LOCAL AND GENERAL.

Stratford Evening Post, Volume XXV, Issue 50, 2 March 1915, Page 6

LOCAL AND GENERAL.

Tim- Press Association agent at Dunedin reports a sudden death. Margaret Coulter Patrick, aged 56, expired suddenly while darning at her Ipne at Tomahawk, apparently from heart failure.

Mr J. R. Adams, of Christchurch, recently returned hbme (says the Lyttelton Times) after a visit to England, during which he made, arrangements with the Board of Trade for tests of the patent life-saving raft of which he is the patentee. The tests were not completed when Mr Adams left for New Zealand, but be has since received cable advice that they were most exhaustive, and that \ the hoard had stated its intention of further considering the raft. On luesday Mr Adams received a cable message from London to the effect that the authorities had put his raff to fnr T ther exhaustive tests, and that it had come through them so satisfactorily that the hoard desired the presence Of the patentee in London immediately’ Mr Adams was to leave Christchurch on Wednesday night for Auckland; en route tq England.

The cry of th.e increasing cost of living was raised by an employer of labour at the Wanganui Magistrate’s Court on Tuesday, when charged with a. breach of an award. The Wanganui Herald states that, when called, the defendant waved a telegram in his hand and said he had received it from the Prime Minister asking him to keep down the cost of living. He further remarked that if employers were subject to pin pricking by an over zealous inspector, the public would have to pay for the extra cost. The offence, with which the employer was charged, was failing to keep a wages and overtime hook.

The Glory of a Shattered Nation ! Cardinal Mercier’s pastoral: God will save Belgium, my brethren, you cannot doubt it. Nay ; rather, He is saving her. Across the smoke of oon. •flagration, across the steam of blood, have you not glimpses, do you not perceive signs, of His love for us ? Is there a patriot among us who does not know that Belgium has grown great? Nay, which of xxs would have the heart to cancel this last page of our natioxxal history? Which of ns does not exult in the brightness «.f the glory of a shattered nation? When in her throes she brings forth heroes, our mother country gives her own energy to the blood of those sons of hers. Let us acknowledge that we needed a lesson in patriotism. There were Belgians, and many such, who wasted their time and their talents in futile quarrels of class with class, of race with race, of passion with personal passion. Yet when, on August 2, a mighty foreign Power, confident in its own strength and defiant of the faith of treaties, dared to threaten us in our independence, then did all Belgians, without difference of party, -or of condition, or of origin, rise up as one man, close.ranged about their own king, • nd their own Government, and cry to the invader: “Thou sbalt not go tbrongh ■” .. .