People We Hear About

New Zealand Tablet, 31 July 1913, Page 41

People We Hear About

Cardinal Bourne was among the guests invited by the Prime Minister to the official dinner given in London in celebration of the King's Birthday. Rev. E. A. Kirby, pastor .of St. Rose’s Church; O. (says the Catholic Columbian will leave shortly on a trip abroad. Dr. Kirby goes first to Ireland, where he will meet his three brothers all three are priests. Two of them had left home to serve in England and Australia before Dr. Kirby was born, and he will see them now for the first time in his life. His father is still living; Together the father and four sons will travel through Europe, going finally to Rome, where the father will have the unusual honor of presenting four sons, all in the service of the Church, to the Holy Father. The strength of the Irish population of Liverpool may be judged from the fact that there are no fewer' than fourteen Irish Nationalist members of the Liverpool City Council. Five of them enjoyed a walk-over at the recent election. In this connection it is interesting to read that an Irish Nationalist, Councillor Brogan of Battersea has been elected Mayor of the Borough of Battersea, one of the twenty-eight boroughs that compose the County of London. This is the first time in the . history of London that a militant Irish Nationalist has been elected to such a responsible and honorable position in the public life of the English metropolis. Will time ever come when a Catholic will be elected President of the United States (asks the Catholic Columbian) ? There are some excellent Catholic citizens who would make fine Presidents. Take, for instance Senator O’Gorman, Judge Victor J. Dowling and Judge Morgan J. O’Brien, of New York; Treasurer of the United States, John Burke, ex-gov of North Dakota; Chief Justice White, of Louisiana, and of the U.S. Supremo Court; Governor Pothier, of Rhode Island; Governor Dunne, of Illinois; Mayor Fitzgerald, of Boston; Lieutenant-Governor McDermott, of Kentucky ; Attorney-General Hogan, of Ohio ; ex-Attorney-General Bonaparte,, of Maryland; U.S. Senator Ransdell, of Louisiana; Congressman Fitzgerald, of New York, and a hundred and one other men of distinguished ability and political experience. A London paper, the Eveniny Standard, in its notice of the death of Mr. George Wyndham, sa’d: His personal appearance belonged to the romantic period, his oratory was of the ornate polished style of the time of Disraeli, Bright, and Gladstone, his politics were to him a faith, not a profession, and faith cannot be measured and recompensed by a salary of °£4oo a year. It is probable that George Wyndham would have had a greater career had he not been born with so many natural and artificial advantages. His ancestry fordoomed him to a character charming, brilliant, and versatile, but lacking, perhaps, a little in stability and doggedness. He was a great grandson of the Irish rebel, Lord Edward Fitzgerald, and do we not see the inherited trait in his descendant, who for his heterodox views on the Irish question had to resign his Chief Secretaryship, and thus closed an official career of great promise of possibilities ? Lord Edward Fitzgerald, as is now well known, married the famous Pamela. To this mixture of racial strains, French and Irish, Mr. Wyndham owed his poetical and imaginative qualities, his attractive appearance and gracious manner, his impulsive generosity—indeed, all those qualities which make a man beloved of his fellows if they do not tend to his own worldly success.