Current Topics AT HOME AND ABROAD.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXVI, Issue 27, 10 November 1898, Page 1

Current Topics AT HOME AND ABROAD.

A CHESTNUT AND ANOTHER.

piquant as anchovy toast.' The London Daily Telegraph has been enlivening the dull season by anecdotes of Irish beggars. Scarcely any of the stories realise Von Konigstein's ideal. The great part of the Daily Telegraph's dish of anchovy toast is musty —as old as the days of Thackeray's Irish Sketch-book (1843) and Mrs. S. C. Hall's books on Irish Character, the Irish Peasantry, etc. (18281840). One of the stories, though old, is so little known as to be worth reproducing here. It was told by Mr. Leitch Ritchie, the Scottish novelist and historian, who visited Ireland a few years after the great famine. He saw a man in tattered clothes, and of squalid and starved appearance, sitting silently by a wall. • Are you begging V said Ritchie. • Of coorse, I m begginY • But how is it you do not utter a word V 1 Arrah,' the beggar replied, ' is it jokin' me your Honour is ? Look there !' (He held up the tattered remnants of what had once been a coat). 'Do you see how me skin is spakin' through the holes of me clothes, and the bones cry in' out through me skin? Look at my sunken cheeks, and the famine that's starin' in mv eyes. Man alive, isn't beggin' lam with a hundred tongues?' The most graceful of the recent Irish beggar-stories that I have heard was told some four years ago by a Protestant clergyman in the columns of the Catholic Examiner. The clergyman was touring through the Green Isle. In one place he was being persistently followed up by a beggar-woman who kept on beseeching him to give her something 'for God's sake.' His patience broke down at last. 'Go away, woman,' said he i ' or, at any rate, give up taking the Lord's name in vain.' * Ah, your Honour,' the beggar promptly replied, ' if its in vain that I'm takin' it, whose fault is it ?' The Irish beggar is not by half so picturesque as his Spanish confrere, but he is probably the wittiest of his class. Both alike ask 'in the name of God or ' for God's sake,' and few close their pockets to the appeal.

THE 'BUN TUCK INCIDENT.-

'Sin,' says Oliver Wendell Holmes, r has many tools, but a falsehood is the handle that* fits them all.' Substitute for *sin ' the words 'sectarian hate ' and ' political passion,' and the statement is equally true. I am reminded of this by the upshot of the allegations made by the Member for Patea against the Right Honourable the Premier. We were told last August, on the authority of a document in Chinese, that the Premier, under the Celestial name of Bun Tuck, was associated in a dishonourable fashion with a party of Chinese miners on the West Coast. The charges made were of a nature to demand investigation. A Committee of Inquiry was formed. After an exhaustive investigation they have completely exonerated the Premier. For reasons which we can surmise, but which are best known to himself, the Member for p atea refused to attend to give evidence. The whole charge fctood or fell by documentary evidence. The utter worthlessof the charges may be therefore estimated from the following sentence in the Committee's report : 'In reference to the document read to the House by the Member for Patea, the evidence leads to the conclusion that the original was written in English, and that the Member for Patea procured the translation of the document into Chinese, a clerk having taken the original in English to a Chinese place of business in Wellington and had it translated into Chinese there.' The story of this locally famous document may possibly not have been wholly unassociated -with the coy bashfulness of the Member

I do not know what should be the qualities of a newspaper anecdote. But Van Konigstein, in Disraeli's Vivian Grey, says that 'an after-dinner anecdote ought to be as

for Patea. After all it is a relief to know that Bun (or rather Bung) Tuck is not the Premier of New Zealand, but a mere yellow-faced, almond-eyed, pig-tailed, heathen Chinee, And Mr. Hutchison has —at best—discovered a mare's nest, I

DOES IT PROHIBIT ?

Longfellow tells how a quack once invited him to write a verse for the label of a ' marvellous drug-.' The poet's fee was to be the free use of the medicine for himself and his family for an unspecified period. (It reminds me of an advertisement which was inserted, in all seriousness, in a London newspaper in 1895 : ' Any person who can show that my tapioca contains anything injurious to health, will have three boxes of it sent to him free of charge.') The enterprising American practitioner had either a deep consciousness of the money value of Longfellow's name, or a simple and a chlid-like faith in the powers of his wondrous specific. It is said to be on record that a quack once actually took a dose of his own medicine. But political quacks have oftentimes a fierce and energetic belief in the value of their pet remedies. Prohibition is a case in point. The trials of the specific in the United States, Australia, and New Zealand, show, with sufficient clearness, that the remedy for the undoubtedly great drink-evil lies not that way — despite Mr. Isitt's recent sultry declaration at Masterton that non-Prohibitionists were ' devilishly wicked.' • # # Among the ' devilishly wicked ' ones we must count the members of the Anglican Synod held last week in Dunedm. They frankly abandoned prohibition, and floated instead a Public-house Reform League. Rev. C. S. Bowden, the mover ot the resolution for the formation of the League, said : 1 Clergy and laity all know the evils of drunkenness in their parishes. They were all pretty well satisfied that what was called " prohibition " was not sufficient remedy for the evil. 1 Canon Dodd, who seconded the motion, declared that in his district of Balclutha they ' had tried to cast out one devil, and had brought seven devils far worse into the place.' Now Balclutha is an out-and-out prohibition district, where people — in the main — are not supposed to drink anything stronger than Clutha water flavoured with Hondai- Lanka or Pekoe. Mildura (Victoria) is also a prohibition colony — conducted on the same strict lines as the ■ Balclutha district. Hence it was quite in the nature of things that, some time ago, a of over sixty tons of spirituous and ' fomented ' drinks should find their way to Mildura by one of the Murray steamers. Later on — according to a writer in the Advocate — a telegram was received by a large brewing company in Melbourne: 'River falling. Send at once four hundred dozen cases of beer.' The Advocate writer figures out this order to be the equivalent of 19,200 bottles. Not a bad order for one tiny temperance colony.

OUT-LYING ANANIAS.

Mark Twain thus describes one of the trials of his life : ' I never could tell a lie that anybody would doubt, nor a truth that anybody would believe.' London Life cannot lie plausibly — at all times. Its latest sensation is a story to the effect that Zola, the apostle of filthy literature, is to be ordained priest — and that, too, after a mere preliminary canter of a six months' training ! The long years of preparation demanded of the virtuous young levite are to be dispensed with in the case of the notorious pornographer, whose hatred of the Church is only equalled by his ignorance of her teachings ! As one of our exchanges says, if Zola ' were to be really converted to God, he would probably be moved to retire to a monastery and do penance for the rest of his life, rather than to aspire to the dignity of the holy priesthood.' People of the class who believe in Maria Monk and ' the Jesuit in disguise ' will also swallow Life's new sensation at one gulp and without so much as a grain of salt. The inventor of this latest Zola-story is probably i one of the recognised fraternity of ' news-forgers ' who earn a

precarious livelihood by hoodwinking 1 unwary editors whose wits may be a-napping. In any case Ananias must be wild with envy of the man in whose brain this tale was spun.

OBITUARY.

Dublin has been the grave, as well as the cradle, of many a journalistic enterprise. The Evening Star, the Weekly Nevis, the Nation, and such ' comics ' as Zozimus, Pat, etc., all in turn died of rank starvation. United Ireland is now added to the list. It was established in 1881. In the heyday of its pride, and in the editorial hand of Mr. W. O'Brien, it filled a mighty place in Irish politics, had a subscribers' roll of 100,000 a week, and led the new agrarian crusade with a daring and vigour which mark an epoch in the history of the period. In the palmy days of the eighties United Ireland waked up the despondent Irish tenantry to life ; it struck a ringing note of warning to the landlord party, and fairly launched the great agrarian struggle which forced from an unwilling Parliament the Land Commissions and the various Land Purchase Acts. Its Dublin office was for a time closed. It was made a misdeamour to print, publish, or sell, or buy the paper. It came out none the less — sometimes from London, sometimes from Paris. Newsagents and newsboys were sent to gaol for selling it ; but the paper circulated as before. Chief Secretary Foster was recalled. A Land Bill was introduced. Government frankly threw up the sponge, and United Ireland came back in triumph to its old office in Dublin. | The famous Plan of Campaign was formulated in the office of United Ireland, at a time when the Tories, having secured the reins of power, had introduced a fresh Coercion Act. A clause in the Act forbade the publication of any report whotsover of a Land League meeting. United Ireland continued to defiantly publish them just as before, and carried on the campaign with unabated vigour until the ranks of the Irish Parliamentary Party were split up. Then the fighting newspaper that had ever shown set teeth and a defiant brow against external enemies, lost its old verve, policy, and spirit, and sank rapidly under the spell of internal party divisions and miserable bickerings. Its sales fell to a paltry two thousand to three thousand copies a week. And then the end was only a matter of waiting.

THE NEW ROBINSON

•In England,' said Disraeli, 'we too often alternate between a supercilious neglect of genius and a rhapsodical pursuit of quacks.' Kepler the scientist and Cagliostro the quack adventurer furnish instances in point. De Rougemont (alias Grien) is another example. This latett teller of ' travellers ' tales, was lionised by the British Association, petted by scientists, and flattered by the marked attentions of men of such mental calibre as Lord Rosebery. Now he is plain Grien, and even the Wide World Magazine no longer guarantees the accuracy of his highly varnished tale of Munchausen exploits among the cannibal blacks ot Northern Australia. Lumhollz's genuine adventures among the Herbert River blacks in Queensland are by comparison as tame and unexciting as a lettered door-mat. De Rougemont was the rage of a season. He's not the fashion now.

A BRACE OF FALSEHOODS.

There are persons still living who remember the last execution for forgery in England — that of Thomas Maynard, who was hanged on the last day of the >ear of grace 1820. Were the death-penalty enforced now-a-days the public executioner and his assistants would be doing a large and thriving business, and a goodly row of news-forgers would be lying peacefully in quick-lime, after dancing an unrehearsed hornpipe in the air. The Spanish-American war produced a fine crop of forged documents. Exposure may kill a microbe It will not necessarily wither up a good, round, forged tale that has a political mission to serve. This is the case with the Pastoral Letter attributed to Archbishop Dozal, ' head of the Church in the Philipines.' I had foolishly thought it dead and buried and gone, like Judas, in locum suum — when, lo ! it bob^ up smiling serenely in last Saturday's Dunedin Evening Star. The American correspondent of our Dunedin contemporary makes the Archbishop's pastoral refer to the Americans a y 1 heretical scum, thieves, assassins, and assailant- of women The alleged pastoral was an impudent forgery, like that attributed to the Archbishop of Havana, and the letter stated to have been written to the American people by Admiral Cervera Another second-hand fiction from the tar-off little town of Keokuk has had many variants in the United States secular Press. Here is how our bright contemporary, the San Fran Cisco Monitor, deals with one of them :—: — • Another little lie about the fabulous weaith of these Philippine monks has been exposed. A former U. S. Consul at Manila, gifted with a strong imagination, gave as an example of the unbounded riches of the friars that ' one Order

done sent to a branch in America 1,500,000 dols.' Someone :00k the trouble to inquire what church in America had fallen ieir to such a sum. The Church of St. Augustine, Charleston, / 5.C., was named. It develops that there is no such church in i Charleston and no such religious Order in the diocese. Pretty soon we'll be forced to the conclusion that there are no monks in the Phillipines.'

THE OLD STORY

Bishop Mant, in his day, lamented, in poetic , rebuke as mild as milk, that ' . . . Some there are Who hold it meet to linger now at home And some o'er fields and the wide hills to roam ' an Sundays when they ought to be at church. Ido not know ivhat the good bishop would say if his ghost came back and witnessed the relatively increasing elbow-room at the services of our separated brethren. There can be no mistaking the tendency of the times — it is decidedly towards a falling-off in their church attendance. The question has been tugging at the sleeves of church people for the past half century. In Germany, the cradle of the Reformation, the matter has (outside the Catholic body) long since reached the hopeless stage. The masses in England are fast following suit. 1 dealt with those countries statistically some time ago. Last week the question of church-going occupied the attention of some of the New Zealand synods. Recent returns from America tell an unpleasant tale. I quote hereunder from the Philadelphia Standard some remarks made on the subject by the Rev. Dr. De Costa, at St. John's Episcopalian Church, New York, on September 24 : — ' Confining ourselves to our own land,' said the preacher, 'we naturally ask : What proportion of the people make any profession of Christianity? The proportion, we are bound to confess, is somewhat small. Of 70,000,000 hardly more than 20,000,000 are nominal members of any ecclesiastical body, while the time was when in all lands embraced by Latin or Western Christianity the entire population was comprised in the Church, to which it was loyal. The " Blessed Reformation," however, changed all that, and the " Reformation" has worked so well that, in this country alone, the religion of Christ has been emptied out of the minds and lives of two-thirds of all the people.' • • • So much for broad generalities. A Protestant authority, Mr. Reni Bache, has recently been gathering statistics on the subject. He is described by the San Francisco Monitor as ' a well-known newspaper man and grandson of Benjamin Franklin.' This is what he has to say :—: — ' Nearly one-third of the churchgoers of the United States are Roman Catholics. Considerably more than one-fifth are Methodists. More than one-sixth are Baptists. One churchgoer in sixteen is a Presbyterian and one in seventeen a Lutheran. One in thirty-nine is an Episcopalian and one in thirty-nine a Congregationalist. The balance of the churchgoing people is split up into minor sects. New Mexico is almost wholly Roman Catholic ; Arizona is three-quarters Catholic; Massachusetts, Wyoming, and Nevada are twothirds Catholic ; Connecticut, Colorado and California are half Catholic. Methodists are strongest in Delaware, South California, and Florida, numbering fifty per cent, of the churchgoers. Baptists are more nnmerous in Mississippi, Georgia, and Virginia, claiming fifty per cent, and upwards in those States. Twelve in every thirteen religious people in Utah prefer the Mormon faith ; two in three are Mormons in Idaho and one in eleven in Nevad 1. Catholic New Mexico is the most pious section of the Union, with sixty-eight per cent, of its population church communicants. Utah comes next with sixty-two per cent., for Mormons are first-rate churchgoers. Rhode Island, Massachusetts and Connecticut are high up on the list with over forty per cent. ; but Vermont falls much below, and New Hamp-.hire has a record of only twenty-seven per cent. Maine drops below twenty five per cent. The really heathen States, however, are those of the far West, where the percentage of churchgoers drops off to a lamentably small fraction.' A third of the Church-goers of the United States are Catholics. A third of her whole fighting strength, both in the army and navy, is said to be Catholic. And yet before and during the late war we were asked — even from the New Zealand pulpit — to close our eyes and confidingly swallow the bold insertion that the United States wis a Protestant nation — the people of God girding on the bword to fall upon the Amalecites of Spain and smite them hip and thigh.

THE DIVORCE EVIL.

Meantime, while the denominations are wasting their energies girding at the Pope, the divorce evil is assuming proportions that promise to undermine family life in the I United States. Dr. De Co-ta, in the same sermon referred to above, contrives to shift the ultimate responsibility of the evil on the right shoulders : —

* Especially is this the work of the Episcopal Church, which must take her stand, among other things, against the prevalence of divorce, which is yearly coming more and more to be attended with incalculable evils. We know how this evil has spread in New England, and now the latest figures show that in Ohio 3,279 divorces were granted during the past year. Over 7,000 applications were filed in a single year. In twenty years no fewer than 328,716 divorces were granted in the United States, showing the hideous character of the evil, which is rapidly turning society in this country into one vast " disorderly house/ There is a loud call for legislation on the part of the General Convention for a law prohibiting the marriage of any divorced person whatsoever. Protestantism is largely responsible for this state of things, having deliberately degraded marriage from its true sacramental plane and unloosed the monster now preying upon society.'