Current Topics

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXVII, Issue 36, 7 September 1899, Page 1

Current Topics

AT HOME AND ABROAD.

It was Franklyn who wrote to Josiah Quincy the white in 1773 the famous dictum: 'There never savage at war. was a good war or a bad peace.' Franklin's terse variant of old Erasmus' saying is, perhaps, a little too sweeping. But at its best war is devil's work. When it is— as in the Philippines — a war in which racial (and to some extent religious) passion runs high, Satan's imps are pretty sure to march thick with the rank and file of some regiments, and to ride at the head of others. In previous issues we have given instances of the savagery and brutality of the methods by which certain American officers and their men are forcing western • civilisation ' on the inhabitants of the Philippines. Many — perhaps the larger portion — of the American troops in the islands are undoubtedly men of high, or at least good average, moral calibre. But it is evident that many oftiers of them are no better than the ragged rabble of ununiformed and undisciplined Bashi-bazouks whose atrocities in Bulgaria elicited one of the finest outbursts of the late Mr. Gladstone's torrential eloquence in the seventies.

Here are two samples of warfare as conducted by the white savage at large in the Philippines. The following is an extract from a letter published in the Philadelphia Catholic Standard of July 29, from a respected correspondent in the Philippines : —

The truth is, affaire here are being conducted in a scandalous manner. After six weeks' work in and around Manila I have Been enough, to make me ashamed of my country's flag. In fact, this war here is no more nor lees than an A.P.A. fanatical outburst against the religious customs of the island. I have Been so much that I do not know where to begin in reciting the story of profligacy, debauchery, and licentiousness which dominates the army of occupation. Women walking along the streets have had scapulars, rosaries, crucifixes, and bo on — which, by the way, are all worn exposed torn from their necks. Prisoners of war have been shot to save the trouble of bringing them into camp — and this by volunteer soldiers, without authority from any one. The Tennessee regiment had taken over fifty prisoners ; when the detachment reached camp the question was asked as to where were the prisoners. ' They're on the road ' — in fact the natives had been used as targets for the amusement of our nineteenth century 'evangelists.' _ . . . No wonder we see native priests leading men in battle against our men. The churches have been the object of spoliation unheard of. Chasubles, stoles, chalices — everything of value, and consecrated articles of all kinds, are shown as trophies of victory. There is not one particle of exaggeration in these statements. Indeed, the motive of attack on certain places has been to rob the churches and plunder the natives. Our soldiers teach children on the streets unnameable filth and obscenity, and then another will come along and whip tho child for its progress in infamy. Young girls have been ruined by the thousand, and to-day ' Marguerites '—God save the word— are seen publicly on the street— something unknown before Dewey accomplished his ' great victory ' over a handful of washtubs that were in the shed for repairs. Daily occurrences are something appalling.

m Even if we were to make a reasonable allowance for all this would be bad enough. Unfortunately, the statements of this writer are, however, corrobated by a vast amount of independent testimony from other quarters. The editor of the Standard says : ' Dreadful as these disclosures are, we are obliged to withhold other facts still more re volt -

Here is another somewhat similar sample of war-news. It is taken from a letter written from the seat of war by Private Prendergast, U. 5.1., and appeared in the Aye Maria : —

Villages and churches are in ruins as the result of our cannonading. One church presented a scene Buoh as I have never before seen or heard of. The volunteers found the place just as the priest left, and so when these devils got in they completely

demolished everything. They even broke open the tabernacle and threw the Blessed Sacrament upon the floor ; then they pat on the vestments and marched into camp in a mocking manner. It brought the tears to the eyes of many a Catholic boy to see such an outrage on the Church of his faith. But the volunteer! didn't stop at this. They went to the vaults of the church, and, after breaking them open, threw the bodies in all directions, in their search for jewellery and other valuables. This alone is a disgrace to Uncle Sam, and the gallows is not half good enough for some of his soldiers.

A fine buzz of execration went up over the Englishspeaking world when some half-naked Samoan, unauthorised, hacked off the heads of two of the white men whom his fellows had killed in a stand-up fight near Apia. But, according to another American contemporary, the civilisers of the islands have been sending the embalmed heads of slain Filipinos through the Post Office sacks, for the use of students of comparative craniology. Which reminds us of the brisk traffic in preserved Maori heads that was at one time rampant in New Zealand.

Such methods of warfare afford an explanation of many things. They explain, for instance, the statement of the New York Herald that ' the non-combatant part of the Filipino population is hostile to the Americans.' They furnish one sufficient reason for the rigorous censorship of news sent out of Manila. One English war correspondent says :—

It is impossible to write the truth about the situation. The resources and fighing qualities of the natives are quite misunderstood by the American papers, and we cannot write the facts without being accused of treason ; nor can we tell of the practioally unanimous opposition to, and dislike of, the war among the American troops. The volunteers, or at least a portion of them, were at one time on the verge of mutiny, and unless General Otis had begun sending them homewards there would have been sensational developments. We have been absolutely refused all hospital figures.

Just so. There has been a significant cessation of the cable-messages detailing crushing defeats and heavy slaughters of Filipinos at the expense of a tew wounds or scratches to the American troops. For ' the boys ' are coming home. The Nebraskas left home last year 1100 strong. Only 280 came back. And so of the others. The New York Herald published a message that was somehow smuggled through after having been suppressed at Manila. It states that the American troops in hospital in the Philippines number 4,000 ; that Manila and its suburb Cavite between them require 16,000 ; that 4,800 are scattered among the smaller islands ; and that only 8,000 out of nearly 33,000 are available for active campaigning, and some of these are overworked and can do little else than remain on the defensive. We long ago expressed the opinion that Uncle Sam would get many a bad headache and many a sleepless night before his conquest of the Philippines was an accomplished fact. Events nave fully justified our prediction. The reduction of the islands is apparently as far off as ever. Uncle Sam has found his Majuba Hill. And he owes little gratitude to the loud-voiced Jingoes who led him thither ' and fired his eager fancy with visions of an over-sea colony. The Spaniard civilised, christianised, and educated the Filipinos. Long before his dominion ended there were very few illiterates in the islands. He could not hold them. But neither can Uncle Sam. The Spaniard was a political failure in the islands. Uncle Sam is a worse failure. That is about the difference. Were he to pack up his trunk and go home, things might be better in the Phflippines. They could not well be worse.

We are treated from time to time by press king fraud, and pulpit to much flowery declamation on the commercial greatness and general prosperity of this model of all the centuries. But there are facts in connection with it that should serve to administer a wholesome cold douche to the exuberance of the pulpiteer's and the pressman's verbosity. A noted British judge declared some years ago that the commercial life of our day is rotten through and through. He probably formed his judgment from

the seamy side of human life that makes its bow in courts of law, and his statement, perhaps, overstepped the strict bounds of fact. There is no doubt whatever as to the commercial supremacy of this century. But there csn be just as little doubt that it stands at the same time easily foremost in fraud and adulteration of every kind. New Zealand farmers, from Taranaki to the Bluff, will be interested in the Food and Drugs Bill now before the British House of Commons. Its object is to protect the manufacturer and retailer of honest butter against the wholesale purveyors who turn the fat of cows and oxen into imitation butter — termed butterine — and put the tallow-pot into unfair competition with her royal highness- the cow. Adulteration extends almost every manufactured article which we eat or drink or utilise in industrial processes. Even bread can no longer be relied upon as the 'staff of life.' In some recently discovered instances it turns out to be rather a broken reed. In Sydney —according to the Daily Telegraph — the adulteration of bread was made a few weeks ago the subject of official investigation. 1 Several samples,' says our Sydney contemporary, ' were analysed, the result showing ihat many of the specimens contained a great excess of water. Bread should not have more than 35 per cent, of water, but many of the samples contained as much as 43 to 45id per cent. Bread containing 34 or 35 per cent of water has nutriment or solids amounting to 05 or 00 per cent. In those examined which had from 43 to 45^ per cent. of water, the solids consequently fell as low as 54 \ per cent. The bakers who supply such bread therefore make 54 per cent. of nutriment or flour do duty for 66 per cent, so that the purchaser is deprived to the extent of 12 per cent of the nutriment he pays for. That is bad enough, but as Dr. Thompson points out, too much water meant several other things, the chief being that the bread does not keep. It becomes sour and mouldy, and is specially injurious when given to children. The board has now under consideration a standard of moisture for bread which must not be exceeded, and this will shortly be published.'

Water, however, can scarcely be called an adulterant. But its use as a make-weight instead of flour is an instance of a particularly mean theft, which hits hardest at the poor. Alum is an older adulterant. Recent experiments go to show that its continued absorption into the system produces many alimentary disturbances and induces that form of nervous prostration which causes women to ' go all to pieces ' on what the stronger sex usually agree to consider very slight provocation. • It is probable,' says a tecent issue of a medical journal, ' that many medical men are unaware 01 the extent to which salts of alumina may be introduced into the body, being under the impression that the use of alum in bread is prohibited. Alum, however, is still used surreptitiously to some extent to whiten bread, and very largely in making cheap kinds of baking powder. In families where baking powder is generally used great care should be exercised to procure only those brands made from cream of tartar. The alum powders may generally be distinguished by the lower price at which they are sold/

A complaint of much wider range and deeper import comes from no less an authority than Dr. Wiley, Chief Chemist of the United States Department of Agriculture. The Philadelphia Catholic Standard, summarising his words, declares that 'ninety per cent, of the articles sold for food and drirk in the United States and exported to the outside world from here are dangerously doctored — a great many with absolutely poisonous stuff. Canned goods— and in especial green peas — are treated with deadly admixtures. Fearfully poisonous chemicals are used in the making up of " choice " teas. Coffee is liberally treated with chicory and sawdust. Pigments, such as yellow ochre and Venetian red, are likewise employed to impart to this sham coffee its " desired tints." Drinks are a special study of the chemical expert. A great variety of berries are employed as substitutes for hops, and such positively dangerous compounds as salicylic and boracic acids are commonly"used to give beer its appearance of natural fermentation. The stronger spirits and wines are doctored with equally villainous ingenuity. The whole evidence given (says the Standard) goes to establish the fact that what practically amounts to a vast conspiracy against the health and longevity of the whole population is a matter of daily employment to thousands of capitalists in the United Stales.' The strangest part of the whole affair is the fnct that 'the very chemicals which are used in the processes of adulteration are themselves adulterated with every worthless and dangerous stulf which can be got to resemble them.' Taking all the circumstances into account, would not the non -Catholic pulpit be better employed in inculcating lessons of elemental y commercial morality than in preaching noisy and convulsive panegyrics to prove that bulging money-bags and big steam-boilers and whirling wheels are the result and test of true faith in Him who had not whereon to lay His head. We are a strange mixture of piety and fraud. All things considered, perhaps the following story is not altogether a fairy tale. :—•

The time was night, the grocery store was closed, the family preparing to retire. The grocer's wife addresses her daughter :—: — * Matilda, dear, did you sand the sugar ? ' ' Yes, ma.' ' And did you sloe-leaf the tea, dear ? ' •Yes, ma.' ' And did you water the tobacco, dear ? ' 1 Yes, ma. 1 ' Then come to prayers, dear.' Ah, yes, we are a pious people. And the best of it is that — thanks chiefly to the non-Catholic pulpit — we know we are.

It was was not always thus. In the ages that are by some folk of neglected education termed • dark,' people were better protected from the fraudulent arts of the adulterator than in these days of cathode rays and electric light. In the days when England was ' Merne England ' — as far back as six centuries ago — the markets were controlled by the corporations (as at Oxford) with a view to prevent frauds and adulteration of goods. Special officers were appointed for this purpose. In the cloth-manufacturing centre of Norwich, as far back as 1329 — in the days of King Edward 111. — a special aulnager (or cloth-searcher) was appointed to inspect the worsted stuffs in the whole district. He held office for 20 years, and his chief duty was to see that the high quality of the Norwich woollens was maintained. As far back as the twelfth century the penalties enforced by the weavers' gilds against bad or scamped work were so severe that they served as a stimulus to the use of skill and energy and elbow-grease. The laws of the German gilds against adulteration and 'slummed' work were sometimes almost ferocious in their severity. Bax, in his German Society at the Close of the Middle Ages, records how in some towns the baker who sent out too much water in his loaves or dosed them with adulterants, was brought up before the court of the gild, promptly convicted, caged in a basket which was fixed on the end of a long pole, and soused so many times to the bottom of a pool of particularly dirty water. In the year of grace 1456 two grocers, and the female assistant of one of them, were burnt alive at Nurnberg for having adulterated saffron and spices. A like sentence was meted out to another gay adulterator at Augsburg in 1492. Draco's code never surpassed this. It is vastly too strenuous for our time. But we err in the other extreme — on the score of leniency. We prosecute the man who adulterates the bibber's whisky and rum and fine him soundly. But our bulky volumes of statutes scarcely find a penalty for the baker who poisons the children's bread and the bushman's tea, and Heaven knows what besides

— and makes us a dyspeptic race, and drives us for surcease of stomach ailments to blue pills and pink washes and the thousand and one ' nostrums and drugs infernal ' whose virtues are dinned into our aching tympana by a horde of brazen -throated and bra/en-faced quacks.

Some weeks ago we referred to a Bill which a t\x on was under discussion in the Diet of Hesse bachelors. (Germany). We watched with interest the

fate of the measure, and had concluded that it was involved in some Hessian ' slaughter of the innocents,' when our eyes alighted on the following paragraph from the Berlin correspondent of the London Daily News : —

Great joy reijyns among the fair sex in Hesse. The Diet haspassed by 18 votes against 16 a resolution to introdnce a tax on bachelors. The unmarried men are to pay 25 per cent, more than' the married.

In New Zealand, the home of progressive legislation, the news will give a fresh lite to that most wearisome of all debates ~ ' Should bachelors be taxed V — and will add a fresh vogue ta» the stale platitudes and pointless jokes on the subject wi»h which debate-goers are familiar from Auckland to the Bluff. The Daily News writer, however, falls into the strange mistake of regarding Hesse as the pioneer in this class of legislation. As a matter of fact, the pioneers of bachelor-taxing have been mere layers of bone-dust for the past two thousand years or so. The idea did not burst fresh out of a Hessian brain-pot — like a new geyser at Whakarewarewa — inthe sunlit glow of the nineteenth century. Ancient Sparta, Athens, and Rome — and Heaven knows who before them — imposed various penalties on celibates. Post- Reformation England did likewise. Thus, in the year of grace i6t)s a tax was imposed by Act ot Parliament on bachelors, widowers, births, burials, and marriages, not from any rooted objection to bachelors or babes or such-like cattle, but for the purpose of ' carrying on the war against France with vigour.' So ran the preamble to the Act. The amount v.u-ied from a modest shilling to £12 ids. In 1785 Pitt impuscd a heavier rate or duty on the servants of bachelors thanon those of married people. This tax continued in force for many years. Even the Argentine Republic was, in point of time, ahead of Hesse. Since New Year's Day of last year a law has been in force by virtue of which all bachelors in the Republic are to be taxed from the age of 20 until they have touched the gay and frolicsome season of 80 years. The assessment is monthly. It ceases on the day of marriage. But how-

the law worketh, deponent knoweth not. AH such enactments have been, down the course of history, passing fads or experiments, or — as in the case of the English Act of 1695 — they arose out of some need of the hour. In no case did experience justify their continuance. The Hesse and Argentine laws will probably, in due course, 'gang the same gait' as all their predecessors.