Current Topics. AT HOME AND ABROAD.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume IX, Issue 453, 16 December 1881, Page 1

Current Topics. AT HOME AND ABROAD.

A Friend or a foe, we can't tell which, bat it can hardly be one to whom we are indifferent, has forwarded to us a mysterious document. We call thus document mysterious, because, for the life of us, we can.t tell what it was reprinted for ; or when it was reprinted, for it bears no date. All we see is, at the foot of the second column, it is stated that the circular here act foith was " reprinted at the Taranaki Herald office, Devon street, New Plymouth." The matter itself is of very little weight ; it is headed "Major Brown on Boman Catholic Immigration," and is taken from the Taranaki Newt, December 28, 1872. It is, moreover, signed at the end Charles Brown, md if Charles Brown and Major Brown be one and the same, and both were identical with the editor of the Taranaki Newt in 1872, then all we can Bay, is, the individual who was Major Brown, Charles Brown and the editor of the Taranaki News in 1872, was of no very emminent distinction as a literary man, was a bigot in religion, if hehad any, and whether he had or not, a a bigot nd . of no particular information, probably on any subject, certainly on the subject he wrote about — the fitness of Catholics to form desirable colonists. But nine years ago in an obscure town in New Zealand, we should hardly have expected to find anything very brilliant in the editorial line, and " blessed are they that expect not." Our friend or our foe, moreover, on his part, or whosoever it may be that has sentjus this document in question can hardly expect that we shall set about and return a serious ! answer to a document that gravely proposes as a " desirable limitation" to immigration that it " should be taken from the Protestant population of Europe." Such proposition is hardly worthy of notice and could only be made by some extraordinary Bedivivus who had not attained to an understanding of the age in which he found himself out of place. We learn, nevertheless, that our Bedivivus, at the time he wrote, was not completely isolated ; kindred spirits with his own were, indeed, still in existence, and of this he furnishes us with a proof. " His Honour the Superintendent," he says, " recently received an application for labour, one condition of which was that the immigrants were not to be Irish." "We can imagine," continues Bedivivus, "Mr. O'Borke's surprise and disappointment at such a stipulation." Into the imagination of Bedivivus, however, we venture to say, it never entered that Mr. O'Borke's surprise was natural to a man of enlightenment, educated among people who bad not been fossilized, and that Mr. O'Borke's " disappointment " would be quite as natural to such a man at finding the colony to harbour in a position to employ labour so insensate a bigot. Meantime, to illustrate the erood sense of those who make this proposal made by Bedivivius, as well as to justify our adoption of a surname for him. We shall turn to the archives of a colony where, one hundred years ago, just such an attempt was made as that referred to at the exclusion of Catholics, and where its signal failure may encourage us, if we will, to snap oar fin gets in the faces of those who may now return to it. — The colony referred to is Newfoundland. "The following order," says Maguire, " was issued by several governors down to so late as 1765. It shows the spirit against which the Irish Catholic had to contend : For the better preserving the peace, preventing robberies, tumultuous assemblies, (Redivivus would recognise the Irishman's " combativeneas,") and other disorders of wicked and idle people remaining m the country during the -winter. 0 rdered— -that no Papist servant, man or woman, shall remain at any place where they did not fish or serve during the summer. That not more than two Papist men shall dwell in one house daring the winter, except such as have Protestant masters. That no Papist shall keep a public - house, or sell liquor by retail. That the masters of Irish servants do pay for their passage home."And again governor Milbank in 1790, replied as follows to the application of a certain priest for permission to build a chapel : " The governor acquaints Mr. O'Donnell that, so far from being disposed toallow of an increase of places of worship foa the Roman Catholics of the island, he very seriously intends netet

" MAJOR BBOWN ONBOMAN CATHOLIC MMIGBATION."

COLONIAL LOBDS.

year, to lay those established already under particular restriction*. Mr. O'Donnell must he aware that it is not the interest of Great Britain to encourage people to winter in Newfoundland, and he cannot be ignorant that many of the lower orders who would now stay, would if it were not for the convenience with which they obtain absolution here, go home for it at least once in two or three years ; and the governor has been misinformed if Mr, O'Donnell, instead of advising their return to Ireland does not rather encourage them to remain in this country." To-day the Catholics of Newfoundland have a cathedral whose building cost them £120,000. "Were governor Milbank now in the flesh " adds Maguire, " and were he to stand on the floor of that great cathedral,glance up at its lofty roof, cast bis eyes round at the beautiful works of art brought from the most famous studios of Borne, and then remember his famous letter to Dr. O'Donnell— bo coolly insolent and so haughtily contemptuous — he might well feel ashamed of himself and the government whose miserable policy he represented ; and also learn how impossible it is to destroy a living faith, or crush a genuine race." {The Irish in America, p. 169.) Redivivus is neither insolent nor contemptuous ; he has not force enough for that, and all we can accuse him of is a slight impertinence and a large degree of silliness. If, however, h« be still in the land of the living, and the reprint of his article be not a melancholy tribute — a very melancholy one— to a respectable memory of the dear departed, he may profit by the lesson that Governor Mildank at least did not live to learn although he helped to teach it. We h&ve no column, it is true, especially devoted to the service of fashionable intelligence, but that is no reason why we should not give an honoured place to such when it offers itself to as. We should be singularly vulgar, indeed, were we not to hasten with delight to acknowledge the prospect that now opens before the Press of the colony of being, every newspaper among them, enabled to devote a fair space each issue to the doings of a galaxy of finery, of a whole park of loveliness and accomplishments, and to all the exalted comings and goings, dancings and promenadings of a titled world, and those who hang upon their outskirts. We are, in a word, about to have a peerage established among us, and soon among the names, the motions to and fro, and stoppages, of lordly folk chronicled by the Morning Post — or even certain of the Dublin newspapers, on whose columns such chronicles appear a most anomalous blot that it is to be hoped the present agitation may do something towards obliterating — we shall read of the distinction conferred by, it may a be, a Lord Baron Bed Jack's, or » Duke of Tinker's Gully, in leaving London for Brighton by a morning train, or spending a week at Breslin's Marine Hotel, Bray — news which our colonial Press will be only too anxious to reproduce in its own highly honoured columns. Original items of the kind, it appears, we art not to have, at least for the present. The colonieß are to be the nursing grounds of lords, but the full fledged aristocrat we are not to be privileged to possess ; he is to be kept in England, where the atmosphere will be more conducive to the preservation of his refinement, and, especially, where he will be out of reach of any contamination that might arise from the Bight of the appurtenances by which he, or his parents, made the money that has ennobled him. It may be even necessary to his standing in May Fair, that he should have the world's diameter between him and a father or mother, or perhaps both, and many other relations besides, guilty of a continual murder of the Queen's English — whether the weapon of slaughter be Cockney, Soctch, or Irish — and of several other solecisms, and breaches of' punctilio abominable to the very top of the upper crust. Meantime, what anew interest, and how intense a one there has been communicated to our colonial children 1 Mark Twain, in a humorous speech on babies made by him some little time since, referred to the number of future presidents at that moment cutting their teeth or otherwise engaged in tha occupations of the cradle, and now, in all our babies we may see the possible English lord. Every father and mother in the colony, as matters are, may look upon their child as destined, if he prove to be of the right stuff, to attain to the highest honours the colony has to offer, and if the highest honour of all be a peerage to be enjoyed in England, it is to that the child is destined to attain. Is there nothing we can do to educate our children with such »a object in view?

Should there not be some professorship of lordly manners introduced into our public schools, so that those of their pupils who are successful in life may bear their blushing honours with due composure and dignity, and when they have finally reached the goal proposed to them be no strangers to the repose that marks the caste of "Vere de Yere, As to the failures, who shall abide in the colony, they may go to form the various classes that are sure to follow here on the establishment of our peerage at Home, and to build up and sustain the paltry pride, the petty social fawnings and snubbings, the threadbare finery, and the heart-breaking attempts to preserve what is considered gentility, that are amongst the greatest miseries of the debris of feudalism in the old world, and that here, by belonging to a modern ruin, would exhibit much, in addition, that was piteous and grotesque. In conclusion, how do our colonial masses regard this proposition of the Imperial Government to offer a bribe to absenteeism, and to encourage the determination that already far too largely exists here, of monopolising the lands, and forming an aristocracy on a basis, that at Home the masses begin to declare must give way, in order that they themselves and all the interests of their several countries may be saved from destruction ? Colonial lords under any circumstances would be an anomaly ; colonials made lords, on condition that they should reside in Europe, would be a most destructive anomaly. The colonies cannot with too much energy resist all proposals of the kind.

THE TRADITIONS OF BOMB.

A PABAOBAPH, evidently clipped by one of our contemporaries from some other paper, and which treats of the reception in St. Peter's of the Italian pilgrims, on October 16th, pats forward the belief that the Pope's imprisonment in the Vatican is bat a vain pretence ; and yet it might have been thought that, since it was proved impossible to carry the remains of a dead Pope through the streets of Borne secretly and at midnight without uproar, for the living Pope to go! abroad by day, if nothing else, and other issues would be involved in this, would be for him to expose himself to the utmost danger, and the world generally to the confusion that must result from his murder if it were committed — as in all probability it would be. No newspaper derides the Czar for the precautions he takes to defend his life ; why should the Pope ba derided if he too takes precautions? and, moreover, on his death by violence far weightier consequences may hang than those to follow from the assassination of the Czar. The leading newspapers of Europe, indeed , acknowledged and deplored the reasonableness of the Pope's attitude when the attack on the funeral of Pope Pius IX. was made, and it is not to the credit of any colonial newspaper aspiring to lead when it returns, even at second hand, to the false and stale accusation of a needlessly self-imposed imprisonment. The extract, however, to which we refer goes on to declare that, although even among Italian liberals the idea has presented itself that the Italian Government should remove from Borne, this is not to be heard of. "If the traditions of Borne," it says, " are dear to the Papacy, they ought to be yet dearer to the Italian people, o- whose history they formed the staple ages before the Roman Church was heard of." But what is the history of ancient Borne to modern Italy? What is the history of the Egypt of the Pyramids to the Egypt of to-day 1 As well might the dweller by the Nile drop a tear of lamentation beside the mummy of some prince of the almost primeval dynasties as the modern Italian throb with pride at the recollections of Scipio or Caesar, or blush for the evil fame of Nero or Caracalla. The traditions of Borne that live to-day are the traditions of the Papacy also. The ashes of imperial Caesar may, indeed, so far as the modern Italian is concerned, " stop a hole," and leave him unconcerned because of the conqueror's degradation. Nay, if anything he may rejoice at this, for is he not most probably sprung from the race that as " young barbarians " played by the Danube, while far away in Borne their fathers lay butchered in the arena — " to make a Koman holiday " ? On the other hand, the traditions of the Papacy are the traditions of modern Italy's glory ; of a people rescued from barbarism, endowed with science and enriched by the incomparable gifts of art above all other people. The traditions of Borne for modern Italy, then, are one with the traditions of the Papacy ; these have been the boul of all her splendour, the life of her glory, and deprived of these she must follow the law that nature has appointed for the corpse — through rottenness to rottenness and complete dissolution.

THE ALTERNATIVES.

But what are the prospects of Italy at war with the Papacy ? They are those of the red revolution only. "If this conflict ends in the defeat of the Pope," says the Saturday Itevieiv, "it is not the Italian Monarchy, bat the Italian Republic, that will reap the fruits of victory " " The Italian Conservatives," he adds, " are cut off from the very elements which in almost every other country constitute their strength. The clergy are hostile, the peasantry are at bert indifferent. The Conservatives dare not make the Monarchy popular

by enlarging the electorate, because they cannot feel sore that the first act of the newly-enfranchised voters would not be to return Clerical candidates. Consequently, they are obliged to remain a minority in the Chamber of Deputies, unable to exercise any influence on the coarse of affairs, exoept when the various sections of the Radicals happen to fall oat among themselves." But, important as is the article we refer to, la many particulars, if we omit the Comparison made bet warn the motives aa4^pinionp. of the Popijjs, Pius IX. and Leo X>tll., for' which the writer must chiefly h.aW4*Mm upon his imagination, liro^ly advocating, aa $ does,^bil reßtapation to the Sovereign Pontiff of his ancient city, more important still is the utterance on, which the writer , has based his article. It has been taken by him from the Paris correspondence of the Times, and its author is vouched for as being " an eminent Italian, who has rendered United Italy immense service, who has made himself famous in divers ways, and whose patriotism or authority cannot be suspected." The Iteview quotes this utterance as follows : — " ' When we have recovered a more natural, a more logical, more central, more approachable, a less sombre and a less unhealthy capital, all that now impedes and threatens us will disappear at once. . . . Italian unity will be cemented by the tacit and satisfied adhesion of the Papacy ; ' while the Papacy, ' knowing that any revolution would destroy that work of conciliation, would be the most powerful ally of the lungdom ia which she would have recognised her independent seat.' " We may very confidently believe that the opinions thus expressed by an eminent Italian have not been weakened by the events that have taken place in Borne since the Saturday JSeviem^s article from which we quote was published. If, on the other hand, they needed to be strengthened, there was quite enough to be found for such a purpose in the grand scene witnessed the other day iv St. Peter's, when 20,000 people gathered from all the quarters of Italy acknowledged the presence of the Sovereign Pontiff with an enthusiasm that could not be suppressed, and did him in his imprisonment aud the condition of his spoliation, an obeisance that might well have filled with pride the most imperious conqueror in the hour of his triumph. In Leo XIII., although he raised his hands to heaven for aid, there was evident the king whose reign cannot be suppressed, the absolute monarch of the hearts of men, whom no power can dethrone — uncrowned though his enemies may boast him to be, and despoiled as lie undoubtedly is, the Pope is still a tremendous power, before which the legions of evil must always quail and be disconcerted. The Saturday Review, indeed, in concluding his article, though writing of a cause with which his sympathy is limited, seems to acknowledge as much. " Whether," he gays, " the idea of leaving Rome, which has of law been attributed to the Pope, has really been entertained by him cannot be said with any positiveness ; but it is obvious that he has in this idea a very powerful weapon as against his adversaries, however dangerous it might prove in the long run to the Papacy itself. It is impossible, hewever, to form even a guess of the use to which Leo XIII. may put this weapon. He may be unwilling to irritate the Italian nation by transferring the seat of the Papacy to another country ; or tie may think it expedient to let the Italian nation see that he is not to be trifled with beyond a certain point, and that if the conservative forces of Italy are to make common cause against a common enemy, the time has come when the secular power must make advances to the spiritual power. The Papacy, under the guidance of Leo XIII., is not likely to act rashly ; but it will not be surprising if, in the end, it should act with more decision than the Italian G-overnment seems to anticipate."

VOLUNTARY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOL BOARDS.

The Saturday Meviem in referring to the prosperous condition of the voluntary schools in England, which ten years ago, it was foretold, would go down in presence of the School Boards, attributes the wonderful success that has so completely faM fied the prediction in question partly to the " national love of fighting." The spirit of rivalry, he says, was called into play by the new institution, and the supporters of the old system increased their efforts to secure for their system the triumph. A reflection, however, suggested to us by this theory that the Review propounds is, that if the love of fighting be a national characteristic of tbe AngloSaxon, and h characteristic that evidently under certain modifications leads to wholesome results, it can hardly be wise among people where tbe Anglo-Saxon element largely predominates to curb so useful an influence, at) d, by leaving no legitimate issue to the national spirit, to re luce everything to a condition in which stagnation must be the aifitnr.il consequence. If, for example, the Voluntary Schools were fcUotalnsd, increased, and improved through a spirit of emulation in face of ihe Board Schools, we may also conclude that a like spirit f>ei vadeil the teaching in both classes of schools |and made it better ft. an it would otherwise have been. And, if this has been the case in En "lan 4, as without |proof to the contrary we are justified in holding it to have been, why should it not also be the case wherever the English strain is largely prevalent ? Or can any other condition of things be insisted upon without injury and the repression of a

quality given by nature for a good purpose to the Anglo-Saxon race— tnd here we may believe the Celtic family also to be at least on an equality with them ? We cannot but believe, then, that a wholesome rivalry in educational matters is suppressed to the injury of education, by the imposition of one dull uniform system everywhere throughout the country. Meantime the paragraph in. which the Saturday Review points out the particulars in which the Voluntary Schools excel those of the Boards is not without significence to us here, and may very well be applied, mutatis mutandis, to^secular and denominational schools among ourselves. Voluntary rcWools, he says then, " are, as a matter of fact, more humanising, 2ft"Jth as regards teachers and children, than School Boards are — perhaps more than School Boards can be. The interest which the clergy take in the parish school is not limited to the actual school work. They regard tie children as something more than so many machines for earning the Parliamentary grant, and the teachers as something more than so many machines for qualifying the children to earn the Parliamentary grant. Here and there no doubt the managers of a School Board School may also be anxious to take this wide view of their functions. In the majority of cases, however, they regard themselves simply as the representatives of the ratepayers — bound, indeed, to do their best to make the school efficient, but having neither the right nor the wish to know anything either of the children or the teachers, except in the hours during which they are within the school precincts and engaged in the school work. Even in the exceptional cases they are hampered by the absence of any relationship or permanent official standing outside the school to which they can appeal with any confidence. They know nothing of the children's parents or houses ; they never see the teachers unless they are actually engaged in teaching. The clergy and the managers of voluntary schools generally stand in a different position. The parsonage is the place to which the parents naturally look for help and advice in anything that concerns themselves. In so far as the other managers are really identified with the school they become in these respects a kind of supplementary clergy. Thus an interest grows up between the managers on the one hand, and the children and teachers on the other, which is human as well as professional. As such it may be of very great value in bringing classes together. In a School Board school this uniting influence is in a great degree wanting. The efforts that the better managers of School Board schools are constantly making to bridge across the interval which divides them from those with whom they have to do are evidence of this. It is scarcely possible to suggest any really appropriate remedy for this state of things, and so long as none is forthcoming it is permissible to hope that voluntary schools will continue to multiply and prosper."

ANOTHER VIOTOBT,

If it be remarkable to find a change of opinion begin to obtain as to the desirableness of giving the Pope back his capital, and that Italian politicians and English journalists who for some time were most resolute in declaring that Rome was the one thing needful for the perfection of United Italy, now declare that, on the contrary, the existence of United Italy depends upon the restoration of Rome to the Pope, no less remarkable is the change of opinion as to the usefulness of the Kiilturkampf in Germany. It both instances it is already evident that the Church has won a notable victory, and there is much encouragement to be derived from this by Catholics throughout the world generally in whatever contest, for conscience' sake, they may be engaged in — as, for example, with respect to the education question in our own colony. The whole community may seem joined together against them, and they may be beaten in their efforts again and again, but still there is good reason for them to persevere with hope. The whole world declared that Home had been torn from the Pope for ever and beyond all chance of recovery ; yet, although the Pope never struck a blow, it is now declared that ere long he may have not only recovered Rome, but " re-conquered " it. Prince Bismarck, and the world with him, declared the Kulturltavvpf would kill the Church in Germany, and yet when Prince Bismarck is now accused of going to Canossa — that is, of making submission to the Pope as the Emperor Henry IV. did at the Castle of Canossa to Pope St' # Gregory VII. — he does not deny the charge, but acknowledges himself beaten and defends his surrender — now bitterly accusing and reproving thoee whom he made his tools when he entered upon his unequal combat. The following passage, translated by the Roman correspondent of the London Tablet from the Leipsic Grenzboten, a newspaper tinder Prince Bismarck's control, and in which a reply is made to the mockery of certain Italian journals, is decisive of the subject in question :—": — " The journalists who thus write are Jews or defenders of Judaism, and they busy themselves with many matters which do not in the least concern them. This sort of people, which has ever on its lips liberty of conscience, does not mean by these words anything save merely the liberty of the enemies of the Church. All Christian confessions inspire them with hatred and fear. The servants of the Church are for them subjects of scorn or horror, and

they love none but the Rabbi. They cannot be ignorant that their own liberty of worship runs no risk whatever, no matter what may be concluded between Rome and Berlin, but the mere idea of peace between the Church and the State puts them in incredible exasperation. The Kultwkampf at an end, Judaism can no longer fish in troubled waters, and crowds of imbeciles in Germany allow them* selves to be persuaded by the Jewish Press that the State ought never to acknowledge the error which it committed by plunging into the Kulturhouinpf ! At the commencement of the strife it wa» hoped that a potent aid would be found in Old- Catholicism. It was a mistake. That sect has been reduced to a handful of generals without soldiers, aud to-day it will not venture to demand the continuance of the contest. As for Herr Falk, who began it, all are now agreed that, however learned he may be in his Pandects, he never had the stuff in him of •which Statesmen are made. By his famous laws he did nothing except to gain for Catholics the honours of martyrdom." With such notable examples, then, of the conqnests gained by Catholic perseverance and determination before their eyes, Catholics throughout the world must indeed be timorous and weak if they yield in any single point which conscience orders them to persist in — and especially, as we have said, among ourselves with regard to the education question concerning which is their chief and only contest as Catholics.

OTTR 810 WIGS IK ENGLAND.

We actually find then, that, as we have already suggested, it will be essentially necessary for us here to do something towards educating our children up to the possibilities of their hereafter becoming the members of a colonial peerage clustered round the steps of Her Majesty's throne in London. As it is, it seems those of our leading colonists who venture to put in an appearance in the neighbourhood of St. James's savour of the wool-shed far too much to be agreeable in the nostrils of the elder aristocracy, and become the butts for all kind of remarks on the part of horrified refinement. Since we wrote our note on the creation of a colonial peerage, in a word, we have come upon an article from The World in which a witty, though somewhat supercilious, writer gives his opinion on the material out of which our aristocracy is to be moulded apropos of the leasing of Hughenden Manor by Sir Samuel Wilson, the Victorian millionaire. Sir Samuel it seems, according to the writer in question , was originally a " raw gossoon from Ballycloughan," who went to Victoria having for his stock of qualifications some knowledge of mathematics and flax-spinning ; but finding neither of these marketable he was obliged to take to gold -digging, by means of which he developed into squatter and millionaire. He is now in England trying " to gain a footing among the new men" of that country, and, as the writer tells us the first generation of the squatter's family is " energetic," it is possible he may succeed in this most laudable ambition of his. The second generation of the squatter's family, however, is anything but energetic, and we may sum up the description the journalist we refer to gives us of them — "girls" and their "brothers" — by saying no more unpleasant a branch of polite society can possibly be found all over the world — that is, if our journalist is to be taken as exact in his delineation of them. It is en. couraging to learn that the people thus described " are forming a true country party in Australia, possessed of all the prejudices and bitterness of that cultured portion of the community" — that is, beiDg interpreted, a party distinguished for self-assertion, and irreverence, listlessness, loafing, bumptiousness and boasting ia an offensive degree, for with all these are the " girls" of our " squatterocracy" and thair brothers accredited by this writer in The World. But it is with the squatter gone Home as a candidate for the colonial peerage that we have especially to do. " Here, indeed, says The World, they supply the place of the old Nabobs, though their manners are healthier than those of the yellow-faced people who last century shook the pagoda tree and bought boroughs with the fruit. They are also unlike the shoddy and petroleum magnates of America. For these are usually townsmen, and, though purse-proud, have rubbed too much against other classes to retain many of their wor»t angularities. Nor is the successful squatter akin to the successful gold or diamond digger, since he made his money much more slowly than the latter, and thus became more thoroughly ingrained with the peculiar surroundings of his trade, ... He lives in the best of West End houses ; and if he does not always attain the best of clubs, he amazes their habitvSs with the strength of his Conservatism — and language." Said we not truly that it would be necessary to prepare our future peers for their new dignity and associations 1 Meantime, it may, perhaps, be thought worthy of consideration by colonial legislators whether the duty they owe to the country whose destinies have been committed into their hands will permit them to wink at the facilitiea that exist, and in some quarters it is determined shall continue to exi9t, for sustaining and increasing the class that thus affords models for the most contemptuous picture that this clever London journalist could find it in his power to draw, or whether they shall not rather endeavour so to manage the affairs of the colony as to cover the country with a population among whom no room may be found for.

any class of the kind, and where even individuals capable of being justly so described may be of extremely rare occurrence. Let us, indeed, have our colonial aristocracy, an aristocracy of genuine worth, and good service done among us at home in the colonies, and rewarded by colonial gratitude and esteem — not an. aristocracy by virtue of its millions seeking to gain admission into high society in England bat rebuffed as upstart and intolerable.