Current Topics AT HOME AND ABROAD.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXV, Issue 38, 21 January 1898, Page 1

Current Topics AT HOME AND ABROAD.

OURSELVES.

of the N.Z. Tablet.

BOME HOT SPELLS.

it is raining do as you will. A short time ago it published a column of matter, by a Collins street medico, oautioning people what to eat and wherewith to clothe themselves while being slowly roasted alive by one of the heat-waves that drop in unexpected and uninvited among the southern colonies of Australia. It was, perhaps, merely a coincidence that the article in question appeared in a lucid interval between two hot spells — at a time when people were revelling in fresh, cool breezes from the South, and suffering a recovery from the effects of the week-long wave which had reached 118 in the shade ; had killed off sleep, like Macbeth ; coffined sundry scores of men, women and children ; trebled the consumption of beer ; set sodawater bottles a-volleying night and day all over the land ; and caused the thirsty denizens of Melbourne to draw water — for internal and external application —to the lively tune of forty-four million gallons per day. The readers of the Argus ■were busy forgetting that the lines had ever been penned, when, lo 1 another tidal wave of heat broke from its moorings in the tropics, and once more submerged Victoria and the two neighbouring colonies in a glowing atmosphere fit only for a coolie or a salamander. Meteorologists and weather prophets — for they are not necessarily the same thing — tell us that these heat-waves are usually due to antarctic depressions, that they usually advance in a rotary spiral, and vary in width from a hundred to several hundred miles. All this information must have been comforting to the sufferers whose lives were, for the time being, a pendulum beat between a lemon-squash and shandy-gaff. It is fortunate that these sultry visits are not usually either frequent nor of long duration. As evidencing the high capabilities which a thoroughgoing heat- wave has of producing physical discomfort we may state that the thermometer at Stawell (Victoria) has reached 120 in the shade. At Euston. in New South Wales, it is stated to have reached 124 in the shade during the heat-wave which ushered in the New Year ; and Baron von Mueller, in his Select J'Jxtra-Tropkal Plants, tells us how a district in the Riverina (New South Wales) once stewed to the tune of 12i in the shade. The deserts of the interior, however, seem to be the recognised hotblast furnace of Australia. Lumholtz describes them as "hotter and more arid than any other part of the earth." An idea of their higher capabilities may be had from the experiences of Sturt and his fellow-explorers in the intensely hot summer of 1844. "The earth," says Sutherland, " split the hoofs of the horses ; it scorched the shoes and feet of the men. . . . The heat was sometimes 130 in the shade, and in the sun it was altogether intolerable. They were unable to write, as the ink dried at once on their pens ; their combs split ; their nails became brittle and readily broke, and if they touched a piece of metal it blistered their fingers. In their extremity, they dug an underground room, deep enough to be beyond the dreadful furnace glow above. Here they passed many a long day, as month after month passed without a shower of rain."

The Rev. Henry W. Cleary, recently of Ararat, Victoria, arrived in Dunedia by the s.s. " Monowai," and has taken charge of the editorial department

The Melbourne hrgus has been supplying some fatherly advice to its readers— on Poor Richard's principle : When it is fine bring your cloak, when

A THREATENED FAMINE.

drip, drip of the Autumn of 1896 ruirei the grain and potato crops.

The English opium-eater said in his Confessions that he could " put up even with rain provided it rained cats and dogs," and then ceased. Bat that is not the way it rains in Ireland. The dismal

A similar alarming failure of the harvest of 1897 has brought the peasantry of several counties on the west coast face to face with famine. The area threatened with this fearful visitation is a wide one, covering, among other places, considerable portions of Kerry, Clare, Mayo and Donegal. Meetings have been held throughout the affected districts, local bodies are up and doing, and Government ia being urged to take prompt and effective action with a view to meeting a situation, which has already assumed a serious phase. In the face of such grave danger, it seems to us that the demands of the people's leaders are both moderate and feasible. They call for the construction of a much required light railway to Belmullet, and of necessary roads in other districts. Among the other measures suggested are small loans to farmers — a system which has already borne good fruit elsewhere in the west — the distribution of seed potatoes and reductions in rents in proportion to the extent of the disaster which has fallen upon the tenant farmers. An urgent and insidious source of danger lies in the old, old policy of delay of the measures necessary to stave off or to minimise to the last degree the tragic and long-drawn suffering of famine. On such a subject Irishmen must ever write and speak with deep feeling. It must not be forgotten that in the background of the present trouble there lie the famine of 1879-1880 and the ghastly agony of 1846-1847, one of the most tragic and awful of all human events. It left two chief memories burned as with iron into the heart and brain of the Irish race : the memory of a terrible suffering, borne with extraordinary patience, and, (ccasionally. even with a sort of gaiety, as grim as the presence of a harlequin at a funeral. Think of the haggard, gaunt, starving old dame at Skibbereen ! " You're losing your teeth, granny," said the relief doctor. " 'Deed an' it's time for me to lose 'em when I've nothing for 'em to do." But there is another memory which Black Forty-seven leaves in the Irish breast — that of an unwillingness on the part of the Government to learn hard facts or face them, or to make in due time that due provision which would have mitigated, if it could not have prevented, the colossal calamity which lost the land a million of her children and started the exodus which even still is draining her life-blood away The same fatal blunder was repeated, in a great measure, when the country was face to face with the happily lesser famine of 1879-1880 The lesson of those two famines points out, as with a finger of iron what the duty of Government is to the west of Ireland to-day.

THE GERMAN EMPEROU.

'• A splendid (and true) story is told to the effect that an English gentleman on a visit to Germany was recently walking with a friend in the Unter der Linden, and in the course of a discussion on Kaiser William's many absurdities he committed a gross case of that awful offence whioh is known by the still more awful name of Majestats Beleidigung. ' There's no getting away from the fact that the Emperor is a d d fool,' exclaimed the Englishman, and the words were hardly out of his mouth before a police officer tapped him on the shoulder, and said : " ' You must goom mit me to der poleesc-station.' " ' What am Ito do that for ? ' asked the astonished Britisher. " ' Mein Herr, did call ze German Emperor a tarn fool,' replied the officer.

" ' Not at all,' said the otter cutely. 'It was the Russian Emperor that I was talking about.'

" ' Oh, no, sare, dot vill not vash,' observed the guardian of the the peace, ' there is no Emperor vat is a tarn fool except ze Emperor of Zhermany.'

" The Teutonic ' trap ' was right, I fancy, but there is certainly a much greater fool alive that the crack-brained Kaiser, and he is Prince Henry, who has started off to China to ' uphold the sanctity of his royal master.' There is no knowing what terrible trouble such a pair of prize idiots as himself and the Kaiser may

The ever-genial '• Flaneur " of the Sydney Freemail's Journal discourses thus pleasantly upon the mighty atom whose impulsive brain is circled

by the Imperial crown of Germany :—: —

cause if they put their wooden heads together. The • divinity that did hedge a king' now hedges him in, and the divine rights of kings to govern wrong is being confronted by the divine right of the people to govern themselves. Most rnonarchs have sense enough to see this, but the German galoot hasn't enough sense left to enable him to come inside when the shells begin to shoot, and one of those fine days he may find himself ' dispersed ' in a style that will cause him much astonishment, if he has time to take any notice of bis surroundings."

RABBITSKINS AND SWEATING DENS.

ally overhauled, and now one, now another of its fetid roots are being held up in the light of day to reproach our humanity and put our civilisation to the blush. The Women's Industrial Council has been conducting a quiet, systematic, and extremely detailed inquiry in the slums of London, among various classes of female workers who are '• jammed between famine arid the workhouse," with neither energy, ability, nor means to organise for self-defence against starvation wages. A brief summary of their inquiry appears in the December number of the Contemporary lit new. It is decidedly unpleasant reading. The inquiry covered over 16 regular small trades, the worst paid of which are the makers of our toothbrushes, slop-made suits, match-boxes and the pullers of furred skins. The last named unfortunates furnish a fearful and hitherto unwritten chapter in the history of our export trade in rabbit-skins. The fur-pullers are, says the writer, " a deplorable tribe. No woman takes to this who is fit for anything else, and those who are driven to it by necessity are anxious to conceal the fact as far as possible from the prying eyes of the world. These women live in the utmost poverty and filth, in the back kitchens and attics of tenement dwellings in noisome courts and alleys. They work, eat, and sleep in an atmosphere thick with impalpable hairs and tainted with the sickly smell of the skins, everything around them coated with fur, and they themselves, in their sack-like dresses, ragged and open, looking scarcely more human than the animals whose skins they pluck, owing to the thick deposit of fur which covers them from head to foot, and forces its way into their eyes, noses, and lungs. Their task is to remove with a plucking-knife the long hair from rabbitskins, leaving only the soft, silky down close to the skins. They earn about Is Id per day, and 4d a week may be deducted for knives, etc. There is little difference in their condition or circumstances : all have sunk to the lowest depth of squalor and misery. They Buffer from chronic asthma, and, of course, the rate of infant mortality is high. There would seem to be no remedy but to destroy the industry, at least as a home trade. The rooms might, at any rate, be registered and inspected as workshops."

The sweating evil is one of the darkest blots on the industrial history of the nineteenth centuryIt is doubtful if any previous epoch in history could have produced Hood's heart-breaking " Song of the Shirt." The pestilential sore is being gradu-

TWO PKOBLEMS.

flourishing countries, the evergreen one of immigration. Decade after decade it furnishes a fast-gathering pile of nuts for legislative wits to crack — the bristling questions of '■ undesirable white immigrants," "pauper labour," " coloured race«," and, e:>pecially, " the yellow agony," which most of the Australian colonies decline to receive except in homeopathic doses. The Latin races in Central and South America have generally contrived to settle a kindred racial difficulty by the easy and peaceful method of miscegenation — they marry the problem and by marrying end it. This highly sensible proceeding has prevented a difficulty, and given rise to highly variegated and useful specimens of humanity, whose different degrees of blackness, redness, or whiteness have enriched our language with such ornamental works as " mulatto," ''quadroon,'' ■' mestizo," " creole," and "zambo." English-speaking races talk more of the brotherhood of man, but they will not " marry beneath them," whether into the bL ck, or red. or yellow families of our race. Hence we have almost in sight of the mixed population of Mexico, the famous " Black Belt " of the United States, where the war of the white and the coloured races is being bitterly fought, without armistice or parley, down through every relation of social and public life. The "Belt" stretches irregularly and in varying depths from North Carolina into Louisiana. It furnishes on' 1 of the greatest racial problems the world has yet seen, and is big with events. The Times commissioner and many others who have studied the subject plainly stata their belief that those southern and south-eastern States will, in all human probability, witness in the future, near or far, a gigantic struggle which will end only in the extirpation or deportation of the descendants of the slaves who were brought thither as immigrants againtt their will.

THE movement of population supplies two great problems which furnish abundance of healthy exercise for the minds of politicians and economists. These problems are, first, the old and, for new and

A problem of a different, but still of a serious kind has been steadily growing up in England and in several Continental countries. We refer to the subject of rural depopulation. It has already disturbed the equilibrium of things in England. It has produced a relative scarcity of agricultural hands. It has tilted the balance of supply and demand of labour in the cities ; and has swelled the tide of the idle and vicious urban populations. A somewhat similar movement, though on a much smaller scale, took place almost at our doors, in Victoria, during the exaltation of the boom period. The growing acutene^s of the troubles arising from immigration to the cities maybe gauged by the following extract from the JS'orth British Agriculturist :—: —

'• At the luncheon in connection with tho Yetholm Border Shepherds' Show, Mr. Walter' Rutherford, who presided, referred at some length to the subject of rural depopulation. Mr. Rutherford said depopulation of the rural districts of the country, and the congestion of population in large towns, was one of the greatest problems of our time. The question for the statesmen of thu future would not be how to bring the people back from the towns to the country, but rather how to prevent the migration from the country into towns. All great nations had had a large rural population, and unle-s our co intry maintained such a population, she would, like Rome and other nations of the Eist, in time go down to decay. Some men asserted that the great desideratum of the future was to cheapen production. He thought otherwise, believing the great thing to be done in the future was that we should produce more instead of less. An acre of land in cultivation would surely give more labour than an acre of land laid down to grass. In the country districts themselves this gradual depopulation was assuming a serious aspect. Much might be done to remedy the existing state of matters. The depopulation of the country districts meant that farmers had to pay increased wages for inferior work as the men who remained were not always the best. He thought that much might be done to promote the prosperity of an outlying district like that of Yetholrn if a light railway were introduced, as had been the case in other parts of the country. If they could get such a railway laid down at the cost of £2,000 or £3,000 per mile, the land could be kept in thorough cultivation, and a much larger population maintained than at present. He believed that in future the distance at which land lay from a railway station would become an important factor in determining as to whether or not that land should be cultivated. It was therefore clearly in the interest of rural districts that light railways be provided."

The age of electric light, deep research, and exact ? methods is not favourable to the growth or con-

ISO OR 2000

tinuance of rnyt.hs ; and the ransacking:, by such men as Brewer. Pocook, and Gasquet, of the musty documents of the Reformation period, has scattered to the winds of heaven many a time-worn legend which had grown up like ivy around that great religious revolution. One of these fairy tales told how only some 189 of the English clergy entered a protest against the change of religion. The tale has been oft-times exploded. Father Taunton deals with it in his rocent book, The English Blacli Monltx of St. Benedict. The London Tuhht thus deals with a recent review of Father Taunton' s learned work :—": — " In a review of Father Ethelred Taunton's Etf/lh-h Bluclt Jlonkx of St. Benedict, the Manchester Guardian asks for more satisfactory proof that 2,000 parochial clergy, and not 200, resigned their livings rather than accept the Elizabethan oath of supremacy. Father Taunton has given the evidence desired in a letter in which he points out that the 200 priests mentioned did not resign, but were deprived, and that there were 2,000 others who, without waiting to be deprived, resigned of their own accord. He then goes on to state how he arrives at this conclusion. After premising that at first little attempt was made to force the rank and file of the clergy to take the oath, he points out that contemporary documents reveal an extraordinary diminution in the numbers of the parochial clergy. This seems to have caused a good deal of difficulty to the Anglican bishops, who were obliged to make up the deficiency by holding frequent ordinations.

'• Father Taunton then quotes a number of instances. Grindal, in the first year of his episcopate, finding that large numbers of his clergy had obtained licence to live beyond the seas upon what was called " mislikings of religion," tried to fill their placed by holding thirty different ordinations, at which he admitted HSO deacons and as many priests. This, as Mr. X. Pocock remarked in the Guardian (November it, 18 ( J2),is a much larger number than can be accounted for by the deaths of incumbents or curates. Parker, too, within three months after his own consecration held no less than five ordinations at Lambeth, and .at the last one ordained as many as 155 persons, and in 15G0 was compelled to wiite to his suffragans forbidding the frequent ordinations of artificers and ignorant persons, which had been, in Strype's words, " occasioned by a great want of ministers." In the diocese of Ely, in 15(51, even after such whole-

sale ordinations had taken place, only 52 out of 152 churches were properly served. Norwich was in a similar plight, and in 1565 the returns from half the dioceses showed that nearly 1,000 parishes were wholly without spiritual superintendence. Jewel's letter to Peter Martyr, in 1559, is to the same effect : ' Now that religion is everywhere changed, the Ma^s priests absent themselves altogether from public worship, as if it were the greatest impiety to have anything in common with the people of God.' The conclusion to be drawn from all this is evident. The resignation of 200 priests could not have occasioned such a dearth of clergy, and so Father Taunton's estimate of 2,000 seems well within bounds."

A NEW BLISTER FOr ITALY.

turn, the uninitiated stanger has for a time to cling to cushion and hand-rests with all the desperate energy of an M.11.R. whose seat is insecure. The situations that arise therefrom are generally ludicrous, often pitiful. But ludicrous and pitiful alike are the antics which the Italian premier, the Marquis di Rudini, plays before high Heaven in his efforts to cling to his place of power for yet a little while. Lines of cleavage have been opening among his following. Rumour has it that the violent anti-clerical, Zanardelli, who has many supporters in the Chamber of Deputies, is pining to assume the reins of power, and the fall of the Di Rudini ministry is by many predicted for the near future. Our readers are aware how the temporising Marquis purchased a further lease of Zanardelli's unstable allegiance by issuing the five notorious circulars which inaugurated a peculiarly bitter guerilla warfare against the rights of Italian Catholics. The circulars in question have so far set aside the very first article of the Constitution as to prohibit meetings in churches for any other purpose than what the anti-clerical Minister of the Interior and his carabineers are pleased to interpret as worship strictly.

In the matter of persecution abyss generally calleth to abyss. From our latest European exchanges we are not surprised to learn that the five original circulars have been followed by a sixth, the evident purpose of which is to harry, paralyse, or break up the associations of Catholic lay people, which dot the peninsula from the Alps to Girgenti. These associations exist for the purpose of reviving and increasing the faith and devotion of the people, and of furthering the interests of such public action as it might be deemed desirable to take. Within the past few years the growth of these associations has been marvellous, both in the extent of their membership, and in the variety of their activities. An interesting feature in the Catholic revival is the establishment of vill.i»e loan banks by Father Cerutti. Four hundred of them are in active work in the North of Italy. They are carried out in the spirit of the old medieval guilds, and have proved the salvation of the small farmers and agricultural labourers of Lombardy and the neighbouring provinces. Parochial clubs, unions, and committees are established all over the country, and flourish like the green bay tree. These are knit together by district committees. The whole is guided by the Directing Council of Catholic Congresses — the congresses being held at brief intervals in nearly every important city throughout the country. The last great congress at Milan made it evident to Zanardelli, and indeed to all Italy, that the spirit of union among the Catholic body had assumed portentous proportions. Ulna ilcc larlirhncc — to wit, the latest of the circulars.

The Catholic associations are now being dogged by a f ar-reachin? system of espionage. The membership roll ot each, together with minute details of woiking, etc.. is to be obtained by the police. The execution of this, as of the previous circulars, has been entrusted to them and they have entered upon this work with a searching zeal which recalls the palmy days of suspect-hunting in Ireland during the land agitation of the eighties. Priests and bishops are shadowed like criminals, or interfered with in the discharge of their sacred duties ; the way to church doors has been barred by cordons of carabineers ; meetings of Catholic Associations have been prohibited or dispersed ; and under the aegis of parliamentary representation and of a Constitution which guarantees the liberty of worship, acts of petty tyranny are being daily perpetrated which sting the more because of their very littleness, and which read like a page of Russian rule and Cossack knouts in Poland. An Italian journal, quoted by the London TahUt, thus sums up the impression made upon the people by this carefully planned series of petty persecution :—: — " The educated classes call the Government precautions against the pretended clerical danger a farce, while the people, at the street corners, on the roadp, at their gatherings, in their houses, continually repeat : ' These dogs of assassins have forbidden the Minister of Christ to preach ; to-morrow, perhaps they will forbid Mass to be said, and at last come to forbidding us to baptise our children. They wish to make us pagans like themselves. 1 " It is the old story

Thackeray, and strangers to the Green Isle generally, have admitted that the Irish jauntingcar is — for foreigners — a lamentably "skeery" vehicle. To avoid flying off at a tangent at every

of a round peg in a square hole. Di Rudini enraged the extremists of his following by his Surveillance Acts against the Socialists. He has exasperated his Catholic supporters by those mischievous and irritating circulars which have left him personally bankrupt in reputation, and exposed his country to a ridicule at home, and a contempt abroad, which it can ill afford to face.