Yellow-Fever Day

New Zealand Tablet, 25 October 1906, Page 9

Yellow-Fever Day

In our issue of October- 11, we told how the Orange lodges of Queensland had arranged to send a deputation to the Home Secretary with a modest proposal to have ' the date of their annual outbreak of Yellow Fever ' (as the Brisbane ' Age ' happily de. scribes it) 'proclaimed a public holiday.' Wejl, the;' brethren came, and saw, but did not conquer. ' The/ Home Secretary,' says our esteemed Brisbane contemporary, ' may not be, all round, the " strongest "- Minister dn the Cabinet ', but on this occasion he ' proved himself the right man in the right place '. 'He presumed ', says the " Courier ' report of his reply to ' the deputation, ' that they made the request from a conviction that there was an existing public demand for- ' such a holiday. Before they could expect the Minister or the Cabinet to take action on such a matter, they must put before him facts to show that such a demand existed. They alluded to the twelfth of July as having a certain historic interest, but did that historic interest justify it being made a public holiday in Queensland ? The position with regard to the seventeenth of March was that it had been generally celebrated prior to it being gazetted as a public holiday. The Government had not taken the initiative in that matter, lyut had simply recognised a lioliday that was generally' observed.. He could only say that, so far, they had given him no evidence that there was a public demand for the holiday which they asi'ved for. He could mention several occasions that were quite~as important dates in the Empire's history as the twelfth of July— the occasions of the 'passing of the.. Bill, the^. Catholic Emancipation Bill, the Education Act, or even, in Queensland the passing .of "our own Education Bill, or the date of the passing of that little measure, " one-man-one-votc. " '

. The Home Secretary dismissed the deputationists^ with this Parthian-arrow advice : that ' the next' time they came t^ him, they would come, not as Britishers, but as Australians '. This friendly counsel (says the ' Age ') ' contains a volume of wise statesmanship in a nutshell '. The Queensland Government is evidently not prepared to proclaim a public festival for the benefit of

sundry little knots of oath-bound admirers j af the Boer monarch who (as the Orange writer, Sir Jonah Barrington, remarks) ' has been .. the cause of more broken heads and drunken men since his -departure than all his predecessors '.