A FORGOTTEN MISCREANT.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXX, Issue 8873, 6 November 1907, Page 4

A FORGOTTEN MISCREANT.

Such is fame! Yesterday was only the three hundred and second anniversary of the arrest of Guy Fawkes, famous for his connection with the Gunpowder Plot to blow up the British Parliament; yet no one seemed to remember the fact that this British anarchist ever existed. Not even a squib was set off locally to mark the notable event. Shakespeare rightly said, "the evil that men do lives after them," but the remembrance of the evil soon dies-—though in the case of Guy Fawkes it survived some centuries. For many years in the dominion the November Fifth demonstrations have been confined to urchins who have gone about with effigies and crackers, but probably not one in a thousand has had the remotest idea of who or what the miscreant was. All bu*. the circumstance, the effigy, and the crackers, has been forgotten from the foundation of the dominion. It is well that it should be. It points no moral, adorns no tale. In our own times, within our own Empire, we have had greater plots, and greater deeds of horror are daily occurring in phces within a day's reach of us by cable; but they are forgotten almost as soon as perpetrated. It is well so. Life is too strenuous nowadays, there is so much to be done in advancing civilisation-—so little time in which to do it—to long remember evil deeds, however conspicuous at the time. The "living present," with an eye to the future, takes up all men's time to-day. This, too, is well.