Current Topics

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXVII, Issue 23, 8 June 1899, Page 1

Current Topics

AT HOME AND ABROAD.

A good many readers of the N Z. Tablet leeches that will remember the enterprising lady who, bleed under the title of ' Dr. Anna Potts,' netted the poor. such a rich haul of chinking shekels a few

years ago by guaranteeing cures for various ills that flesh is heir to in New Zealand. A ' lady doctor 'of the same or similar name — Mrs. Longshore Potts — lias recently been ordered by an English court to pay £ 175 damages, with heavy costs, for unskilful treatment of a patient — or rather, victim. The incident sets one of our Dunedin contemporaries wondering ' how people of average intelligence are so readily captured by the medical charlatan, who makes loud-mouthed professions of performing cures which the welltrained medical man, who conducts his profession upon scientific principles, knows to be impossible.' How, indeed? Here is a riddle which even the Lancet cannot solve. For it is a question for the psychologist rather than for the physician or the journalist. The solution of the knotty problem may, perhaps, be found partly in the theory that there is an insane spot somewhere in most people's brain-cells, partly in the hope which, as the poet assures us, springs eternal in the human I breast — especially in the breast of one who is, or fancies he is, I not himself at all'; and partly in the principle enunciated py Butler in his Iluthbrcii,, that, for the time being, at least, Doubtless the pleasure it as great Of being cheated as to cheat.

The known impossibility of the ' guaranteed cures' is no bar to the popularity or success of the brazen imposter who appeals to the evergreen hope and credulity of the masses. A cancer-curer and a consumption-drencher are always sure of a plentiful clientele. Bartholin professed to cure all disorders — especially epilepsy — by repeating rhymes, and very poor rhymes they were, too. And Bartholin was the rage in his day. Paracelsus- — or, to give him his full procession of names • Aurelius Philippus Paracelsus Theophrastus Bombastus de Hohenheim — set people crazy through the power he claimed of making men immortal by dosing them with liquid gold. He belied his cure by dying at forty-seven — just as little Methuselah Jenkins placed false to his name by dying at six months old. And did not Kenelm Digby set all Kngland by the ears with his new system of curing all human ills with a shake of his 'sympathetic powder 9 ' Speculator Ivell) — a Worcestershire man — claimed, besides the gift of prohecy, the power of raising the dead to life. And Wever tells us in his Funeral Monuments that Queen Elizabeth 'sent for him out of German y,' and, it is surmised, knighted him for services. The credulity of those days was lashed by Cervantes in Don Ouixote's balsam of Fierabras, which the Knight of the Rueful Countenance declared would make a man ' sound as an apple ' after he had been cut in two ; and in Waltho van Clutterbank's balsam of balsams, two drops of which, ' seasonably applied,' would in six minutes restore life and activity to anyone who chanced to have his brains knocked out or his head chopped oif . « * *

Despite our electric lights and our Baldwin engines and our liquid air and our patent nutmeg-graters, there still rtunains somewhat of the adjutant-bird in the human kind, long-legged Indian stork will swallow with equal composure and trustfulness a healthy green swamp-frog and a carving-knife or a saw-file. Such, in respect to quacks, is the gobe?)iouc/ierie of the crowd. They will swallow at a gulp, and without examination, every statement that is made to them. In this respect we have advanced but little since the days of Digby and Paracelsus. The increase of the quack fraternity has probably more than kept pace with that of the population. This is, in fact, the golden age of quackery. The claim of occult power is put forward with as calm assurance in the advertising columns of the secular Press as it was from the

stage in Elizabeth's days by charlatans like Doctor Dee. An ungrammatical trickster, for instance, advertises his semimiraculous powers in a number of New Zealand papers, asseverates that neither cancer nor any other disease can 'baffle' him, and modestly declares himself the greatest physician the world has ever known. He has probably his clientele of open-mouthed idiots. According to the Bulletin of Pharmacy, one of the islands in Puget Sound, near Seattle (U.S. A ) possesses at the pre-cnt time another prince of quacks who prattles with ungr.imm-itical lips. He is less demonstrative than his New Zealand confrere. But he is evidently not easily ' baffled.' He sets forth his prospectus in the following placard printed by himself on a home outfit : — ■ Leers and arms sawed off while you wait without pane. Childbirths and tumours a specialty. No odds asked in measles, hooping cuff, mumps, or diarrear. Bald heads, bunions, corns, wartz, cancer, and ingrowing townales treated scientifically. Coleek, cramps, costiveness, and worms nailed on sight. Wring-worms, pole-evil, shingles, moles, and cross-eye cured in one treatment or no pay. P.S. Terms : — Ca«h invariably in advance. No cure no pay. N.B. (Take Notis). No coroner never yet sot on the remains of my customers, and enny one hiring me don't haf to be laying up money bye a grave stone. Come one come awl.

The poor are nowadays the chiefest sufferers from the wiles of the quack. Some ot the fraternity would be in appro priate surroundings if placed under lock and key in gaol for pla\ing at dice with hum, in lives — or, to slightly alter Voltaire-, words, conveying drugs of which ihey know nothing into bodies of which they know less. A few of them would be ' nane the waur o' a hanging.' Samuel Rogers kept both phjsician and quack from his door, and lived till ninety-two on this prescription : ' Temperance, the bath and flesh-brush, and don't trtt.' Sydney Smith's saying was: 'The best physicians are Dr. Diet, Dr. (Juict, and Dr. Merryman — an adaptation of the old Latin distich :—: — - Si tiln (h'ticttint viidici, tih/ tianl JFcrr tmi : nn it? Ireta, nrj tacit, tno/L rat a dueta. If they fail, call in the doctor, not the cjuack.

Some of our readers may have heard the two militant story of how Bishop Moorhouse, when in bishops. Melbourne, administered a finished and

rao^t scientific drubbing to a big hulking fellow whom he caught m the act of pommelling his (the hulking fellow's; wite. The Bishop was an accomplished pugilist in his younger days, and his hand had not lost much ol its. tunning nor his biceps much of its strength amidst the cares ot episcop il lite in Melbourne. A recent issue of Sandoiv's Magazine records a somewhat similar exploit by Dr. Shoit, the iirsi Anglican Bishop of Adelaide. One evening in the Australian bush a party ot shearers were amusing themselves by boding in the shearing shed. Bishop Short was staying the night at the squatter's, and looked in to share the tun. A heavy weight was having it all his own way, and was unmercifully punishing all comers. When everybody had had enough, the Bishop stepped into the ring and offered to put on the gloves with this man. Alter some laughter and pretended reluctance the shearer took up the challenge, and resolved to give the bishop a lesson. But he was no match for the old Westminster boy. In a few minutes he got a scientific pommelling, and retired after a straight knockdown amid great applause from his former victims. It is said that at the Record Reign protalents ceedings in London the mob that lined the going to sidewalks expected to see the Australian and waste. New Zealand contingents with brass rings in their noses, black skin on their faces, and fuzzy hair on the place ' where the wool ought to grow.' Despite our frozen meat, our wool, our gold, and the other enormous el-ceteras with which we comfort the outsides and

line the insides of the British Islanders, there exists among the mass of our kinsmen of the northern seas a bountiful ignorance of the actual facts of our colonial life and progress. Among a large class in Great Britain, the sister island is even still almost as little understood. For them Ireland is a desolate land, peopled by ape-headed barbarians with pipes in their hat-bands, heavy clubs in their fists, wild ' whirroos ' in their mouths, and their hair done .up with hay-rakes. The principal occupation of those benighted islanders is supposed to be that of breaking each others' heads and potting strangers from behind hedges with blunderbusses. Political passion plus the stage Irishman are jointly responsible for this libel on a nation. The idea finds curious exprassion in the following advertisement which appeared in a recent issue of the London Times :—: — Warried by a pensioned Indian civilian, aged 51, employment in Ireland, or el«ewkere. Physical risk not objected to. Salary not so much an object as steady and interesting occupation. Is a good pistol shot, swordwnan, and boxer. Speaks German, French, Dutch, and several dialects of Hindustani. This advertisement, by the way, appeared in the Times just after the time' when the judges were presented, county after county, with white gloves at the Spring Assizes in Ireland. The Indian civilian's pistol, sword, and 'mailed fist' would be about as unnecessary to him in Ireland as his parcel of 'dialects of Hindustani.' For in no part of the British Isles and in few, if any, civilised countries in the world, would he run less ' physical risk ' than in green Eirinne of the streams. In his Kilmainham Memories (published towards the close of' - 1895), Mr. Tighe Hopkins, a keen English critic, says : 'There is hardly any crime in Ireland. The entire convict population of the country, male and female, numbers fewer than five hundred persons.' 'In the whole of Ireland last year (18941895),' he adds, 'only 187 males and 8 females were sent into penal servitude, and the largest number of sentences were for the shortest term of penal servitude.' No less than 82 per cent, of those in gaol were sentenced to terms of imprisonment not exceeding one month. Crime, said he, 'as we know it in England is practically non-existent in Ireland. • . Our great guilds of crime — the bands of professional burglars and robbers ; the financial conspirators, ; the adept forgers ; the trained thieves; the habitual leviers of blackmail, the bogus noblemen, parsons, and ladies of family; the " long firm" practitioner; the hotel and railway sharps ; the " magsmen," " hooks," and "bounces" — these are almost unrepresented in Ireland. In a word, so far as habitual and professional crime is concerned, there is not as decent a country in Europe.' The 'pensioned Indian civilian,' with his arsenal of weapons and ' language,' would not be happy in Ireland. His talents would go waste in that too cnmeless land. Better become a London detective or a football umpire.

Twelve years ago the genial author of the concerning Recreations of a Country Parson referred, in sermons. one of his parochial sermons at St. Andrew's, Edinburgh, to the change which had even 'then been effected irom the long, dreary sermons of his childhood days. And now forth comes a Dundee paper with the information that the average sermon, both in the Anglican and Piesbyteiian churches in Scotland, has dwindled down to a merciful half-hour. This is a mighty change from the longdrawn sermons of the good old Puritan days. The writer of a tract published in 1648 irreverently says of the preachers of his day that they ' could pray, or rather prate, by the Spirit, out of a tub, two hours at least, against the Ring and State.' In those days every pulpit was furnished with a corpulent hourglass. It was cased in an iron frame, fastened on the board on which the cushion lay, and was visible to the whole congregation. The glass was turned up as scon as the text was given out. Congregations were — like women — kittle-cattle in those days. If the sermon did not hold out till the sands were run, people glared at the preacher and said he was lazy. If the words ran very much longer 1 than the sand, people yawned, shuffled, stretched, and dozed, and signified in various other ways that it was high time for the founts of eloquence to dry up. In some parts of Italy to the present day, and in certain Catholic Religious Orders or Congregations, an uncompromising note of the sacristy 'bell warns the pulpit orator that his • lastly,' or his peroration, or both, mu^t come to an end within five minutes. N

It is an open question as to how far — outside of special occasions — -the long sermon is useful or judicipirs. The owner of a strange face may, of course, be allowed a certain latitude — with, however, a recommendation to mercy in the direction of brevity. The same remark will hold true of missions and all notable occasions. But a wise and venerable clerical friend of ours once gave it as his opinion that, ' for a constant thing,' half-an-hour is consistent with both charity and justice; threequarters of an hour is a weariness of spirit ; an hour is a mistake; an hour and a quarter a crime; and anything beyond that a blunder. * * *

A Protestant clergyman once asked the celebrated but erratic preacher, Mr. Henry Ward Beecher, what they did in Plymouth church when the congregation got sleepy. Mr. Beecher's eyes sparkled with a merry twinkle as he replied : ' I don't know that it applies to your church at all. I guess it doesn't. But we have a definite rule about that in Plymouth church. The sexton has strict orders, whenever .he sees the congregation getting sleepy, to go and wake up the preacher.' Not a bad plan, by the way, when the chloroform is in the preacher's subject, or manner, or both. No Catholic priest is lacking in a choice of interesting subjects. Here it is a sheer embarras de richesses. But, none the less, are not a few of he published sermons that we see marked by that ' decent debility' which Sydney Smith said was characteristic of the Anglican sermons of his time — ' tedious essays, full of commonplace morality ? ' As to manner : A tedious manner would make even a splendid sermon dry as a chip and lifeless as a stone. You remember Kinglake's account of the English Cabinet Ministers dozing over the monotonous hum-drum reading of the momentous despatches of the Duke of Newcastle ordering the invasion of the Crimea. As Samivel Weller would have said : ' Poppies were nothing to it.' * ♦ * Unfortunately, there is another and more subtle force at work which does more than every other cause combind to seal the ears of body and mind against even the nrfost fervid oratory on the most burning subject. Eloquence and earnestness are, at best, but a partial barrier against it. The matter is thus expressed by one who himself spoke words that smote with the impact of a Nasmyth steam-hammer : ' Wherever there is a preacher in the pulpit, there is a devil among the pews — busy, watching the words that fall from the speaker's lips to catch them away, and, by the idle, worldly, evil thoughts — the birds of the Parable that pick up the seeds — which he intrudes on them, to prevent the word making an impression or to remove any it happens to make.' There lies the preacher's chiefest grief. And there the cause why many whose tympanum vibrates to the physical sound of the priest's words, never really hear a sermon — like the graceless housewife who hears the visitor knock and batter at the hall door, yet goes on with her knitting or baking, and never slides back bolt or bar to let the caller in. When we set forth to write these lines we thought that, like Bobby Burns' Epistle to a Young Friend, Perhapa it may turn out a sang, Perhaps turn out a sermon. A sermon on a sermon. Which, bytheway, is a very good subject for a sermon, after all. For mark you, dear lay friends, the discourses of your gentle sogart may serve you as wings to soar to the great Aloft. But they may be also so many millstones tied around your necks to plunge you into the depths of a place whose floor is said to be paved with good intentions. Listen to your sogart's voice with the mental ear as well as the vibrating tympanum of flesh.

! Less than nine years ago Lord -Wolseley the heathev declared that he fully shared General chinee again. Gordon's rose-tinted views as to the future of the Chinese ' race and nation. ' The Chinese,' he said to Mr. Stead, ' are the coming nation.' The Chinese will, I think, over-run the world. The Battle of 4 Armageddon will take place between the Chinese and the Englishspeaking races. There will be, I assume, another war between France and Germany, and it will be about the bloodiest war or of wars which we have seen in Europe. But, some day, a great General or Lawgiver will arise in China, and the Chinese, who have been motionless for three centuries, will begin to progress. They will take to the profession of arms, and then they will hurl themselves upon the Russian Empire. Before the Chinese annies — as they possess every military j virtue, are stolidly indifferent to death, and capable of inexhaustible endurance — the Russians will go down. Then the Chinese armies will march westward. They will over-run India, sweeping us into the sea. Asia will belong to them, and then, at last, English, Americans, Australians, will have to rally for a last desperate conflict. So certain do I regard this, that I think one fixed point of our policy should be to strains every nerve and make every sacrifice to keep on good terms with China.'

Thus Lord Wolseley — with much more in the same strain. The Tartar rulers of the Hwa Kwo or Flowery Kingdom follow so religiously the policy of lopping the tall poppies — slicing off the progressive heads — that the great General and Lawgiver has but little chance of becoming famous. When Commissioner Leh was asked whether it was true that he had, in three years, lopped off 60,000 heads, he replied : ' Oh, surely mary more than that !' As for ' straining every nerve and making every sacrifice to keep on good terms with China ' ! Why, the very idea of the thing is enough to give one, a wholesome fit of blood-tingling, diaphragm-shaking laughter. England is up to the eyebrows in annexing big slices of the country, threatening and bullying the Tsung-li- Yamen, and, generally speaking, tweaking the nose of the Emperor just as if he were the veriest

scullion, instead of bein«- (officially) Tien Ti or Celestial Ruler, the Tien Tse or Son of Heaven, and the Wan sui wan-wan sui or Ten-thou^and-times-ten-thousand-years — in other words, the Everlasting. However, the Powers have made some .amends at last for this lack of courtesy. They invited China to part in the deliberations of the Peace Conlerence. The of the Sunday Chronicle took down his harp and chanted thereon the following lay :—: — WALK THIS WAY. ll was a balt<;red Chinaman, A worried look he wore, lie had becii u^ed extensively For wiping up the floor ; His heart was very heavy, and His bones wore very sore. He was a heathen Chinaman To superstition prone, A poor benighted infidel Who worshipped wood and stone , The joys of Christianity To him were all unknown. And righteous souls in Christendom Were deeply pained to gaze Upon such ignorance ; they felt Their duty was to raise That heathen and convert him from The error of his ways. So Briton, Russ, and Mailyphist Devised a piouß plot To lead him to salvation, and They taught him quite a lot. They speedily knocked spots off him, And each retained a spot. And having- thus appealed to him By bludgeon and by sword, The Russ (who'd got the biggest share Of swaar, all snugly stored) Cried : ' L°t us now make Peace unto The glory of the Lord !' And so that heathen Chinaman With flagellated skin Is beckoned to the Conference The sweets of Peace to win. And 0, it is a goodly sight To see him taken in !