People We Hear About

New Zealand Tablet, 14 September 1916, Page 47

People We Hear About

Henryk Sienkiewicz, who is at the head of the relief fund for his suffering fellow-Poles, is generally known to. English-speaking people as the author of the famous novel, Quo Vadis. He is now in his seventieth year, and has been a prominent figure in social and literary life since his youth. When he was but thirty years of age he led a band of intellectuals to the United States, and attempted to found a kind of socialistic or co-operative community in California. Unlike Hawthorne’s experiment at Brook Farm, the Polish colony was based on Catholicism; but, like Brook Farm, it failed.

News has reached London of the death in the South of France of Dr. Edward Patrick Sarsfield Counsel, who was a well-known Irish Catholic barrister in London. He was the eldest surviving son of Laurence Counsel, J.P., of the Inland Revenue, and was educated at Trinity College, Dublin, where he took his LL.D. He was called to the Irish Bar in 1875, and to the Middle Temple in 1896. He was one of the founders of the Westminster Catholic Federation, and was a regular attender of the meetings of that body, his speeches being always to the point. On Catholic platforms he was a popular speaker and he was very keenly interested in all that pertained to the improvement of Catholic conditions.

On Sunday, July 23, his Eminence Cardinal Gibbons celebrated the eighty-second anniversary of his birth. On June 30 of this year his Eminence rounded out his 55th year as a priest of the Catholic Church and completed his thirtieth year in the Cardinalate. The double anniversary is one of interest not only to himself, but to the people of Baltimore and to those of t lie whole United States. Cardinal Gibbons’ length of service in the College of Cardinals is only exceeded by that of Cardinal Netto, but «as the latter has retired from an active life, Cardinal Gibbons is looked upon as the dean of Cardinal priests. Cardinal Netto was born in 1841, and Cardinal Gibbons, therefore, is seven years his senior. Cardinal Netto was created and proclaimed a Cardinal in 1884, while Cardinal Gibbons was elevated to the Sacred College in 1880.

The Great War has occasioned the death of tens of thousands who were in the bloom of youth, and of hundreds of others who were too young to ask why human beings should be slaughtering one another and causing so much ruin and suffering and desolation. But our enemy, Franz Josef, an old, old man, long before the conflict began, lives on and reigns. He saw the rise and fall of the Second Empire in France, carrying down the ambitious Napoleon 111. in its ruins. He has outlived (says the Catholic Press Queen Victoria and King Edward, her son. He saw the German Empire created, William I. crowned Kaiser, Frederic succeed him, and the third Emperor, William 111., ascend the throne. The present Czar is the grandson of the Emperor of all the Russias that Franz Josef first knew. He has witnessed the entire history of the modern Italian Kingdom, and is now at war with the grandson of the Victor Emmanuel he fought so many years ago. He has seen half a dozen Sultans of Turkey and Persia rule and pass away. Spain and Portugal have seen revolutions and regencies; the changes have been rung in Norway and Sweden and in every other country in Europe and Asia. He has followed the course of events in the United States since long before the Civil War began. Not one of all those who bore a prominent part in that great struggle remainsbut the venerable Emperor of Austria reigns on. He, too, will pass; and for a day the world will wonder That a career so strenuous and so sorrowful should have been so lengthened.