Page:Notes by the Way.djvu/146

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76

��NOTES BY THE WAY.

��The Nen York Herald.

��The Daily Telegraph and the Zulu War.

��The Soudan tablet in St. Paul's.

��The outlay of The Daily News for war telegrams, exclusive of the remuneration and expenses of the correspondents, amounts to an average of 1,2001. a month.

Although the cost to the daily newspapers for correspondence and telegrams during the Boer War must be large, it cannot, of course, compare with that of the American Press during the fight between the North and the South. The New York Herald during the four years the contest lasted employed sixty special corre- spondents. The loss hi horses was seventy-eight out of one hundred and twenty-three.* The account of the capture of New Orleans, which occupied three columns, cost alone 260J., while the entire outlay during the war amounted to 120,OOOZ.

Most of the newspapers, with the exception of The Times, now give the names of their correspondents. " Y. L.," in The Sphere of June 9th, 1900, states his belief that the practice was first commenced by The Daily Telegraph in 1879 when it sent out Dr. W. H. Russell to describe the incidents of the Zulu War. "Y. L." well describes our military historians as

" no longer chroniclers ; they are now literary kinematographers, who, from the distance of 7,000 miles, flash you out a transparency picture of a battle ere yet the mountains at the seat of war have ceased to resound with the roll of invisible musketry and the thunder of eight-mile-range guns."

No record of special correspondents can be complete without a tribute to those brave men who fell in the Soudan, and to whom a memorial has been fittingly placed in the crypt of our great Cathedral.

��Flag: its symbolism.

��THE NATIONAL FLAG.

(See 9 S. v. 414, 440, 457, 478 ; Supplement, Jane 30th, 1900 ; and vi. 17.)

1900, July 14. i n connexion with this discussion readers of ' N. & Q.' need

The National scarcely be reminded of the beautiful symbolism of the colours composing our flag : the blue, baptism by water, the material world, or " great deep " or " ark," or world made manifest, or sea, or Isis, or Venus, or Regina Coeli, the world won out of chaos ; the white, illumination, air or light, the third Person of the Trinity ; the red, fire, the " Oriflamme," or " Fire of Gold," the national colour of the Welsh. The flag with a white field, advocated by Mr. St. John Hope, would hardly be popular, if he means that it should occupy the position of a National Flag. White is by old tradition regarded as ominous to English Royalty, and De Quincey

~ v,;,, essay on ' Modern Superstition ' i'~" -~4-; ~t u in

��in his

��makes mention of it in

��* Grant's ' Newspaper Press,' vol. ii. p. 255.

�� �