BRITISH ORDERS

New Zealand Tablet, 3 June 1915, Page 27

BRITISH ORDERS

The official red, not blue, pencil has been busy ruling out from the precious records of British Orders—mainly the Order of St. Michael and St. George—suck names (says a writer in the Universe) as Admiral Baron Hermann von Spaum, Vice-Admiral Wandel, Admiral Emil Bandemann, the Khedive of Egypt, and various others, a process of blotting out which will have the effect of reducing the strength of the Order, which is one of the junior class, although it has now close on a hundred years to its credit, and is, therefore, old as compared to the Order of the Indian Empire, which came into being just sixty years later, or the Victorian Order, which has only a life of nineteen years behind it. But the Bath was instituted in 1399, and revived in 1725; St." Patrick was founded by George 111. in 1783, the Thistle by James 11. in 1687 (and re-established by Queen Anne in 1703), and the Garter by Edward 111. in 1348. There is to be a special St. George's Day on April 23, and its national celebration is to be boomed. Which reminds me. This fair country of ours is finding by slow degrees a closer range with the things that were, and ought to-be again very soon. She is accepting surely the Calendar of the Saints, as she did throughout the many centuries that heralded the storms of the sixteenth century and after— storms that eventually broke the cable which had held her to the Barque of Peter from the earliest times of the Christian era. As St. George was not a Protestant he must necessarily have been a Catholic, and as he is therefore one of ours, I venture to humbly suggest that we ourselves should do something to give him special honor on his feast day. SS. Andrew, David, and Patrick make a glorious quartet with St. George, but neither Catholic nor Protestant goes out of his way to show that special distinction to the English patronal saint as the Celts do theirs.