CORRESPONDENCE

Taranaki Daily News, 29 April 1922, Page 9

CORRESPONDENCE

SIGNS OF THE TIMES. (To the Editor.) Sir, —Changes are occurring so rapidly as almost to take one’s breath away, for up to a short month ago the teaching and preaching of disloyalty was the best paying game in New Zealand, and every one knows how two almost unknown men got large sums of money and a free tripvhome, through telling • tales and fairy stories of Ireland (not by Will Carlton), but today, they would get the boot in any town they visited. Worse has happened in N.S.W., where Dooley, the little Bathurst tailor, trying to carry Mannix and mad Labor on his back, came a cropper. The fight there was the same as it will be here at nex't election, I am sorry to say, purely and simply sectarian Protestants against Irish Roman Catholicism and mad Labor combined. This is what the Bulletin (an anti-Orange. anti-British paper) says: —“As a result of the solidest sectarian campaign, the Protestant vote is revealed as a first-class seatwinner. By the use of it Tom Henley beat his quota in Ryde by well over GOCH) votes; Bruntnell, late of the Salvation Army, polled nearly 13J000 primaries in Paraamatta; and one Ness, eminent in Orangeism. scored more in Western Suburbs than an exDigger who is a born Coalitionist and a Protestant, but whose offence is that he is not a vehement platform Protestant. Only one Laborite adventured the full L.O.L. ticket—W. J. Skelton, of Newcastle. He scored a primary vote which is surely a world’s record, under the party government system, for an Independent candidate.” Intending M.P.’s please note the last sentence. Briefly, let me give the lie direct to “Husband of a Protestant” (no wonder she is one) when he denies about the English priest refusing the sacrament to an Irish woman. My informant was the lady herself, a devout Catholic, whose word I would accept before all the Sinn Feiners in or out of Ireland, but H.O.A.P. only displays his ignorance, because an English-bred priest wouldn’t touch a Sinn Feiner with a forty foot pole, let alone their churches polluted with his presence. And now, H.O.A.P. has only himself to blame, through his sneer about the hotel incident, as T did not intend to publish the. final remark. Said the young Sinn Feiner to the Digger: “Your’e not the only man that went to the front; my brother was there!” “Oh. was he,”' replied the D.C.M. man. “then did he tell you the number of British officers he shot, for that was what so many Sinn Feiners did, and they ke.pt it up when they murdered fourteen officers in their beds in Dublin." Sir, New Zealand is a small place. There’s not room here for anyone who is not a loyalist, and after the next election, the green and red flaggers will be comparable to the ear that tried to run down the Main Trunk Express.—l am. etc., H.O.A.C. Wanganui. April 24.