Notes

New Zealand Tablet, 4 March 1915, Page 34

Notes

A Tipperary * Protest ’ One of the new destroyer leaders for the Fleet is to be called- the ‘ Tipperary/ so that the music-hall marching song has apparently made an impression even in official circles. Meantime the- town of Tipperary, though enjoying more than its full share of the limelight, professes itself not to be sure, all the same, that it is being fairly treated. Its complaint is voiced by a humorist who, “under the title of ‘ A Protest from Tipperary/ occupies half a column in the London Star with a protest ‘ on behalf of a number of influential residents of that town.’ The extraordinary impression, he says, which has got abroad that Tipperary is a place of exceptional inaccessibility has given great pain to the inhabitants of our pleasant town. With the object of repairing before the summer tourist season sets in the harm done by this mischievous and entirely false idea, please allow us space to prove that so far from Tipperary being ‘ a long way/ it is easier to get there than it, is to get to many of the more famous beauty spots of Ireland.- By reference to Bradshaw, he points put that the journey from London to Tipperary can be made in less than thirteen hours. ‘ Unfortunately,’ he adds, ‘no definite evidence has so far been discovered, but 'in the town itself little doubt is enter-

tained that the rumor' as to the length of way to Tipperary was instigated by the people of Limerick. / Their jealousy of the growing /popularity of Tipperary has Jong been notorious.’ ; - ‘ - •■ ■ .• . i , ■ : Mr. T. P. O’Connor and Cardinal Mercier ' ■ In a recent interview with a representative of,the London Daily Chronicle, Mr. T. P. O’Connor, M.P., had something interesting to say regarding Cardinal Mercier. He is (said Mr. O’Connor) a saintly man and one of the intellectuals of Belgium. His. appearance is so beneficent and so sweet that everybody who meets him admires, respects, and loves him, and recognises in a very short. acquaintance that he is entitled to the high position he holds in his Church. He is a great man, and one of the greatest sons of Belgium. As a personal friend and admirer I feel Cardinal Mercier’s arrest very keenly, and yet, although it is a shocking affair, it is not by any means surprising. Anyone who has watched the doings of Germany in general must have been prepared for some such act. I cannot help thinking, however, that it is one of the brutal acts of clumsy German policy that will recoil on the heads of that country. The arrest is a German blunder, a German crime, and a German avowal. It is a blunder, because it will antagonise , further the neutral nations of the world, especially among Catholics ;• it is a crime, because anybody can see that what the Cardinal said he was perfectly within his rights in saying; and it is an avowal, because it shows that Germany now regards herself as entitled to annex Belgium and destroy her independence. Discussing the excuse given by the German authorities for the arrest, Mr. O’Connor asked: ‘What does it mean ? It is quite true that the Pastoral Letter of Cardinal, Mercier referred to the independence of Belgium, but if Germany did not mean to destroy that independence, what right had she to interfere?’ Some Orange Futilities Orangeism might fairly be expected to have the sense to hold its peace at a time like- the present; but since it will not do so, it must take what it gets. It gets some fairly hard knocks from the Sydney Bulletin, which thus comments upon a recent futile ‘ demonstration ’ in Sydney:—‘Brother Robinson and his Orange crowd held a dreary demonstration in Sydney on Anniversary Day. The bite had gone out of the Walls of Derry, and the Boyne was a back number. The British Empire is fighting for its life against Prussia, which is mostly Protestant and has a strongly Protestant State Church ; for Prussia is the head and front of the offending. Its other enemies are Roman Catholic or Mohammedan. Its allies are Roman Catholic, Mohammedan, Greek Church, Buddhist, Shinto, and sundries. It hopes that the Catholic States of Italy and Portugal will join in, also the Orthodox eek State of Roumania. Bulgaria, which , runs a Church of its own, will be welcomed if it is willing to assist. The mostlyProtestant United States keeps aloof. So do Protestant Denmark, Holland, Norway, and Sweden. N.S.W., the most strongly Roman Catholic State of the Commonwealth, reckons that it is making the biggest effort in the Commonwealth. The only insurrection which started in the British Empire was among the Protestant Boers of South Africa. The Pope flatly refused to give his blesssing to Catholic Austria in its war with mostly-Protestant Britain. In fact, all the religions have become mixed, and the annual struggle to represent the Scarlet Woman as the cause of all the world’s troubles lacked its wonted enthusiasm.’ v * The performance in Melbourne was evidently no better. ‘ Grand Master, Snowball, M.L.A., Victoria’s Orange lodger,’ says the Bulletin, ‘has discovered the secret of German militarism, the cause of the German navy, the meaning of the Kaiser’s ultimatum to Holy Russia, and the origin of the late Paul Kruger’s objections to the British flag. “It is proved beyond doubt,’’ said the astounding Snowball to an Orange picnic, “ that the war in South Africa was owing to a desire on the part

of the Jesuits to break up the British Empire, whilst the present war is owing, to a campaign by the Jesuits, who have ,succeeded in embittering the German nation against the English.” These are the oddest clods that Snowball ever ploughed up from his field of political research. What the Jesuits had to do in S’ Africa with the Zulu rising in the ’7o’s, the discovery of diamonds and gold, the subsequent Jameson raid and the .greed of Jewhannesburg, is just as evident as their connection with the Prussian attack on Roman Catholic Belgium and France, and the subsequent war-conquest preparations of the Protestant of Potsdam. A-Snowball at an L.O.L. bean feast is in the same happy position as a parson in a pulpit. Nobody expects him to draw a line of reasoning through the centre of his allegations. He just says things, and the congregation disperses with a sense of having been further confirmed in its belief.’