SPURIOUS PATRIOTS

New Zealand Times, Volume XLII, Issue 9720, 24 July 1917, Page 5

SPURIOUS PATRIOTS

“A DAMNING STATEMENT” DEAN POWER OF HAWBEA RELIEVES IIIS FEELINGS. Special to jthc “Times.” HAWERA. July 23. At St. Joseph’s, Hawcra, on Sunday Dean Power reerred to the question put by Mr Nosworthy in tho House of Representatives, and to tho reply of Sir James Allen. There were spurious patriots who thought that patriotism consisted in abuse or the Kaiser and in the free dissemination of every wild rumour against tho people over whom the ’ Kaiser ruled. Such patriots, according to tho illustrious General Butler, tho Bishop of Limerick, the honest editor of tho “New Zealand Tablet.” and Catholic sentiment and teaching, wero in reality tho greatest enemies of thoir country, for they most surely brought down upon it tho swift anger of God. The might of Germany was not the gravest danger with which they were threatened. Thoir most terrible danger was from within, as Lincoln had advised hia countrymen in a notable address; it was to bo found in injustice, in uncharitabWess, m vain boasting and tho propagation of racial hate. Lot them all remember the shame thai came upon them with tho memory ot the foul litany of epithets hurled by their forefathers against tho greatest soldier that ever lived, and let them put Up such a clean fight themselves that posterity might not blush for them; defeat would not degrade them so surely as racial hatred and ahuso, and it was surely possible to engage in 1 a wul warfare without the meretricious aid of those. The bravo Bishop of Limerick, whose lofty patriotism Was a thorn in the side of Mr Nos* ■worthy, will have conferred a great benefit upon the Empire when ho had cast the blinding beam from its rulers eyes. ... , . Referring to the Minister s reply to the member’s remarks on the Manat B*i thers, the Dean said that no more damning statement had ever been mado by a Minister of State to a body of legislators. The Marist Brothers, the Minister said, were doing an indispensable work and wero receiving no pay. Such a damning statement could have been made a quarter of a century ago by,tho Minister for Public Instruction in the German Parliament, but in its evolution from barbarism to civilisation the Prussian branch of the Teuton family had grown ashamed ot that vilest form of highway robbery. Not so the Teutons that lorded it over Australasia : they thought themselves dignified, but were in reality contemptible, when forgetting their own injustice towards the Marist Brothers, they sniffed the air at German rottenness. So rank was this injustice, and so loudly did it cry to Heaven that even the Orange organiser of the Protestant Political League was having a strongly-worded resolution passed at bis meetings that the Marist Brothers be put on an equality with the other teachers in New Zealand. The Dean wished the organiser success, but he feared his efforts were doomed to fi.iluro since the legislators and nubile opinion in New Zealand had wrapped themselves in what had been, but no longer was, tho foul garment of Prussianism.