CINDERELLA. MORE JUST THAN HER SISTERS.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XII, Issue 26, 17 October 1884, Page 7

CINDERELLA. MORE JUST THAN HER SISTERS.

(From the West Australian Catholia Record.") Though slighted for her tattered dress and menial service, Cinderella was in some respects the superior of her fashionable and favoured sisters. Fortune, while taking from her with one hand, had enriched her with the other, and in the state of obscurity to which she was temporarily condemned, she was enviable in the possession of gifts which were to raise her one day to fame and greatness. West Australia has been called the Cinderella of the Australasian group. How far she merits the name either by the reality of present weakness or by her hope of future power, it is not necessary for us to decide. It will be quite enough for our purpose, if we say, that even admitting to the fullest extent the justice of the appellation, and granting her feebleness to be as great as her haughty sisters declare it to be, yet abe has in her some good qualities which are the pledge of happiness, if not a presage of greatness, and make her lot a more contented one than that her scornful rivals are permitted to enjoy. Common sense, tempered by the kindly tolerance that comes of charity, is a treasure that makes the possessor as amiable to others as it keeps him at peace with himself. To the State its presence brings advantages as great, as those its enjoyment Becures to the individual in private life. Where the statutes of a country have that breadth with which a large minded discernment can alone inspire them, and are adjusted to the needs of the people with that nicety which the habit of making allowance for the feelings of others can alone teach, the land itself may not be very wealthy or renowned or great, but its people will be at least united and content to a degree unknown to States upon which the more showy gifts of fortune have been lavishly bestowed.

In one province at least of legislation, West Australia gives proofs of a common sense and tolerance, of which we in vain look for a display in the laws of her sisters of the East. The question of elementary education is, at the present moment, a burning topic in every Colony of the Australasian group except our own. In the provisions made for the instruction of the young, the wishes of the Catholic body are, everywhere but here, despised and their conscientious objections to a dereltgionised education for their children ignored. Everywhere there is agitation and loud complaint ; and •very where too that discontent from which indeed these things spring, but upon which also they re-act and, in re-acting, intensify. The unsettlement of society, which results from this unhappy posture of affairs, might be tolerable, if the evil were confined within narrow limits ,* but when the party chafing under the sense of wrong is of the strength which the Catholic body undoubtedly has in the Australian colonies, the calamity is of a magnitude that no available consideration serves to alleviate. With a section of the citizens, numbering from one-fourth to one-sixth of the entire population, fixedly impressed with the belief that tbey are the victims of partiality and in consequence chronically disaffected towards the State, provision is made for the permanence of i iternal discord for which no amount of commercial prosperity or high reputation for intelligence can compensate. We have no need to hold up the statutes in which West Australia deals with the question of elementary education as models of legislation that are free from blemish or above reproach. The Education Act of 1871 has defects to which it in impossible for Catholics to close their eyes. But whatever may be its shortcomings, the most dissatisfied must recognise in it a praiseworthy attempt on tbe part of a majority to meet the convictions of a body of whose tenets they do not approve, and to do to a party of their brethren, weaker from a numerical point of view, as they would themselves be done by. Imperfect and halting as the West Australian system of public elementary education may be, it yet is founded on the recognition of a principle, in acknowledging which the wealthy and populous colonies of the East would wisely consult for the happiness of their people and for their own internal peace.