Notes

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXIX, Issue 37, 12 September 1901, Page 17

Notes

They Want to Fight.

A sturdy paterfamilias of the good old style writes to us in vehement denunciation at the proposal which has been made to enrol a young ladies' volunteer corps in Dunedin. He ' looks impreoashuns,' as the late Artemus Ward would say, at the projeot. But we fancy he has been merely wasting useful indignation. During the siege of Paris a great body of more or less youthful women were fired with the enthusiasm of defenoe and marched in procession to the Hotel de Ville to demand arms from General Trochu. The hard-headed and unromantic Breton Commander-in-chief had an idea that a regiment of modern Amazons with loaded riflee in their hands might be much more terrible to their friends than to their enemies. But he did not dare to tell them so ; neither had he the courage to directly refuse their request. Instead, the ounning old stager oast the apple of discord among them. He told them to elect their officers and choose their uniform and then oall around again. There was considerable difficulty about the appointment of the officers, but it was got over by time and patienoe. But things got into a hopeless tangle when the question of uniform was tabled. Stout and slim, dark and fair, tall and short, had hopelessly divergent views upon the subjects of cut, color, style, trimmings i etc. The project stuck fast in the mud, and the plucky ladies never called on Trochu for their rifles. But they soon found work more oongenial to woman's kindly nature, not in inflicting wounds, but in helping to heal them, when the red work of the sorties began and the hospitals were filled with maimed and battered sufferers.

Take Notice. Buskin puts the writer who Bays what he means in a direct and forcible way on almost as high a pedestal as the man who made two blades of grass spring up where only one had grown before. A certain West Kansas editor must, on this principle, be a benefactor of his kind. He recently iased the following notice to his readers : — ' Send your items of news in when they are fresh. We don't like to publish a birth after the child is weaned, a marriage after the honeymoon is over, a death after the widow is married again, nor the notice of an entertainment when only the oldest inhabitants can remember when it took place.' We a*k our readers to take a note of all this.

The Penny Post. People wagged their heads and smiled a low, wise smile when, in 1837, the enthusiastic young Rowland (afterwards Sir Rowland) Hill maintained that reduction of the rate of postage — which varied from 4d to 12d per letter — to a penny would result ia an enormous increase in correspondence. Some of the wiseacres thought Rowland had a bee in his bonnet. But he kept pegging away at his idea, and his scheme of reform was launched on January 10, 1840. The event fully justified his prediction. In 1839 the number of letters that passed through the English post-offioe was 82,500,000 ; in 1840 — the first year of the new reform — the number jumped to 169,000,000 ; and in 1890 the letters alone counted 1,650,200,000, and there were, in addition, 217.100,000 post-cards, 441,900,000 book-packets and circulars, and 159,300,000 newspapers. * 4lt is more pleasing,' said Dr. Johnson, ' to see smoke brightening into flame than flame Binking into smoke.' And therefore New Zealand has reason to rejoice at the results of its plucky adoption of the Imperial Penny Post. It was estimated that the reduced rate would involve a loss of £80,000 for the first year. But already about 10,000,000 letters have been posted more than last year, and the losa has been found to be only £43,591. In all probability the total loss will soon be made up, and the experiment has been an emphatic and gratifying success. Nobody nowadays objects to the principle of the penny post ; and it is curious to reflect that when it was first introduced into England by Robert Murray in the last years of Charles 11. it was (says Sydney in his Social Life in England) loudly denounced ' as a contrivance, on the part of the Papists, to facilitate the communication of their plots of rebellion one to another. The infamous Titus Oates,' continues the same author, 1 assured the public that he waa convinced of the complicity of the Jesuits in the scheme, and that undeniable evidence of it would certainly be found by searching the bags.'

Export Lies. We are getting on journalistically as well aa commercially in New Zealand. Up to the present most of our newspaper lies have been imported — clumsy, ill-oonstrncted, and inartistic creations, as a rule, and mostly the work of the 'prentice hand of some inexperi-

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enoed cable-demon. But now we are able to turn out almost sufficient newspaper anti-facts for home consumption, and even to export some to the English market. The latest consignment took amazingly well, and was greatly appreciated by the London press. It ran as follows : ' Many a gold mine haß been found under the sea, and when, five years ago, a poor fisherman off Tiinaru, in New Zealand, pulled up a piece of quartz in hia net, he naturally thought he was on the high road to fortune. Subeequently various pyndioatea have expended over a quarter of a million in trying to locate the mine, thr^e divers have lost, their lives in wandering about amongst the rocks, but the gold Htill remains hidden, though there is every reason to believe that ifc is there pompwhere.' The pwtieni and unromantic Timaru Herald — which has an amiable weakness for what Kinglake calls ' profane fact ' — made searching inquiries and, of course, found that ' there ain't no sich persons 'aa the ' poor fisherman ' who fished up the quartz, nor the drowned divers, and that the whole story is a golden fable of the kind that enterprising youths concoct on the first of April to tell to the marines.

The Belfast Anarchy. The courts have at last adopted a sane and common-sense method of dealing with the fearfully frequent outbreaks of Orange anarchy that have made the name of Belfast a by-word throughout the Empire. They have taken to imprisoning the clerical firebrands that have been the cause or the occasion of inciting the Orange proletariat to deeds of violence and outrage upon the Catholic minority who live in their midst. One of them is just now enjoying the hospitality of his Majesty the King in a place where he will be afforded a lengthy opportunity of pondering on the sinfulness and folly of his evil work. Had Government given ' the butt-end of the law' to the Revs.Drew, Mcl]waine,Hanna, and other inflammatory olerical agitators long ago, Belfast would have been spared the dance of death and the savagery of destruction that marked the local civil wars of 1837, 1864, etc., and fraternal peace instead of unrelenting strife might now be reigning in the capital of Ulster. It is not a little singular that in Australia and New Zealand, inflammatory onslaughts on the Catholic body come almost invariably, not from tha non-Catholic laity, but from clergy who profess it to be their duty to preach the Gospel of peace and brotherly love.