Current Topics

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXVIII, Issue 7, 15 February 1900, Page 1

Current Topics

AT HOME AND ABROAD

Thi- treatment meted out by rampant seeking journalists and a fool-headed public to a General Sir William Butler recalls the scapegoat. accusations launched against the first Napoleon in the opening number of Rejected

Addresses :—: — Who burnt (confound his soul ) the houses twain Of Covent Garden and of Drury Lane 1 Who, while the British squadron lay off Cork (God bless the Regent and the Duke of York !) With a foul earthquake ravaged the Caraccas, And raised the price of dry goods and tobaccos ? Who makes the quartern loaf and Luddites rise / Who fills the butchers' shops with large blue flies ? Who thought in flames St. James's court to pinch ? Who burnt the wardrobe of poor Lady Finch 1 And the answer is ever and ever : ' Boney, 1 of course! General Sir William Butler was in like fashion made by hysterical English journalists and by the easy-chair amateur strategists of the clubs the prime cause of every blunder and disaster that has taken place in the South African campaign. Among other things he was accused of pro-Boerism, of disloyalty, and — as the ]Vestminster Gazette tells vis — he was blamed ' for the inaccurate counting of the enemy's guns, for the underestimate which was formed of the forces which the enemy could put in the field, for the numerical weakness of our army in South Africa at the outbreak of hostilities, and a thousand other things besides.' The army regulations compelled the gallant Catholic General to bear this wild tongueHailing in silence. The outraged officer closed his mouth and held it grimly shut. He has now at length realised the truth of Horace's lines : — . . . Est et fideli tuta silentio Mercas : The reward of silence is a sure reward.

But there is a sane portion of the British Press that keeps its brain packed about with ice-bags even in periods of popular delirium. And it has taken up the cudgels right vigorously for General Butler. The Westminster Gazette has fairly cut the ground from beneath his critics and conclusively shown by an appeal to the plain facts of the case ' that Sir William Butler's sole offence lies in the fact that he failed to estimate rightly the pugnacity of the Cabinet, and, further, that he, more clearly than any other man, foresaw the magnitude of the struggle in which we were engaging with so light a heart, and the strain which would be put upon our national resources before we could hope to bring it to a successful issue.' That was the head and front of his offending. Truth of December 21 has the following note on the subject : —

Even worse than the veiled attack of the Jingo Press on our generals in the field is the campaign of calumny that has been started against Sir William Butler. It has already been indicated in Truth that Sir William, before he offered to resign his command, warned the Government of the probable difficulties of a campaign against the Boers. The Westminster Gazette, in the ample vindication of Sir William which it published on Monday, states expressly what the nature of the warning given was. It was to the effect (1) that in the event of war it would be impossible to hold Northern Natal ; (2) that, to prevent the Boers overrunning the whole of that colony, a force of 20,000 men would be required to hold the line of the Tugela ; (3) that to strike effectually at the Boers via Bloemfontein, an army of 100,000 would be required in Cape Colony. There is not an honest man who can deny that this opinion stands amply justified by the results of the campaign, or that if Sir William Butler's advice had been taken we should not be in the position in which we find ourselves to-day.

But in the meantime the senseless clamour of the Press against General Butler has, says the Westminster Gazette, tendered it 'practically impossible for a weak-kneed Depart-

ment to send him back to a place where the want of a really scientific general is making itself so wofully felt,' and 're robbing the country of one of its bebt weapons.' Sir William, the same paper says, knows the tricks of the difficult game of v\<ir in South Africa better than either Sir Charles Warren or Sir Redvers Buller, and he is nevertheless left to eat out his luart at Devonport, ' scorned, abused, and slandered, because lie foresaw more clearly than his fellows the horrors of the present, and strove valiantly to avert what he believed to be a national calamity.'

'The creature's at his dirty work again.' 'he ci'sshs Slattery and the female impostor that accomthe panics him are creeping slowly southwards i'om 1 i\si.' on their evil mission of stirring up strife and appealing to the low instincts of the prurient at the rates that rule in the cheap monstrosity show — ' front seats one shilling, back seats sixpence.' Thus far the pink pamphlets have done their work very satisfactorily. The unhappy pair have been cold-shouldered or denounced by the Protestant clergy, snubbed by the Press, avoided as the bubonic plague by decent-minded Protestants, and left to the prurient who wallow like unclean animals m a filthy tale and to the Orangemen who invited the roving lecturers to do for money the devil's work of arousing sectarian hate and racial passion in a young country where people of all creeds and parties have been for so long content to work together in harmony for the common good. The fiasco which marked Slattery's visit to Thames will, we trust, be repeated in many a centre of population in New Zealand. It was a tribute "alike to the value of the pink pamphlets, the good sense of the nonCatholic clergy, and the honest disgust of the Thames public at the campaign of shameless and sensational vilification which Slartery and the fraudulent female partner in his •venture' are carrying out with a view to raking in a supply of coins of the realm and then flitting to other shores, leaving behind them an evil legacy of distrust and hatred between the working classes of one creed and the working classes of another.

We have described Slattery as a bold but clumsy liar. The two fellow-Orangemen who composed the law case between him and his nephew in Melbourne were even less choice in their speech • they labelled him 'an unmitigated liar.' He still persists in describing the vulgar impostor that accompanies him as ' the escaped nun.' She still poses as such. Money is still charged for admission to her lectures. That money is, in plain terms, obtained under a false pretence. At Napier Slattery repeated the old gag about having been ' all his life an absolute total abstainei ' and having been 'always in the favoui of his bishop.' The original correspondence between him and Cardinal MacCabe, which proves him to have been dismissed from the priesthood by his bishop for drunkenness, is in our possession and open to inspection by the proper persons. Photographic copies of it have been posted by us to Auckland, Wellington, and Christchurch. Had Slattery posed as a reformed inebriate, people who know his history might have been prepared to take his word on the subject for what it was worth. But when, in the face of his own handwriting and the rest of the evidence against him, he announces himself a life-long total abstainer, he, happily for the cause of truth, furnishes evidence which vitiates his purely personal testimony on any subject whatsoever. And this, as we have shown in our pamphlet, he has supplied in rank abundance. An original affidavit by his nephew, now in our possession, deposes that the ex-priest was not by any means a teetotaller up to July 25, 1899. Whether he is so now or not is little to the purpose. It can in no way mend his hopeless inveracity nor palliate his association in a discreditable business with a notorious and proven female impostor. It was only after his dismissal from the ranks of the clergy that he discovered those 'errors of Rome, 1 which landed him for a long term into a prison cell at Pittsburg, His ' conversion ' recalls the words of Josh Billings : ' I notiss that when a man runs hjz hed

aginst a post, he cusses the post fust, all Kreashun next, and sumthing else last, and never thinks ov cussing himself.' lhat is Joseph Slattery. He knocked his bibulous head against that portion of the Church which is in thedioceseof Dublin, and has been cursing it back to the forty-seventh generation. He has likewise wasted a good deal of useful energy in cussing the Church at large, and, generally, every decent man and woman of every creed— the enlightened Protestant clergy especially— who do not see their way to aid him and the sham ' ex-nun ' in turning their filthy lying into minted coins of the realm. Slattery doesn't ' cuss T himself. That, as Josh Billings points out, is not part of the game. On the contrary, he asks the guileless public to believe that he never— what, never ?— looked at wine (or whisky) when it sparkled in the glass, and that in the midst of abounding wickedness and general chuckle-headedness he stood forth alone, a solitary paragon of all the virtues.

Hl2 evil trade .is a worse affliction to a country than the bubonic plague or the small-pox. But it has still a commercial value when— as in SUtlery's case— the appeal is made at cheap rates to the gobemoucherie of bigots, to the levity of the curious, and the piuriencvof the lewd. For the eobemouche* this roving pair — in Butler's words, Wen' c fine cobwebs, fit for skull That's empty when the moon in full , Such as take lodpirps in a head That's to be let unfurnished. For all their shilling and sixpenny patrons alike their motto is that immortalised by James Russell Lowell :— . . . I firmly dv believe In Humbug generally, For it's a thin? that I perceive To hey a solid vally ; This hetb my faithful shepherd been, In pastures sweet heth led me ; An' this'll keep the people green, Tojeed ez they hey fed me.

Meantime, while the Change party i-i the Colony seek to strengthen their ranks by the blackguardly vilification of the noble-minded Sisters who are setting what a non-Catholic paper calls 'a splendid example' of courage nt MafeUuur and elsewhere, we may supplement the brave \\olds of the Auckland Observer by the following extract from .in article written by the Protestant editor of the San Frnmiuo Star in 1595. Commenting on a coarse lecturer of the Slattery tjpe, he qualifies as ' blacker than hell ' the heart of the man who could so traduce women who have become eaith's angels by their unselfish devotion to humanity. 'On the battle-fieW,' he continues, 'tenderly ministering to the wounded , in the' midst of pestilence, from which even the bravest fl\ ; by the side of the leper, loathsome even to himself and shunned by all others, these gentle souls are to be found and fear not. To be by the bedside of the sick, giving comfort and hop— ,„ t ] lt . d imp basement and cold garret relieving misery and want , to give light to the ignorant and joy to the despairing; to seek places where the merely " righteous " may not go, and be not ashamed to take the erring ones by the hand, and kneel with them in prater; to visit the condemned wretch in the prison cell, and by kind words and deeds inspire him with the love of God, and give him the peace of mind which " passeth all understanding"; all these things and many more are the daily duties ot these Sixers of Chanty, who worship at the Catholic shrine — but whose creed — to do good — embraces all the world and is as broad as the universe itscH.' Ihis broadminded Protestant editor had no personal interest in giving Catholic nuns their meed of praise. The Slatterys, on the other hand, have a pecuniary interest in vilifying them . < front seats one shilling, back seats sixpence.'

COSTLY ' CONVERTS.'

Ihe Rev. Henle\ Htwsov, that pioneer Protestant missionary, Dr. Cust (author of Missionary Methods), and many other earnest non-Catholics have condemned in language suited to the occasion the exaggerations of the average foreign missionary reports. But for cheerful and practised tact-slaying commend us to the annual reports of the Irish Church Missions Society. Their cool manipulation or outright creation of facts found long ago an absurd travesty in the story of Mick McQuaid. Their latest report is thus commented on in Truth of December 28, which by the way, seems to accept their figures without question : ' The conversion of Jews to Christianity, judged by the number of converts is generally believed to be the most costly form of missionary enterprise ; but from an article from the Daily Nation it would appear that the efforts of the Irish Church Missions Society to spread Protestantism in the Sister Isle are equally expensive. In a recently-issued booklet the society claims that " during the past ten years no fewer than 246 families, containing 610 souls, nave been transferred fiom the Church of Rome to the Church of Ireland as the fruit of the Dublin Mission " ; and on the bases of some figures in the same publication as to the annual expenditure, my contemporary estimates that these families

have cost £460 apiece to proselytise. It seems a stiff price to pay for the " transfer " of a family from Catholicism to Protestantism, and if the subscribers are satisfied they must be thankful for very small mercies.'

The Rev. R. A. McFariane, 8.D., of pricking Stranorlar (Scotland), is not exactly a A George Washington months aero he little bubble, published a tiact of the usual type which coiiUincJ a pathetic, though highly improbable, s ory of a death -bed scene. It is soberly recorded as a personal experience of the author. A Catholic priest is represented as administering the last Sacraments to a dyine woman. But hi* ministrations failed to give either hope or comfort to the departing soul. Then came upon the scene a Protestant neighbour. He spoke to the dying woman of • the saving power of Christ.' Oi course, being < Oll | y ' a Catholic, it was inevitable that she had never beiore heard that Christ had died to save sinners. She therefore listened eagerly Her tears were at once miraculously dispelled. Hope and confidence returned with a rush— like the tide in the Bay of bund}— and the dying woman passed swiftly and with a smile into a happy eternity. It is an old and mildewed story and has beer, trimmed and pared and added to and told with blameable iteration in a thousand silly tracts, with as many local and personal applications as certain of the antiquated tales ,n Joe Miller's Jest- Book. In this instance, as usual it was narrated at first hand. Pimphlc-t and story fell into the hands of Mr. M Diamond, of 12 Rutherglen Road, Glasgow. Like Talle) rands famous creditor, Mr. Diamond is bien cuneux— inconveniently inquisitive. He wrote to the author of the pamphlet, asking him to mention ' the place where this happened, or the names of the parties—the priest, minister or woman— and any other particulars you may have about the matter. After some delay the answer came. It was not after all, a personal experience of the writer of the pamphlet! He had found the narrative in an old copy of the Christian treasury, and ' the names of the parties were not given ' nor the date nor scene of the supposed death-bed conversion The whole tale is thus left hanging m the air. The story is but a typical one of its class. Ihe truih of the rest may be euasred from this. Saving the sicknes and the skull and cross-bones it is Slattery':, -tory of his allied 'conversion,' which as editor Brann sax s, was cqu.llv Midd.-n, like that of Saul of 1 arsus— or of Judas Iscariut. But does it not, in one teature at least, bear a striking resemblance to the little fiction for the truth of which a prominent Dum-din clergyman vouched some time ago? When pressed upon the matter he could only state that he had it from another man that there was something about the matter in the London Time* 'some fifteen \ears ago.' ■>

needs \ LONG MEMORY.

A liar need-, a long- memory. And ex-priest Slattery's memory is a short and treacherous one. In the H,iivks\ Ray Herat,/ oi February 7 and l<ebruny 8, lie admitted that he had been convicted but denied that he had been imprisoned in Pittsburg | O r the sale of indecent literature He quite forgets that in an announcement of hi-, book facing pace 268 of Mrs. Slatterns Convent Life (American edition) he roundly declares ' For pioducing tins work the Romanists imprisoned me at Vauhur^, Pa.' l-acimr pag e i 99 of another book of lies, entitled Secret*, &c, r American edition) he has the following notification n^udn.g the s une pamphlet: 'For this work the Romanics imprisoned me at Pittsburg Pa ' These books were both purchased at Sl.Utcry 1 :, meetings and are now in our posse-ion. So, like^sc, is the very pamphlet for the publication of which he was relegated for a period to the privacy of a prison cell. On (he ver> second page of the copy before us are these uo.ds- < For publishing this I waS imprisoned in Pittsburtr, />„.' Venly Slattery's Orange friends in Melbourne had good reason for characterising him as 'an unmitigated liar.'

While upon this unsavoury subject we must here express our emphatic conviction that the- wiitmg of letters to the Press as at Napier—on this roung pair is a blunder which should be carefully avoided. Most editors will, on prudential grounds, decline to &\e a full statement of the facts of the creatures' careers, and unless this wot k is thoroughly done it is best left severely alone, as it serves only to furnish them with an opportunity for cheap and effective advertising. The extensive distnbu.ion of our Pink Pamphlets is the best specific for the Slattery plague, and the facts set forth therein have remained unanswered by Siattery at Napier simply because they are unanswerable.

Vintors to Dunedin are invited to call at Messrs A and Ingh.ss and inspect the bpl-ndid stock of autumn Roods in air departments. As Messrs Injylis are noted for keeping the best class of seasonable poods, at moderate price*, it will be to the advantage of our readers to accept the firm's invitation and inspect the jroods when they can judge as to quality and price.— ** '