LOVE STORIES BY CABLE. Could We Spare Them?

Free Lance, Volume V, Issue 220, 17 September 1904, Page 6

LOVE STORIES BY CABLE. Could We Spare Them?

READERS of British cable news will be thrilled to the marrow to learn that the wicked lrrigationist, M'Calman, has been and gone and jilted the daughter of the Lord Mayor of London Also, they will be very angry with the old man who got himself killed by being in the way of Madame Melba's motor car It will probably necessitate repans to that vehicle, and Madame will be inconvenienced. It is conceivable that, at the same time as M'Calman left, his fiancee and lit out •for the Continent, Coster Bill of Whitechapel may have jilted his faithful 'Arriet, and we haven't heard anything about it. Also, that a cabman, who couldn't sing a bit, knocked down somebody, and killed him, m Lambeth. We have to wait for the mail-boat to know the sordid particulars of both these possibilities * *- *■ The British Press Association is evidently convinced that colonists take a breathless interest in the love affairs of people they don't know, and have no particular desire to become acquainted with. We were regaled the other day by a two-inch thriller about the princess who* nad contracted an "ideal" friendship with a riding master, and, to continue the friendship, had climbed down a water-pipe and so into the great throbbing world. Of gallivanting duchesses and intriguing coachmen, we have had our fill, and none of them matter to us. ■* ¥■ * If these events are cabled to us as warnings to walk the narrow path of rectitude, well and good, but we fail to see why amours of people with handles to their names should be of more consequence than the sordid love-makings of the 'orney 'anded. We have squalid stories of our own to revel in if we are so* inclined, and we don't inflict them on the British public. Of course, the papers to which such items are sent need not publish them. How intensely pleased the jilted daughter of the Lord Mayor of London must be to feel that, thanks to the press, her story is now common property wherever the British flag flies. * * * You will note that insignificant cable items about anarchists, bomb outrages, plague cases, and so on are relegated to obscurity so that the thrilling Lord Mayor's daughter item can have the display its importance merits. Reciprocity is now the watchword of the Empire, and lots of nasty little events occur here that we could "swap" with the London press for its gone-wrong-aristo-crat paragraphs. * * ♦ Of course, there may be people m New Zealand to whom the backslidings of a marquis have more interest than the doings of Parliament, and it may be that the cablegrammer understands colonial human nature and the colonial love for labels, still, with all due respect to the cablegrammers, and to the papers that print these tremendous items, to wait for such news for six weeks, or three months, or for ever, wouldn't hurt any of us. Still, we're sorry for Constance.