People We Hear About

New Zealand Tablet, 15 October 1914, Page 41

People We Hear About

John McCormack, whose Australasian season was so 'wonderfully successful a little while ago, has returned to England from America, where lie had recently given forty-seven concerts, and had added to his fortune by another £30,000. The last concert was given in the New . York Hippodrome, where a huge audience . paid top prices to hear him in a series of Irish songs.

A cable message states that the eminent Polish Catholic writer,. Henryk .Sienkiewicz, author of Quo Vadis, is resident in Vienna at the present time, but that he is not being held prisoner of war, as reported. Shortly after the beginning of the war Sienkiewicz appealed to the Polish people under Austro-Hungarian rule to throw off the foreign yoke and fight with the Russians for their national freedom.

News comes by mail of the death of the Right Rev. Dr. Pace, Bishop of Malta, who, it will be remembered, was so important a figure in the International Eucharistic Congress held at Malta last year. Mgr. Pace, who .was a K.C.Y.0., and held the' Grand Cross of the Papal Order of St. Gregory, died at Gozo in his 74th year. Mgr. Pace, as well as being Bishop of Malta, as Archbishop of Rhodes.

Mr. Martin Donohue, the London Daily Chronicle war correspondent, from whom a good deal is being heard, is only 45 years of age, but he has had a long and interesting career. Ho was born in Galway (Ireland), on November 10, 1869, and began his journalistic career in the Courier Australian, at Sydney, in 1892, and later with the Evening Aries. Subsequently he took a prominent part in exposing the notorious imposter De Rougemont. In the Boer war he represented 'the London Daily Chronicle. Ho acted as an assistant galloper to Hector Macdonald in the fight at Koodoesberg Drift. In the Russo-Japanese war he was attached to the first Japanese Army. He escaped from Lisbon with the first definite account of the fighting in the Portuguese Revolution of 1910. Subsequently he followed the Italian-Turkish war in Tripoli and the Balkan war. Commenting on the resignation of Sir John Ross, Chief Commissioner of Police, Dublin Castle, who is a Catholic, Truth says: ‘Possibly Sir John Ross was not the right man in the right place as Chief Commissioner of Police. When first offered the post, in Lord Cadogan’s time, he refused it. As Under-Secretary he might have been a success, but in accordance with the strange and wonderful ways of Dublin Castle the ami--1 able Sir James Dougherty, formerly a minister of the Northern Church, was appointed successor to Lord in the office of Under-Secretary. Dublin Castle is not only a paralytic but a paralysing government. Imagine Sir Edward Henry in the position of not knowing whether the carrying out of the law or letting it lapse would cause his resignation or suppression.’

The statesman who ranks next in importance to Mr. Asquith, the Premier, in regard to the management of the present war crisis is Sir Edward Grey, Foreign Minister since the late Sir Henry CampbellBannerman formed his Liberal Cabinet in 1905 another North of England man, from Northumberland. Grey is only 51 —a reserved, shy, lonely bachelor, with a greater love for angling and tennis than for politics, but an abiding passion for his country. It is stern sense of duty that has kept Sir Edward Grey working at the Foreign Office during Europe’s most difficult nine years. It is his work that has delayed the war, as all Europe admits j, for he has constantly used his weight as the leading personality in European diplomacy, and the representative of the leading Power, to quieten the absorbing racial passions of the Continent. He is a man pf brilliant talents, but he is happiest at his quiet ancestral hall at Fatloden. (