Tarragona

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume LXXII, 30 November 1938, Page 10

Tarragona

Notes on the News

Tarragona, was bom boa on No vein | tier 7 by Spanish rebels. The hope is expressed that (bis beautiful city with its historic cathedral and -47,000 civilian inhabitants, may be spared front furl her destruction. Tarragona is situated in north-east Spain, on the Mediterranean Son, 03 miles by railway from Barcelona in a westerly direction. It crowns a steep hill 525 ft. high, and is surrounded on three sides by massive walls that go back to Roman times. The famous cathedral was built chiefly in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. There are also remains of Roman buildings. The now town stretches down to a fairly largo harbour. Tarragona’s history has been an eventful one. Once a Phoenician colony it was an important Roman colony ns far back as 218 B.C. In subsequent years it passed through various hands by way of capture, including Moors, Christians, the British, and the French. U.S.A. Foreign Minorities The American Ambassador, Mr. ,T. P. Kennedy, speaking at a Thanksgiving Day dinner in London, said it was probably due to the ideal of democracy, embodied in their Constitution that, despite the fact that the American nation consisted of many races, they had little trouble due to unabsorbed foreign minorities. Said the late Lord Bryce, in “Modern Democracies”: "American cities have grown with unprecedented rapidity. . . . This growth was due not only to industrial development and the building of railroads, but also to the flood of immigrants which began to pour in from about 1840 until 1010, most of whom could not speak Fnglish, very few of whom knew anything of the country or its institutions, and practically all of whom had no experience of the exercise of civic rights and no conception of civic duties. “They formed a heterogeneous j mass, tit first chiefly of Irishmen and Germans, to whom were presently added Italians, Poles, Czechs, Slovaks. | Croats, Serbs, Slovenes. Magyars, Russians, Greeks, Finns, Armenians. S.vr- I iatis, and vast swarms of Russian and Polish Jews. (The vast majority of Swedes and Norwegians did not remain J in {lie cities, hut took up farms, chiefi- ; ly in the north-west.) “This crowd knew as little of the men into the midst of whom they came as they did of the city government. But they found themselves, within a few weeks or months, turned into citizens and entitled to vote at elections —city, State, and Federal. . . . an easy and indeed a willing prey Itol .... the lower sort of professional