napoleonic army, was destroyed at Waterloo, and the power which its mighty leader had built up on tho basis of its astonishing successes was gone for ever.