THE MINIMISTS.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XII, Issue 12, 11 July 1884, Page 18

THE MINIMI STS.

At the present moment a great effort is made to minimise the cost of education. All, indeed, or nearly all, candidates for legislative honours admit that the cost of education is tpo great and. that an effort should be made to lessen it. But some of them endeavour to persuade the people that after all this cost is not so very great. For example, Mr. Robert Gillies told the electors at Milton a day or two ago that the cry about this cost was all moonshine, and that last year it amounted to about £255,000. Mr. Bradshaw wishes the electors of Dunedin central to believe that the total cost last year was only £380,000, including £70,000 for buildings and several other items. Which is correct, or is either ? The answer is both Mr. Gillies and Mr. Bradshaw are wrong. Mr. Bradshaw has forgotten to take into account the money spent by Government on Native schools, and secondary and university education, or to give credit for the proceeds of endowments for higher schools. Mr. Gillies says that out of £46,000 which the secondary education cost, half was met by fees and the other half by rents of reserves. Mr. Gillies, however, forgot to include £14,000 spent on the new High School, Dunedin, and some other similar items. Mr. Gillies seems to glory in the cheap education his sons get. "It was," he says, " one of the grandest things for their children and his. He had five boys in the Dunedin High School, and he was delighted to send them." We have no doubt of this, as less than half of the cost of their education falls on him. When the expense of the building, supplied by a generous public for the special benefit of Mr. Gillies's children is considered, it is evident that he has his boys educated for lees than half nothing. It is a pretty state of things which permits rich men to prey on the public, and when rich men glory in doing so. Notwithstanding the contradictory assertions of Mr. Gillies and Mr. Bradshaw, the cost to the Colony of education amounted last year to very nearly five hundred thousand pounds. This was proved in the Legislative Council last session by the Hon. Mr. Holmes, whose speech is to be found in Hansard. In the face of this undoubted fact, it is hardly honest in any candidate for Parliamentary honours to act so disingenuously, to say the least, as both these gentlemen have done in their respective speeches. Why, compared with them, even Mr. Stout is honesty itself. He openly proclaims that enough has not been spent in godless education. In his views the progress of de-Christianising the Colony is not sufficiently rapid. But the other, two endeavour to palliate what ' is an admitted grievance. We have been asked if it is true that Catholic children attending Catholic scheols are shut out from Government scholarships — that is, scholarships provided by public funds. Our answqr is yes ; Catholic children attending Catholic schools cannot hold any scholarship provided by public funds. This is a certain undoubted fact, which none but a knave would dare to deny. We have been asked, again, if it is a fact that Catholic children who have been educated in Catholic schools are ineligible for Government situations. Our answer is, not by any positive law ; but practically the difficulty of their obtaining Government situations is nearly as great as if they were actually precluded by positive enactment. The ' system of examination is so managed that a youth educated at Catholic schools encounters almost insuperable difficulties.

Ls reference to a denial made by Mr. Fergus at the Arrow, that Oatholic children taught in Catholic schools are ineligible for the Government Scholarships or the Civil Service Examinations, we in our turn have to make a denial of what Mr. Fergus says. The only condition on which, it would be possible for Catholic children who had gained the Government scholarships to hold those scholarships \roukl be by their giving up their attendance at Catholic schools and attending godless schools instead. Catholic children, therefore, are eligible for Government scholarships only as, for example, any Catholic man is eligible for an evangelical lay-preacbership — that is by renouncing their religion. Therefore, Catholic children are ineligible for the Government scholarships. Catholic children are also practically ineligible for the Civil Service Examinations, because those examinations are conducted on the Government standards. And by this we do not mean that the pupils of Catholic schools are nnable to pass in the standards — but on their presenting themselves for examination they are questioned as to the standards they are in, and on. their replying "no standard," they are pronounced disqualified. Catholic children, then, are ineligible for the Government scholarships, and practically ineligible for the Civil Service Examinations, and Mr. Fergus's denial of these facts is false. The kalf -yearly meeting of the members of the New Headford, Branch No. 3, of the N.Z.H.C.B.S.|was held in the schoolroom, New Headford, on Thursday, June 18, at 7.30 p.m., when there was a fair attendance of members. The balance-sheet and report were read and unanimously adopted. The following officers were elected for the ensuing six months : — President, Bro. P. J. Henley ; vice-President, Bro. J. Doherty ; Secretary, Bro. F. M. Byan (re-elected) ; Treasurer, Bro. P. Ryan ; Warden, Bro. J. Wilson (re-elected) ; Guardian, Bro. J. Walshe ; Sick Visitors, Bros. Keaneand Leathern.' The Illustrated N.Z. News for the current month is very creditably turned oat ; the views given of Tararn Creek, Thames, and George Sound are in particular remarkably good. As an instance of the kind of warfare that is now being waged agaiust Christianity, and of the enlightenment that makes it easy to wage it, we may take the following extract from the report of a lecture lately delivered in Chicago by the renowned Colonel Robert Ingersoll :— " You know that when Christianity came into power it destroyed every statue it could lay its ignorant hands upon. It defaced and obliterated every painting ; it destroyed every beautiful building ; it destroyed the manuscripts, both Greek and Latin ; it destroyed all the history, all the poetry, all the philosophy it could find, and burnt every library that it could reach with its torch. And the result was tbat the night of the Middle Ages fell upon the human race. But by accident, by chance, by oversight, a few of the manuscripts escaped the fury of religious zeal ; a few statues bad been buried, and the result was that these manuscripts became the seed, the fruit of -which is our civilisation of to day. (Applause.) A few forms of beauty were dug from the earth that had protected them, and now the civilised world is filled with art, with painting, and with statuary, in spite of the rage of the early Church." Butthe Colonel did not say half be might have said — and robbed his hearers of half the good things they might have applauded. Christianity also dried up all the springs, destroyed all the soil, and played the devil with the world generally, leaving it as bare and sterile as the desert of Sahara. It turned men biack and put wool on their heads, and gave them, four legs, and all this lasted until freethought came to restore fertility and make mankind white in the face again. Colonel Bob's invention failed him, and did not go half far enough and his audience ought to have demanded back at least half their money. But is even secularism itself resulting in making American audiences ignorant, and brutally stupid enough not only to sit and hear, but even to applaud such utter fustian 1 Colonel Bob is probably more knave than fool — but that can hardly be said for the majority, at least, of his hearers, A pious paper repeats in Victoria the rather exaggerated account given by pious people in New Zealand of the privations and pious ministrations attendant on the death of the late Madame Lottie Wilmot. The paper in question concludes as follows :—": — " Madame Wilmot's own career supplies a warning as melancholy as her last words. She had gifts which might have won her a high position. She spent them in ridiculing God's Word and died penniless, destitute, abandoned, and lies in a pauper's grave." There are, nevertheless, plenty of people who spend such talents as they have got in a similar manner, and who yet are not in the least likely to come to any such end. Many noted blasphemers have died in the midst of abundance and surrounded by friends— and many people who have spent a life of sanctity have died amid more temporal wretchedness than that among which Madame Wilmot died. But if the end proposed to himself by the student and expounder of the Bible were only that he might die as comfortably as possible— leaving money in his purse, it may be doubtful as to whether his life would, after all, be very much more acceptable in the sight of heaven than that of Madame Lottie Wilmot herself. . ,

Mb. Stout, at one of bis meetings the other night, said: " A man's religious belief was holy and personal to himself, and no one else had a right to deal with it."-— So holy, in fact, in some instances does a man find it that he does bis best to cram it down the throats of all his neighbours whether they will or not, and lends his influence to have those of them heavily fined who absolutely re"fu3e to swallow the dose. So holy does he hold his own belief that he determines bo bully that of every other man out of him— in vindication of course of liberty of conscience. Can we believe that any man in his senses does not perceive that when he talks in such a way, while ho occupies Mr. Stout's position, be holds himself up to the derision due to a humbug and hypocrite. But then, perhaps, Mr. Stout has good reason to know that he addresses a safe audience — blank stupidity may be played upon safely. Among- the failings we mark in certain Irish patriotic writers, is an inclination to sympathise with the murderous hordes of the Soudan, and to claim them as brother patriots, rather than recognise them as the aggressive, unsparing, savage fanatics they are in truth. As an instance, we find a letter in the columns of a contemporary in which a correspondent of far more than average ability criticises severely and justly the conduct of Colonel Burnaby in going to amuse himself at Souakim by shooting the rebels with a doublebarelled gun, and from a safe distance. No condemnation, it is evident, can be too severe for such brutality, and the man guilty of it might well, for a pastime, take upon himself the office of the common hangman. So far we agree with all the correspondent in question says. He, however, adds the following :—": — " I regret that I cannot give the result of Mr. Buchanan's queries in the House of Commons ; but it is not a hard matter to conjecture what satisfaction the Secretary of State for War gave to the widows and orphans of the ten men that the brave Burnaby knocked over with his doublebarrelled gun and his twenty cartridges, all the while that he protected his massive form, behiud the parapet wall." Widows and orphans, nevertheless, whose late husbands and fathers threw upon them the whole work of supporting the household, and of cultivating the farm, such as it was, and spent their lives in those lighter occupations they judged suited to their dignity as lords of the creation, would not be likely to miss the protector — or, most probably, bully — of whom they had been deprived. The work of subduing the insurrection in the Soudan is a necessary one, and if the rebels are slaughtered in their own country, it is only to prevent a wider slaughter and a more frightful carnage from occurring when they would have crossed its boundaries. It still remains, however, true that the man who goes, of his own free will and for amusement, to take a cool hand in the slaughter, acts a very disgusting part. Meantime it is much to be regretted that Irish writers should afford a colour to the belief tbat an Irish Parliament would hamper by opposition the Imperial policy — for nothing less is done when Irishmen express their sympathy for the foreign country or barbarous tribe against whom England justly and necessarily takes up arms. We perceive that the College of St. Francis Xavier, Kew, Victoria, has again been most successful at the recent University Examinations. ■ From this college 100 per cent, passed for Matriculation at the June, examinations, whilst, from all the colleges and schools of the Colony taken together, only 32 per cent, passed. From the same college ten out of eleven, or 90 per cent., passed the Matriculation examination last December, whilst from all the colleges and schools taken together, only 35 per cent, passed. THT Sydney Freeman's Journal concludes as follows an article on the unsuccessful attempt made by the Protestant ministers of New South Wales, to agree as to leligious instruction in the public schools :— " There is one lesson we think our Anglican friends may derive from the split among the Protestant clergy— if, indeed, their prejudices will allow them to learn a lesson. The reason why Dr. Barry cannot act with Mr. Jefferis in a scheme of education is because" he believes more dogmas than Mr. Jefferis does. Dr. Barry may believe everything that M.r. Jefferis does, but he also believes a great deal more ; therefore he cannot coincide with Mr. Jefferis without abandoning these additional articles of his faith. This, happily, he cannot do ; therefore he has no course but to stand aloof. The same, . in a far larger degree, applies to the Catholic Church, and accounts in some measure for her action in the past. Had we not separated from our fellow-colonists on the Education question, as Dr. Barry is Dractically compelled to separate from the Dissenting ministers, we would have been false to our principles, to our Church, and to our God."

What every man can do better that anyone else, says a Western exchange, is to poke a fire, put on his hat, edit a newspaper, tell a story — after another man has commenced it— and examine a railway time-table. The many friends of Mr. James Daly will be glad to hear that he has purchased the Royal Exchange Hotel, Dunedin. This is certainly one of the finest houses in the Colony, and we have no. doubt under Mr. Daly's management, will occupy a first-class place in the list of superior Hotels, of which we have now a large number,