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Edward Hemmerde and Francis Neilson were both Liberal MPs at the outbreak of the First World War, bound together by a common commitment to the principle of land taxation. A shortage of money, at a time when MPs had only just started to receive salaries, led them into extra-parliamentary co-operation in the joint authorship of plays. But the two men fell out over the profits from their literary endeavours. One or other was clearly not telling the truth. Although he gave up his parliamentary career in opposition to British involvement in the war, Neilson later prospered greatly as a writer in the United States. Meanwhile, Hemmerde turned to his career as Recorder of Liverpool, but the wealth that he craved eluded him. This article reminds us that financial impropriety among MPs is no new phenomenon, while highlighting the difficulty of establishing certain historical truth in the face of conflicting documentary evidence.
chapels.119 In 1873, when Dublin’s Kate Shine died, she left almost all of her estate to the Church. To the Presentation Convent in Cork, Shine bequeathed £70, with £20 more for the Sisters of Mercy in Sligo and the Presentation Convent in Cashel. A further £20 was set aside for the Magdalene Asylum in Limerick.120 Bequeathing money to the Church was not only an overt sign of piety; it also gave Catholic women a sense of pride and local notability. Lay Irish women’s chapel-building efforts were noted throughout the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In May 1880
being informed of one of her drinking sprees in a local pub, Fitzgerald claimed, he preached on the topic at mass, saying that ‘[t]his class of persons have money enough to purchase nasty whiskey. They have money enough to give to the God Bacchus but not one penny to give to the priest of God.’54 Apparently Mrs O’Brien was proving herself to be troublesome. She offended her priest twice, first, by publicly appearing drunk in Fitzgerald’s jurisdiction, and again, by failing to pay parish dues. During her very public binge, Mrs O’Brien stayed in the pub ‘until late in
money was collected for South Africa. When there was a particular need, whether it was political, humanitarian, things would happen immediately, there’d be a prayer vigil and then there’d be: what are we going to do? how are we going to support this? The ‘fast day’ 85 was not only related to penitence but created an awareness of the physical presence of hunger, building solidarity with those who fasted involuntarily. It was a sacrifice complementing the work for justice by a sharing of resources: consuming less so that others could consume more. Justice and peace
’s response, he was not contrary to Christ, and was therefore disproved less from the gospel than those cardinals. For they do not seem to come in the name of Christ, but like a second Gehazi they collect ecclesiastical benefices and accumulate money for their sale, 54 either personally or through their people, and thus they also accept goods from the poor and proudly swallow them down. But they do not perform miracles, nor do they preach or pray, and thus, with the scale of their hypocrisy and their deeds taken into account, neither Gehazi nor Simon 55 is even worthy to
Bashevis Singer recounts how, with ‘blue eyes and fiery red beard glowing,’ his father returned one day from Warsaw's Radzyminer shtibl (small synagogue) with news of a group ‘whose members call themselves anarchists.’ He recalls how till late into the night his father described ‘the happy times to come, when there would be no need for money and everyone would work and study Torah,’ concluding that though ‘Jews long for the messiah … while we're in exile, it would be quite a good thing.’ Yet, he reports, his father's ardor waned once he heard ‘that their entire
money on religious paraphernalia. In 1904, The Connaught Champion ran a story on the annual Croagh Patrick pilgrimage. Prominently on the same page was a large advertisement for women’s accessories: ‘Straw and Fancy Hats, Bonnets and Toques, … Ribbons, Velvets, Ladies’ Silk Skirts and Blouses, Feather Boas, … Corsets, Umbrellas and Dress Trimmings … .’34 Even as the Champion demonstrated the importance of a gendered consumerism, it illustrated some of the conflicts that women, especially middle-class women in urban areas, faced when making consumer choices
Australia that there should be seasons of drought and flood’. The fault lay with settlers who had wasted the skills and money that ‘would have rendered us almost independent of these changes of weather’. A Rev. Watkin, speaking in Melbourne in 1902, thought that God sent drought to impart four practical lessons: ‘conserve your water, store up forage, do not overstock your pastures, and restore and increase your forests’. Others followed Stanton and condemned the deleterious environmental effects of frontier and pioneer