The New Zealand Tablet. Fiat Justitia. THURSDAY, MARCH 29, 1900. THE SECULAR PRESS : A WORD OF PRAISE.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXVIII, Issue 13, 29 March 1900, Page 17

The New Zealand Tablet. Fiat Justitia. THURSDAY, MARCH 29, 1900. THE SECULAR PRESS : A WORD OF PRAISE.

-♦- HE world keeps moving on. And — for Catholics afc least — one of the pleasantest signs of its progress is the enlightened and sensible attitude of the secular Press towards adventurers like the Slatterys, whose noisome trade it is to > arouse sectarian rancour and coin it into chinking drachmas. The respectable American secular Press took a leading and honourable part in exposing the true characters and the criminal records of the unclean human animals who, posing as ' ex-priests ' and ' escaped nuns,' were employed by the A.P.A. to stir up religious passion — at so much per week — against the Catholic body in the United States. London Truth has done a similar good work in the case of the Ruthvens, the Wid dowses, the Slatterys, and other impostors of their kind. Several leading English and Scottish papers — and notably the Morning C/tronirle, the Western Mail, etc. — denounced the Slatterys and their ways in terms of withering indignation. Their example was followed by many of the Australian papers, including the Mitre (the Anglican organ of Victoria). The remainder contemptuously ignored them. This was the policy pursued by the editors of nearly all the secular daily papers of this Colony in every centre of population which has been afflicted by the presence of these roving impostors. To their lasting honour — as we learn from a furious handbill of Slattery's — the two Dunedin daily papers, tl c Otcujo Daily Times and the Evening Star, refused to foster his evil work by befouling their advertising columns with his announcements. Three New Zealand weeklies have condemned the Slatterys and all their works and all their ways in terms of the strongest reprobation. Two of the leading daily papers of the Colony — the New Zealand Times (Wellington) and the Christchurch Press — have each administered to them a severe editorial horsewhipping, while the editor of a third — the Lytlelton Times — has marked his manly scorn of their evil trade and its supporters in a manner not less decisive, if less public.

The fact remains that crusades of this nature are not merely an outrage on religion and common decency ; they are a positive menace to the public peace. On the face of it, it is no light matter for known impostors and strangers of ill-repute from afar to parade around the world, distributing outrageous handbills by tens of thousands in great centres of population of mixed creeds and nationalities ; screaming out in public places that, in effect, the loc&l Catholic clergy and the devoted nuns are monsters of phenomenal wickedness ; comprising every local Catholic woman and girl in indecent charges of unchastity ; and stating in plain, set terms that Catholic men are consenting parties to gross and

habitual immorality on the part of their sisters, wives, and mothers. With a people so peculiarly sensitive on the score of the sanctity of their priests and the honour of their womanhood as Catholics, and especially Irish Catholics, are, it is not surprising, although it is lamentable, that their outraged feelings have time and again found yent — as in the United States, at Manchester, Cardiff, Glasgow, Maitland (N.S.W.), and in other places — in anti-Si.ATTERY riots of a more or le«s character. We have all along emphatically deprecated even the smallest manifestation of this kind, even by word, much less by deed ; aud we thank God that in New Zealand the Catholic body have borne themselves with dignity and decornm through the storm of filthy abuse witlj which they are being pelted by this roving couple. This happy freedom from disturbance we, with others, attribute to the exhortations of the clergy and to the fact that those of our co-religionists who are usually made to feel the bitterest brunt of foul crusades of this kind are furnished, and can furnish their Protestant fellowworkers, with the facts of the discreditable careers of those vagrant impostors. New Zealand is the only country thus far visited by this unworthy pair in which their venemous outpourings have not been marked by disturbances of the public peace. But we submit that the forbearance of no community should be put to so severe a trial as Catholic fathers, sons, and brothers have been subjected to in our large centres of population for any purpose, and least of all in the financial interests of a dismissed drunkard and the roving female impostor that accompanies him.

The editorial departments of most of the respectable secular newspapers of America, England, Scotland, Australia, and New Zealand, have in one form or other given expression to their condemnation of this abominable method of money-getting. Unfortunately the business departments have not in every instance risen to the same level. And thus we have not infrequently witnessed the Slatteky crusade condemned in the editorial columns and aided and abetted in the advertising columns of the same issue of the same paper. The two daily papers of Dunedin, however, present no such anomaly. We trust it will be ever remembered to their credit that, like the great and respectable dailies of other countries, their sense of public decency extends to their advertising as well as to their editorial and news columns, and that they do not permit themselves to be either bribed or bullied into making themselves, in ever so small a degree, the sounding-boards of a pair of fraudulent adventurers whose object is money, money, money, and who, when they get at> much of it as they can, fiir, to the next city or country, regardless of the running bores of bigotry which they have opened and left festering along their evil track.