Current Topics

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XX, Issue 45, 26 August 1892, Page 1

Current Topics

AT HOME AND ABROAD.

In view of the change of Government at home, it is interesting to speculate as to how we shall be affected in New Zealand. There can be no doubt

COMPLICAmnva

that the Tories were determined co to influence the colonies M to check the advance of Liberal principles, and help to keep things running in their ancient grooves. Bach, for example, was the intention in the appointment of Lord Onslow as Governor of New Zealand, and although that nobleman— like other members of his patty— occasionally made very advanced professions, and spoke in a very liberal strain, there is no doubt that he kept his object well before his mind. Lord Onslow's remarkable explanation to the Maoris as to the importance attached to his position of a leading tangatira, for instance, was evidently no mere appeal to the prejudices of a primitive people, but contained an expression of genuine Tory principles. The traditions of our old nobility, among the rest, are to be maintained even in the uttermost parts of the earth, if the party represented by his Lordship can carry out their will. Lord Onslow, moreover, had banded .over to his successor the principles by which he himself was actuated, or, rather, had instructed his successor in the way in which he was to give practical effect to these principle*, the common gnide of all the party. Lord Glasgow came to the colony fully instructed as to how he was to proceed. His Excellency knew little of politics. His career as a seaman, which, as we have his own word for it, left him little opportunity for study in general, was certainly no more favourable to a particular study of statesmanship, and how was it possible that he could have attuned to a knowledge of what was expedient as to his presidency among ourselvei ? Tet he came to the colony with his mind made up, falliDg readily into the place vacated by Lord Onslow, and eager to carry out the coarse that had been followed by that Governor. Lord Onslow, in a very questionable manner, had strengthened the Tory party in the Legislative Council. Lord Glasgow came here deter, mined to uphold the Tory ascendancy. The import of the situation has been perceived by Sir George Grey. The question is, aa he states it, " Are we to be allowed to govern this colony, or is the government of this Oolony to be handed over to Downing Btreet " 1 The question, moreover, admits of some aggravation — for if it be admitted that in obedience to Downing street, acting, as in the present case, on the advice or information of a previous Governor, a Governor of New Zealand has a right to hold out againat the advice of the Ministry, and to do battle in the interests of his party against the interests of tbe colony, has be not a right also, in case, as at present, of a change of tbe Imperial Miniatery, to hold out against Downing ttreet itself ? It would be a curious spectacle to see the outlying portions of tbe empire — which pride themselves on a more enlightened advancement and more fully developed Liberalism, in tha hands of the Tories, while its heart had subjected itself to the Liberal control. Yet, if Lord Glasgow h%d tbe one privilege, it is difficult to see now why be has not the other. Downing street, as it is, or as it is now about to be constituted, will have no desire, as it certainly had under the rale of Lord Salisbury, to see the colony dragooned into a support of Tory interests. And, we may remark in passing, that in no part of the British dominions could there be found a contingent more likeminded with tbe Toriss at Home, or better fitted to carry out their ends in their own manner, and with all their own pretences of popular sympathies and liberal sentiments, than our Opposition in New Zealand. But if Lord Glasgow be coasistent, he will still hold out. And let us admit that, if any man be more fully qualified than another to nail his colours to the mast, it is the gallant captain of a man-of-war. The situation, therefore, is decidedly interesting. It was interesting even when it involved a question of the Governor and Downing street against the colony — but it is still more so when the possibility appears of a holding out of the Governor against both the colony and Downing street.

A KNOWING CUSTOHEB,

Mb Baxfoub, in bis speech to the electors of East Manchester on Jane 29, was also Tery marked In his appeal to the No-Popery cry. Mr Balfour, however, was very canny in his method of proceeding, and knew how, or thought he knew how, to evoke the speotre withont offending the Popish element perrading the Primrose lodges. " Emphatically," he declared, " so far as I am concerned, I would no more think of associating the great body of Roman Catholics in the United Kingdom with the outrages and criminal actions of certain priests in Ireland than I would think of performing any other deliberate act of gross injustice upon any class of the community." The right hon gentleman, as we see, was very liberal in his professions. In fact, for the moment, he assumed something of the tone of a Catholic in authority defining the limits within which the priesti were to use their spiritual powers — " Spiritual weapons which ought to be most rigidly confined to the spiritual sphere." " They hava denounced those," he said, " to whom they were opposed from the altar, and they have refused the last rites of absolution to persons whose only crime was that they did not gi?e in to the illegal conspiracy of which these priests were the head. They have threatened spiritual pains and penalties to those who are subject to their spiritual authority." On its being denied, howerer, that there were in Ireland priests of the kind describe i by him, the speaker could only quote the case of New Tipperary — Borne of the meetings in connection with which, he said, were held in the sacristy of the Roman Catholic chapel — and that of the boycotting of certain Protestant shopkeepers at Yougbal for refusing to put up their shutters while Mr William O'Brien was in prison, and for which he held Canon Keller accountable.—" It is not a question, and it never has been a question," be went on to say, " between Roman Catholics as Roman Catholics and Protestants as Protestants, but it is undoubtedly a question between a majority led by such persons as those I have named — by ecclesiastics who have not shown any scrupulosity when politics were concerned in ignoring even the demands of their ecclesiastical superiors — and the men they influence, and the politician! with whom they are in alliance and a helpless minority in Ireland who have been subjected, and who will be again subjected if we leave them unprotected, to the full vengeance of which we have had such an example given us in the extract which I have just read to you."— But Mr Balfour had already told his hearers that he would never dream of associating the great body of Roman Catholics in the United Kingdom with the doings of the priests of whom he complained — and now be associates the Irish Catholic majority — the great body of the Catholics of the United Kingdom, with those very priests, by whom only as Oat he lies could they be influenced. Whom was it, then, that Mr Balfour spoke to please ? It could hardly have been the Orangemen of Ulster and their sympathisers elsewhere. Protestants of that class would hardly think less highly of those priests who set at defiance the commands of their ecclesiastical superiors — thereby seeming to them to give a very hopeful earnest of the loosening on them of the Roman boo dp. To raise the no* Popery cry without offending the susceptibilities of the Catholic element in. the Primrose Lodges most, therefore, have been the speaker's sole intention. The canniness of the right hon gentleman, as we have said, is remarkable, but as to his honesty, it is not much to boast of. The concluding passage of his speech, finally, is too good to be lost. Verily, Catholic Primrose Leaguers must be easy to humbug. — " We think," he said in conclusion, " that, for ns in England, be we Roman Catholics or Protestants, be we members of the Church of England or Nonconformists, to hand over that Irish minority to the uncontrolled vengeance of the Irish majority wonld be an act so cowardly and so dastardly that we should undoubtedly deserve to bring down upon us the vengeance of heaven. Ido not believe you will be guilty of any such conduct as that whatever youc religions creed may be, and I appeal here to the Roman Catholics with as much confidence as Ido to Protestants. Whatever be your creed I am convinced that, if you truly realise the conditions of contemporary Irißh life, the granting of Home Rule will Beem to you a political crime, in comparieon with which all the political crimes of which history tells us England may have been guilty in the past, will pale into absolute insignificance."

Amohg the horrors of the hardly anything A warning, can exceed the life and death of the anarchist

Bavachol. Bad as are the principles of the party to which he belonged, or pretended to belong-and we must remember that he was for some time shielded from justice by fear of the anger that his death might provoke, and that, since his execution, threats of vengeance have been uttered— we would fain hope that the infamy in which he was steeped was peculiar to himself alone. Ii is certain that he had been guilty of three murders, each and all committed for the sake of plunder, and the strong probability is that two others might be added to the list of his crimes. But he professed a heartfelt devotion to the cause of the people, and his last words were the cry, almost as the knife was descending, vive la republiqw. His death scene was one of ribaldry and blasphemy. Fettered as he was for the guillotine, he sang abominable verses and attempted to dance to the refrain, continuing to do so nntil the officers laid hold of him, and then he struggled violently until the knife fell. A great cause, however, must not be discredited because a scoundrel tries to identify himeelf with it, or because there is a debased crowd found to sympathise with him and to acknowledge his principles as their own. When the prison chaplain asked Bavachol whether he desired to see him, the reply was :— " I have no need of your services. I never had any religion. . . . I don't care a rap for your religion. I don't want to see your crucifix. If you show it to me I will spit upon it." In these words we find the unhappy wretch's excuse, if he had any, but we also find the danger that threatens the cause of the people, and, through this, the world. It might be some excuse for the wretch steeped in crime, and imagining that his crimes were justified by the unequal conditions of society, that he had never had any religion. Indeed, we know of no other possible excuse. But in the death hp died, a death necessary for the safety of society, and full of horror, of vile bravado, and hatred of Christianity, we see the worth of the extenuation. What we find to alarm us is the determined and universal effort that has been undertaken— by some knowingly, by others in ignorance, but, it is to be feared, effectually by all— to inspire the masses with Kavachol'a motive, that is, a viruient hatred ot Christianity, engendered by an absence of religion. This is the tendeLCy of the day. Its Huccess entails the anarchism of Havachol, and a frequency and world-wide spread of the horrors that marked his life and death.