WITHOUT PREJUDICE
NOTES AT RANDOM ,
(By
T.D.H.)
Everybody in Australia seems to have completely forgotten that Captain Hinkler has broken all the Commonwealth air rules and regulations by flying a land machine over more than 50 miles of water.
“We insisted on war,” so wrote Prince Karl Lichnowsky, German Ambassador in London from 1912 to 1914, whose death is announced to-day. Prince Lichnowsky thought that Britain and Germany ought to be friends and did his best to improve their relations. “My London mission,” he wrote, "... was wrecked not by the perfidy of the British, but by the perfidy of our policy. . . . I had to support in London a policy which I knew to be fallacious. I was paid out for it, for it was a sin against the Holy Ghost. ... It is not surprising,” he added, “that the whole civilised world outside Germany attributes to us the sole guilt for the world war. . . Germany encouraged Austria to attack . . . though no German interest was involved. . . Germany rejected mediation when Austria was ready to be satisfied with the Serbian reply. . . . Germany deliberately destroyed the possibility of a peaceful settlement.”
1 ne above were remarkable words for an ex-German Ambassador to write about the origin of the war. They were not intended to see the daylight, for the Prince wrote them out in a memorandum entitled “Meine Londoner Mission,” which he showed to a few of his friends in confidence. One of these gentlemen passed the document on to an officer on the political side of the German general staff, one Captain von Beerefelde, and this official apparently, completely failing to understand the importance of what he was doing, manifolded the memorandum and broadcast it. This event -occurred in 1918, and naturally had a lowering effect on the German war spirit, causing a first-class sensation in fact.
Captain von Beerefelde, although a Knight of the Iron Cross, was, according to the Berlin “Morgenpost,” promptly bundled into an insane asylum for his indiscretion. A minority of the members of the Prussian Upper House considered that Prince Lichnowskv himself was insane and should be similarly dealt with, but the majority pressed for his trial for treason. In the end a resolution was passed excluding him from the assembly, and the Prince, finding Germany too hot to live in, moved into Switzerland, where he continued to reside even after the war and the Hahenbollerns had gone. The late Maximilian Harden, the journalistic exposer of rottenness in high places in Germany, gave his powerful protection to Prince Lichnowsky, and it was considered by many that this was the real reason whv the demand tor his prosecution w as dropped. Too many princely families, it was said, had a fear of ’what Herr Harden might let out.
A little caution in the building of large scientific theories on small foundations is indicated as wise by the course of events at Glozel, in France. Acco-ding to eminent men of science, objects found on a plot of land owned bv -some peasants named Fradin provided conclusive evidence that the modern alphabet originated in France in prehistoric times, and did not come from the East as is generally supposed. This was good news to patriotic Frenchmen, but sceptical folk inclined to the view that the marks on the fragments of stone and baked clay dug up on the Fradin farm might be of quite recent origin, and an international commission solemnly sat and decided that everytihing pointed to the objects having been inserted in the earth within the last few years.
The general theory is that the seven-teen-vear-old Emile Fradin has worked the whole hoax, copying drawings from text books that came into his possession from local archaeologists who inspected the site of a supposed ancient tomb on the Fradin property. According to a message to-day the Fradin family are to be prosecuted for fraud, and it ought to be an interesting case. It is worth noting that eminent French scientists ridicule the idea that they have been taken in by an ignorant peasant boy. Among the most emphatic in support of the genuineness of the Glozel finds is M. Saloman Reinach, Director of the National Museum at St. Germain, and president of the Academic des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres. M. Reinach has declared that the report of the commission denouncing the finds as frauds will go down into history surrounded by as much r'dicule as that of the Roman Inquisition of 1633 that condemned the astronomical discoveries of Galileo, Galileo in this case being represented by Emile Fradin. M. Herriot, the French Minister of Public Instruction and Fine Arts, has even been sufficiently impressed by the alleged handiwork of Emile Fradin provisionally to declare the Fradin farm a “historic monument.” Altogether they seem to have become extremely heated over this matter in France, and butcher boys as well as scientists have exchanged blows over it.
Here is an example of how they wax the reluctant debtor in the United States, according to the “American Statesman”:— Say I If vou don’t pav this account soon', whiskers will start growing on it! You’ve got a check right handy now, so here ‘is the magic pin—Get Busv Please! (a pin is stuck into the bill through the sticker). We don’t know whether you have been sick, absent on an extended vacation trip, or whether you have just plumb forgotten nil about that little bill of ours for dollars . Sav! It’s some job to write two good sales-collcction letters in a row! It is a trving thing to have to sit down to write vou a letter which will not onlv bring home the bacon, but also keep vou in friendly good humour. * * * If these invitations do not succeed, the following arrives:— \Vell, it’s happened! You ve done it n °Yoii have failed to answer mv friendly summons, and now it is going to be necessnrv for me to resort to a legal summons. . , • But I have a certain wav of judg peonle, and my judgment of you 'swat vou’re Souare—with a big capital . . and I’m just coin" to han" on to th. opinion until Friday the Thirteenth If vou don’t send in your check bv that time—well, vou know the rest. Its up to you now! TARRAS WATER. From the top of Hartsgarth Fell Runs the Tarras Burn— Tinkling fall and golden pool— Through the heather and the fern, Calling, calling, clear and cool, Tarras Water calling, Tarras Water falling, Tarras Water calling, calling— Tarras Water. Tarras Water! Through mv heart the livelong night Runs the Tarras Burn, Golden Pool and tinkling fall: fn the land of No Return Still I hear that golden call, Tarras Water calling, Tarras Water falling. Tarras Water calling, calling— Tarras Water, Tarras Water! —Winifred Wilson Gibson.
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Dominion, Volume 21, Issue 129, 29 February 1928, Page 10
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1,128WITHOUT PREJUDICE Dominion, Volume 21, Issue 129, 29 February 1928, Page 10
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