Current Topics

New Zealand Tablet, Volume VII, Issue 350, 2 January 1880, Page 1

Current Topics

AT HOME AND ABROAD.

" GODLESS " SCHOOLS.

" Abgus," by a letter in last week's Saturday Advertiser, takes the Most Eev. Dr. Moran to task for using the term "godless", in connection with the secular schools. This, says he, cannot be just since the " Boyal Header " contains several passages in which allusion is made to God, the benefits conferred by Him, and the duties men owe to him. But " Argus "is mistaken— the moderate and gentlemanly tone of his letter leads us to conclude he is mistaken only ; the contents of the "Boyal Reader" cannot be received as a criterion by which to judge of the system in question. The "Eoyal Reader "is not read in all the schools, it has only been accidentally retained in some of them, and its occasional use here and there determines nothing that bears upon the case. The principle on which secularism is based is the total exclusion of all religious teaching, all mention of the name of God, His attributes, or man's duty towards Him, from the schools therefore, the secular system is justly to be stigmatised as godless " and the mere accidental use of certain books, some passages in which infringe both the letter and the spirit of the regulation by which it has been established, cannot at all affect the matter. We have no doubt that Dr. Moran will continue to use the very expressive and most justifiable epithet to which " Argus " has erroneously taken exception.

BELIEVED !

Once more we breathe freely ! About a week or two ago we fell upon a paragraph in one of our . , Northern contemporaries that most seriously distorted our peace of mind. It ran to the effect that in Dunedin men aWtinn f & F e&t 6Xtent ° f " Wutj " and cn S a S ed Papally in the absorptaon of oaten-meal, the shorter catechism, and whiskey. Now ™ . ™?^^ ? * he oaten - raeal and whisky by no means disturbed StfaSS'S ea l rlß^r 18^J ci 7 excellenfc aliment, and if it be below their to aw- ? • 'We may attribute the reaßon of their contempt know^ fli *° that by Wbich the fox was i^«enced in the wellSaT^ect ! T?"?* the " m glapea " Tbey cannot eat oatendo L t " Gllmate iB l0 ° hofc t0 P ermit of «*** using it. We ftdfaf 6ther they Can drink whißke y OT not ' if they find Wlth^ emWeWiUbe Wd tb^ provided themStt ™* a ? Bub^tute. However, what disturbed us was to Sri r?? ab ° at tbat P iety in these P arts «>^d not digest its SSStiSX": -Tf ° Ut tbe aid of alcobolic Btim^^s. We had Sat^BeTandt ebappened in S ° me Bn^ Bb electorate dition T lWe been made the cry upon which the Se^^' But » m Wbißkey and tbe Sorter Catechism 2KE££3 ri,^? T™**"" combM^- Had it been milk ShoX cILZm t ?,r* qUite * '^' but Whißkey and the neSoS An? r/ bG a Calumny on our Presbyterian -5* faSfl gkd to find tbafc Buch P roveß lo * «* fact, O-t^^^n^' I"*!.^"?'*1 "*!.^"?'* bj * hat ° f tbe " SbOTfcer nothing whaled v> ' f JS™^ that Presb y terians know knewnotawL^ ?V blB Catecbism ! W * of course bjteriandoclr Ut; but we su PP^d the utterances of PresHud2dT bv t h !- a T gStUB W6re Cmmmed With its tenete - W « k anCeS ' anditißDeedleßß for us to note were ailS n » COnsidered ifc *> *> But, lo and behold !we rncesTave t ' \"" DOt knOW c SiDßle tbin - about ifc ' theirutterWbe said O f tf ? atiCa "- V made iD defiaDCe ° f lt > and ' whate^ Sat the ««Shoth or t PP a t n . ffieal aDd Wbißkey ' ft i 8 Uite falße t0 ass^ found tw. , t eT Catecblßm " »!« the roost in Dunedin. We have «ThUdanX y <T deUt; iDtde COlumnß Of a contemporary we S 1 f WIDg ' aDd DOW we know tbe "Shorter CateisC tell i tbe + utmosl ««t«npt by doctors in Dunedin. Here mentS qUOt !i ICn: -«- 76 ' Whicb is th « n^th commandwitness atSr comn > a adment is, Thou shalt not bear false "ness asamrt thy neighbour.-^. 77. What is required in the

ninth commandment ? A. The ninth commandment requireth th maintaining and promoting of truth between man and man, and of" our own and our neighbour's good name, especially in witness bearing. Q. 78. What is 'forbidden in the ninth commandment 1 A. The ninth commandment forbiddeth whatsoever is prejudicial to truth, or injurious to our own or our neighbour's good name." Who is there, whom stern duty has compelled to keep himself au courant of our doctors' utterances who cannot at once perceive that they know nothing whatever of this catechism 1 We now repel with scorn the accusation of our northern contemporary ; no one in Dunedin carep » straw for the " Shorter Catechism ; " it is not to b« estimated alongside of our oaten-meal and whiskey.

PEASANT PBOPBIETOBS.

Now that the question of a peasant proprietorship has become of so great an interest, some lectures delivered several years ago by John Mitchel on " The Land Tenures of Europe," and in which the subject has been very ably and exhaustively treated, have been exciting attention. They have been republished by the Dublin Freeman, and we take the following extracts from them. The lecturer has surveyed the condition of the peasantry throughout Europe and his conclusion is that those of Ireland occupy a position whose wretchedness is not to be equalled elsewhere, He says " Whatever oppressions and privations the people of any nation in Europe may endure, there is nothing like the oppression, plunder, and misery that afflict the country people of Ireland. You have seen that in many of the best-governed States the land, divided into small properties, is in the absolute ownership of the peasantry ; and that in other countries custom, strong as law, and the universal recognition of title to live by independent industry on the soil that gave him birth, protect the rights of labour. The form of Government makes no difference in this respect. Under despotisms and in republics, Parliament or no Parliament, constitution or no constitution, you find ever where that the peasants are either owners of the land they till, or are somehow or other secured a permanency of tenure and a sufficiency of the crops they sow and reap to sustain them. Even unfortunate Poland, with her ancient feudalism corrupted and destroyed, and no new agrarian pystem established, is no exception to this universal rule. The condition of an Irish ' tenant-at-will' is utterly unintelligible to most civilised Europeans. '-How shall I translate,' says the German Von Raumer, 'bow shall I translate tenants-at-will ? Wegjaglare ? Expellable 1 Serfs 1 But in the ancient days of vassalage it consisted rather in keeping the vassals attached to the soil, and by no means in driving them away. An ancient vassal is a lord compared with the present tenant-at-will, to whom the law affords no defence. Why not call them Jaydbare (chaseable)? But this difference lessens the analogy— that for hares, stags, and deer there is a season during which no one is allowed to hunt them — whereas tenants-at-will are hunted, and may be hunted, allthe year round. And if any one should defend his farm (as badgers and foxes are allowed to do), it is here denominated — rebellion.' Those who have the heart, my friends, can laugh at the whimsical analogy of the witty Prussian ; but it is not easy to be amused when we know that those at whose expense he is so merry are our kinsfolk, the very bone of our bone, with whose fortunes are bound up th« lives and liberties of ourselves and of our children.'* The lecturer further concludes that the exterminating landlords of Ireland are a unique race, and that in Ireland only men areidjndged unworthy to subsist on the food raised by them. " Two otoer facts are plain even upon this cursory and imperfect recital : First, that nowhere in Europe, even in countries far more thickly peopled than Ireland, are to be found the race of consolidators or exterminators ; great tracts without people are not accounted desirable anywhere save here — on the contrary, wherever property is most minutely subdivided there are to be seen the richest harvests and the most independent people. Second, that in all countries of Europe, but one, the cultivators of the soil are thought worthy of their bread out of the very crops they themselves raise, instead of having to ransack the globe for cheaper and coarser kinds of food. Yes, you will search the Continent in vain for a nation of men who are strangers, and vagabonds, and beggars in the land of their fathers. To find tiller*, of the soil oppressed as the Irish are you must; pass beyond the \\m\\M o€

Europe ; you must cross the Black Sea, and leave the Caspian far behind ; you must traverse Persia, from west to east, and cross the mountains of Afghanistan until you see again flying over the Indus this same accursed flag of Britain." In a second lecture Mr. Mitchell went on to show that the erection of an independent class of peasant proprietors would benoinnovation. He adduced the example of Prussia, where such a state of things had been brought about within the course of the present cantury. "In the early years of the present century," said he, " the soil of Prussia belonged entirely to the class of nobles ; and the tenures were mere modifications of the ancient feudal arrangements. It was then, as it still is, an almost purely agricultural country. Nobles, as in France before the Eevolution, paid no direct taxes ; their vast estates were knight-free (ritter frei) ; for it was reckoned unkmghtly and ignoble for barons to contribute directly in money to the maintenance and defence of the State— their counsels in peace, their swords in war, were all they could give their country consistently with the exalted chivalry and nice feeling of honour which distinguished that noble order. The industrious people were to maintain all public burdens and maintain the non-paying nobility too. The genuine system of feudal law and pure institutes of chivalry had been corrupted and died out in Germany as 'well as in France and Spain ; and in the dead forms of fiefs, freeholds, and feudal duties and services, there remained hardly the tradition of life or a glimpse of meaning. The defence of the country was committed to a great standing army ; all powers of self-taxation were taken from the baronial courts and local jurisdictions, and vested in a despotic monarch ; and the relation of lord and vassal was thenceforth reduced into a relation not of mutual interest, mutual dependence, and good offices, but of oppression and exaction on the one side, and hatred aud fraud on the other. This is the history of corrupted feudalism everywhere." He then goes on to sketch the rise of Prussia under King Frederick the Great and her humiliation by Napoleon. There was, however, one man who saw the means of rescuing his country from degradation. " This was the Prussian Minister, Baron Von Stein : he perceived that if Prussia was to remain a kingdom on the map of Europe, Prussia must be for the Prussians ; the tillers of the ground must be made to feel that they had an interest in the State, and that their own safety and honour were identified with the independence of their country. Fortunately, the King had the independence and the grace to give Von Stein uncontrolled authority in the business. Under the muzzles of French cannon the cautious Minister matured his plan ; and, within twelve months after the carnage of .Jenathree months after the peace of Tilsit— began to put it in practice." The condition of the land tenure, as Von Stein found it, was as follows : " Under the feudal institutions there had gradually grown up on the estates of the great barons a vast number of smallholdings, called peasant-fiefs (Bauer-hofe), comprising from 40 to 100 acres each. It had been always the policy of the State to encourage the growth of these peasant-fiefs for fiscal purposes, because most of the revenue of the kingdom was derived from them. The nobles, as I said before, were free from direct taxation : and when a standing army began to be kept on foot, and permanent burdens had to be imposed upon the land, the tenants of the peasant-fiefs were obliged to pay all. It had always been the policy of the State, therefore, to encourage this class of tenures, Dot so much for the sake of the tenants as for the sake of the revenue they produced ; and there had baen at various times laws passed to restrain the lords from interfering with these peasants, from evicting them, or taking possession of their lands, because those lands, the moment they came into possession of the lord, were, of course, tax free, to the loss and injury of the revenue. Besides their dues to the State, these tenants of the bauer-hofe gave a certain number of days' work in the week to their superior, as well as other feudal services and duties. The law had, therefore, recognised in these men a permanency of tenure, although very heavily burdened. Besides these, there were also a numerous body of free-holders (freibauers), being generally manumitted serfs who had settled with the consent of their lord upon waste lands, and reclaimed them. These also appear to have had a perpetual tenure by the operation of the general law restraining nobles from entering upon the ' peasantfiefs.' Then there were also on every barony a great number of serfs who paid daily labour for their patches of land, and ' who originally,' as Mr. Laing says, ' were intended by the proprietor to be his servants and day-labourers for cultivating his mains, or home- farmed laud ; but who, by long usage and 'occupation for generations, had become a kind of hereditary tenants, not to be distinguished from those iccnpants acknowledged to be proprietors, or what we would cal, ijopv-holders.' All these plebeian tenures were subject to some form or other of taxation, and, as encouraging industry, were profitable to the State ; and upon this account the lord was not only prohibited from evicting the occupiers, but was even obliged to keep some kimiß of the farms supplied with responsible tenants and taxpayers. The peasants, of course, could not purchase noble or 'knightfree' land upon any terms or at any price. Such is a general sketch of the actual state of land in Prussia up to the year 1807. You will observe that Government had always been anxious to restrain eviction, and that the whole policy of the State in recognising the undis-

turbed tenure of peasant-fief s for revenue purposes, tended to keep the people on the soil. The great evil was, not uncertainty of tenure, but the heavy burdens upon industry on account of the exemption of riobles from taxation, and on account of the feudal services arbitrarily exacted by the nobles, the grinding personal bondage, and forced labour." The first step taken by the Minister was to issue an edict by which all land was rendered purchaseable by all classes alike, and personal bondage was totally abolished. His successor, Count Hardenberg, adopted his policy, and by a second edict of land reform it was decreed that all exemptions from land-tax should cease. " This was a great step. Land was now a transferable commodity, without distinction of peasant and noble, and was alike subject to public burdens. Here at once was created a motive to industry and frugality ; and if the land reforms had even stopped here, there would have been, in the course of a generation, a vast improvement in the condition of Prussian farmers. But Hardenberg was no partial and timid reformer ; neither could the State of Prussia wait for the growingup of a new generation to save it, Therefore, in the September ofrae next year, forth came two more edicts, both dated the same day* The first, accompanied by a declaration in the nature of a schedule' enacted that all the peasant-fiefs of five several sorts should from thenceforth become the absolute property of their then occupants' This included not merely the bauer-hofe, or fiscal-fiefs, which were entered on the provincial tax-rolls, but also the farms in possession of four other classes of peasant-farmers, as the free boors and the 1 hereditary tenants ' on the waste lands. And 'it was stretched so far as to include the serfs located on the outskirts of the baronies," who had been originally intended as mere cottier labourers, and paid their rent in work, but who had in fact occupied their farms without disturbance for generations, according to that universal tenant right held sacred all over the Continent. It must be observed that cultivators of the land who were neither free bauers, nor held fiscal fiefs, nor had hereditary interest in their cottage holdings, but who farmed land by any other kind of agreements under any of these classes, or under the lords, were not interfered with by the new laws at all* This class, however, must have been very small, and was likely every year to grow smaller. But the second edict of 1811 crowns the land reforms of Prussia. It enacts as follows : — ' That all impediments to the free disposal of land, by sale, gift, or will, arising out of the constitution as it heretofore existed, be hereby abolished. This power of sale over portions of the land is to enable it to get into the hands of men of capital, and. thus clear it of encumbrances. From the greater subdivision of the soil a considerable advantage, and one dear to our paternal heart, will arise. It will give people in a small way (as they are termed) — gardeners, labourers, and the like — an opportunity of acquiring landed property and gradually increasing it.' The inten' tion of this last edict, as you may observe, was to promote, not sabletting (a pernicious and impoverishing sytem), but sale of land in small portions in absolute ownership, free of rent ; aud, of course, to ensure high cultivation and create a vast number of humble but independent land-owners." The landlords, at the same time, were not injured ; they were amply compensated. Still there was a great outcry : " Some years were occupied in. making all these valuations and transfers ; and there was much discontent and outcry amongst the proprietors — the ' rights of property' were invaded ; the state and dignity of a feudal baron, the game privileges, the insolent command, the territorial high mightiness — none of these things was valued by Hardenberg's inexorable commissioners ; it was only the just and substantial interest the lords derived from their possessions that he would pay them for, and that on a moderate scale— not at all the price they might choose to denand, but the fair price, and they might take it or leave it. One could not do what he liked with his own 1 Even a bargain was a bargain no longer. The truth is, the Government of Prussia was in the hands of a man who was determined to make all ' rights of property ' and all individual rights whatsoever subservient to the welfare of the community. Bargains about the holding of land are like no other contracts ; and good Governments will always control them, or void them, if need be. Happy it was for Prussia that her Government was a despotism, not an oligarchy. If it had been in the hands of these very nobles, nothing but a bloody revolution could have accomplished what Hardenberg did with his peaceful edicts." From this there followed the resurrection of Prussia ; it has been the true cause of her prosperity. " The present condition of Prussia is very fortunate. The style of living, the clothing, the dwelling-boui^fof the people, all bespeak comfort and independence. So quickly <m the liberation of the land market operate, and so eagerly was the ownership of the soil sought after, that far the greater part of Prussia is now in the hands of peasant proprietors." What Ireland prays for, then, is not unprecedented. IL has already been granted in a country long regarded as the pattern of all that is progressive and enlightened by those verj people who are now loudJy expressing their astonishment at the extravagance of the Irish desire. Nevertheless we hardly expect that so good an example will in the present instance be followed. " Italy for the Italians," and Prussia for the Prussians ; but Ireland for the Irish,— by no means.

ANGLICAN VABIATIONB.

Or the phenomena of the times not the least amusing, are those presented by the dispute between High Church and Low Church, and their various modifications. It is a dispute, indeed, of which it is impossible to foresee any termination, for there is no authority by which it may be decided, and the one party can bring forward in its defence fully as good arguments as the other can oppose to it. Still there is no restraint upon the acrimony with which one party pureues the other, and the " Evangelical " is not more resolute and uncharitable in urging the claims of salvation by faith only, than is the Ritualist in upholding the efficacy of the sacraments. It is, perhaps, the most flagrant instance that the world has ever seen^ of, a contest between parties, precisely similarly situated, with precisely the same advantages of education, social position, and abilities of all kinds. There seems, indeed, to the on-l»oker to be nothing by which any one can possibly be induced to side with the one or the other, except his taste ; according as that inclines him, he will be High or Low. If a man, for example, be artistic, he will find his finer feelings wrought upon by ornamental vestments, stainedglass windows, beautiful interiors and such like matters, and so will he be edified or helped towards edification." If he be musical, fine choral effects will influence him in a kindred manner. We cannot tell what it is that delights those who are not thus disposed. We cannot see what it is that tends to their edification in lath and plaster, ugly rows of seats, hymns all out of tune, and uproarious ; reading that makes the mosi pathetic passages of Holy Scripture sound ridiculous— we have, for instance, heard of a parson who impressed it upon his hearers that the dogs that licked the sores of Lazarus were named Moreover— and all that appeara bald, bleak, and dreary. Still there must be tastes that ncline towards these things, and verily those who own them are by no means lenient towards those who do not own them. We find them condemn their brethren of aesthetic leanings in no measured terms, and deny them to be in "earnest about their eoul's salvation." We have seen a most amusing instance of this in a contemporary published a week or two ago here in this colony ; and of its converse the uncharitableness of a ritualist parson, we lately were informed of a striking example that occurred in England. The victim of intolerance there was an unfortunate lady, the daughter of a clergyman, who had died a year or two before, and the mother of a clergyman alive and filling a curacy somewhere in England. This lady, then, during an interval in a journey by rail found herself within reach of her son and went as she hoped to spend a pleasant hour or two in his company. She was sadly disappointed, for during her whole visit the rev. host kept impressing upon her in the most earnest manner his mournful opinion that her father bad ceitiinly been lost because the " sacrament" had not been administered to him when he was dying. She went her way home like one distracted ; partly, being very Low Church, at the sad defalcation of her son ; and partly, being very affectionate, at the sad fate insisted upon concerning her father. Now all we need say concerning the matter is that the Church in which such essential differences, touching the very fact of salvation itself, are so flagrantly displayed is in a most ludicrous condition. And the conceit each party manifests in its intolerance makes the matter more ludicrous still.