GUY FAWKES.

Wairarapa Daily Times, Volume LXIV, Issue 11508, 5 November 1912, Page 4

GUY FAWKES.

Our esteemed morning contemporary makes an incursion to-day into the field of history, and, as usually occurs upon those rare occasions when it ventures to print anything original in its loading columns, it flounders. This time Guy Fawkes moves the Age to tears, and thus are we treated to the following highly diverting fable: —

Why is it? For what reason are tho crackers being exploded by the small fry this morning? Some mayunderstand. A great many do not. Guy Fawkes happens to have been a German. He went to England, and in a moment of aberration sought to solve the problems of the British Empire with the aid of gunpowder. His scheme did not eventuate, and the world is supposed to bo the better for it. But why should we be continuing to remember the fifth of November? Why should one have to suffer broken rest on account of a foolish incident that occurred many years ago? We cling to the superstitions of the past without quite knowing why we do so.

This method of treating history is simply delicious. So novel, don't you know. What a shameless impostor the late Samuel Rawson Gardiner, with others of his kidney, must have been, to be sure. They tell us that Guy Fawkes was an Englishman born in Yorkshire, of Protestant parentage, in 1570. They also have the impudence to suggest that the Gunpowder Plot was Catesby's scheme, ami that Guy Fawkes, who had become a zealous Catholic before he came of age, and who had gone to the Continent, where he served in the Spanish army of the Netherlands, was hired by the conspirators to do the deed. They further mislead us by makiug us believe that the Plot had to do with the enforcement of the penal laws against the Catholics, whereas it appears that the desire of Guy Fawkes was "to solve the problems of the British Empire" in 1605. Again, far from -dismissing the matter as a "foolish incident," the historians, with pig-headed' obstinacy, appear to be determined to view it as a very grave and important event. "Some," says the Age, "may understand. A great ninny do not." We confess that we don't. Are we to believe Gardiner or aro we to believe the Age? We leave the puzzle to the small boys for solution. To-night, according to timehonoured custom, they will burn the "Guy." If they are puzzled by the conflicting stories now before them, we suggest, that they might test them by tho good old method: fiat experhnentum in corpore vili.