Current Topics

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXVIII, Issue 15, 12 April 1900, Page 1

Current Topics

AT HOME AND ABROAD

' Not a few good people,' says the Lutheran Observer (American), 'constantly perplex themselves about the resurrection of the body.

They do not know how God can gather their

A THOUGHT FOR EASTER.

bodies up again, the dust of which may have been scattered by the four winds of heaven. We do not need to know how in order to believe the fact. We believe in the resurrection of the body because we believe in God, and believe in His word. Dr. George Pentecost, the evangelist, in replying to the charge of folly made against those who believe that God will raise the dead, gave this beautiful illustration : "There is a ftory told of a workman of the great chemist Faraday. One day he knocked into a jar of acid a little silver cup. It disappeared, was eaten by the acid, and couldn't be found. The question came up whether it could ever be found. One said he could find it ; another said it was held in solution and there was no possibility of finding it. The great chemist came in and put some chemical into the jar, and in a moment every particle of silver was precipitated to the bottom. He lifted it out a shapeless mass, sent it to a silversmith, and the cup was restored. If Faraday could precipitate that silver and recover his cup, I believe God can restore my sleeping and scattered dust." '

SIEGE AND FAJKINE.

which is, perhaps, but the poetic way of saying that they were 'out for a lark. What pranks they played before high heaven Moore does not tell us, beyond the poetic report of a discussion that might have ended in a triangular duel but for the ready brain and wheedling tongue of Mr. Wit. Three grimmer companions have of late been roving through South Africa — War (chiefly as represented in siege), and his precious twins. Hunger and Disease. They have played sad havoc indeed with human hearts and lives in Ladysmith and Kimberley and Mafeking. Dropping metaphor, we find that the distress from insufficient or improper food in the beleaguered places was, in all reason, pitifully keen. Kimbeiley seems to have fared the best. And yet eggs sold there at 24s a dozen, towls at 25s to over 30s each, potatoes and tomatoes at 3s 6d a pound, grapes at 3s 6d to 5s a pound, and milk, butter, cheese, or ham could be procured only on the pioduction of a medical certificate that the bearer was an invalid. Still there was no absolute starvation. For, says a correspondent on the spot, 'the typical menu which remained unchanged day after day consisted of soup, horse steak, and crushed mealies and water ; there was plenty of bread up to the last day of the siege, though even in that matter the inhabitants werelimitedto io.joz per day.' At Ladysmith the 23,000 besieged suffered long from unsuitable food, and for a time from painfully short allowances, while invalids and convalescents dropped off at a fearful rate owing to the impossibility of providing them with proper nourishment. The supply of all sorts of breadstuffs was exhausted early in January, and in the end existence had to be eked out somehow on scanty rations of horse-flesh, starch, biscuit, and horseflesh soup. The end of the agony came none too soon and found the survivors pale, emaciated, and unfit, though willing, to sustain the struggle against the splendid peasant-soldiers of Uncle Paul.

Strangely enough, the prices of food-stuffs even at Kimberley rose much higher than in one of the greatest sieges in

which Bi itish soldiers were the beleaguered force. We refer to the siege of Gibraltar in 1781. In those stirring days, when 1 the Rock ' and the town nestling under its beetling sides were being pelted daily by several tons of solid shot and bursting shell, beef could be purchased at 3s i£d per pound, eggs at 7, ! d each, a pair of pigeons at 9s 4^d, and a fat goose changed owners for a modest 8s 6Jd — the odd farthings and ha'pence showing that the owner of a hungry stomach may yet drive a close bargain. In the Spanish-American war eggs went up to 6d each at Havana during its blockade by the American fleet. Other articles of food did not rise as notably above the ordinary prices as might have been expected, and never soared even to the average of siege rates.

Parisian stomachs were better prepared for the chances of the siege of 1870-71 than those of the garrison and inhabitants of Kimberley, Mafeking, and Ladysmith for the sieges of 1900. For the Parisians had already acquired a taste for the tender and nutritious and by no means unpalatable flesh of that eminently clean feeder, the horse. As famine settled down upon the doomed city, the pinch of hunger made them less and less squeamish as to their food. In November, 1870, there was a brisk demand, at high prices, for the flesh of mules and donkeys. The animals in the Jardin d'Acclimatation were devoured with the relish that a nipping hunger gives to unaccustomed and unsavory meats. Dogs, cats, rats, and mice brought high prices and were eagerly devoured. An English war correspondent describes the flesh of the rat — from personal experience — as 'white and very delicate, like young rabbit, but with more flavor.' Another speaks in high commendation of the harmless, necessary cat as a table delicacy. The cunning ingenuity of the French cooks succeeded in cleverly disguising the taste and appearance of the flesh of cats, dogs, and rodents. It was, moreover, a point of siege honor that no awkward questions should be put to the housekeeper. With this diplomatic understanding things went as well as might be expected over the scantily supplied board, although many must have been forcibly struck with the extraordinary number and variety of unaccustomed meats that went by the name of ' rabbit.' By December, however, such reserve was found unnecessary. For hunger was too keen and pressing. A rat 'fat from the drains' then cost is 3d; mice, 3d each ; geese, £3 3s each ; turkeys, £\ each ; chickens, £1 each ; dogs, £3 to £ IO > according to size and condition ; a cabbage, 3s 4c!. During the course of this month Baron Bri^se, the well-known epicure, made out a lengthy bill of fare for a defiant siege dinner given by the Pans Jockey Club. Among the items on the menu we find the following : ' Soup of slightly salted horse, with vegetables ; ass-flesh cutlets, with carrots ; mule's liver saute aux champignons ; horse's lights, with white sauce ; . . . quarter ot dog braised ; leg of dog roasted ; rats cooked upon the ashes ; rat-pie with mush100ms, etc' ' The banquet,' says a voluminous historian of the war, ' is stated to have been a great success.'

Perhaps it was. But the feast was, after all, merely the gay freak of festive youths who had plenty of money to spend upon the purchase of the hitherto unconsidered trifles that had suddenly become the luxuries of the hour of real need. The poor could not afford such pranks. Two months before the siege closed, their usual daily ration was a short allowance of beans, rice and a potato, with little specks of meat which might have been cut out with a tram-conductor's punch. But the people bore their sufferings with wonderful fortitude and even good-humor. A besieged resident tells us that ' when the time came for them to depend solely on dry bread, they would season it with a bon mot and fancy they had had a good dinner. 1 We think it is Vizetelly who records how an old besieged couple found it at last necessary to sacrifice their favorite poodle, Fiao,

Tommy Moore represents love, valour, and wit, as once upon a time wandering together Thro' Erin's Isle, To sport awhile —

in order to allay the raging pangs of their own hunger. A little feast on unaccustomed dog-flesh followed. At its close, Monsieur laid down a juicy bone which he had picked as clean as if he had been an army of red ants. ' Ah, ma cJierie' said he to madame across the table, ' how poor Fido would have enjoyed this !' But others were in worse case. There was a fearful increase in mortality. Children at Ladysmith suffered severely. In Pans they perished like flies, and the long strings of little coffins tMt wprr diily brought through the streets made the gaiety of the Parisians under their trials" as difficult as that ot Mark Taplcy in the swamp jungles of the City of Eden. At the close of the fearful ordeal of the siege a whole ham was suddenly exposed for sale in a shop south of the Seine. Crowds of people went to gaze on it as a curiosity. And Vizetelly tells us, in his Ironhoitnd City, how, after the long agony of starvation, he broke down and sobbed like a child at the sight of a square meal of civilised food to which he was treated by a friendly war correspondent at Versailles on the day after the capitulation of Paris. There is a heart-breaking pathos in siege incidents such as these.

We fancy that science did more at Paris than at Ladysmith to aid the cook to fill the pot. Chemists devoted themselves with great skill and considerable success to extract nutriment from unpromising materials. They purified various kinds of unpleasant looking grease and even cocoa-nut oil — commonly used in soap-making — and made them fit for table use. They gathered together great piles of bones, horns, hooves, etc., worked their spells over them, and lured out of their unwilling pores a product which they termed ■ osseine.' It made a juicy and wholesome soup that helped to hold the bonds between soul and body together in many a faminestricken home in Paris. They also manipulated the bowels, liver, and blood of slaughtered animals to good purpose, and made or suggested the thick syrupy liquid called soupe de glucose which proved such an agreeable tipple to the rats of Paris that they tumbled heels over head and bit and tore furiously at each other in their mad efforts to get first into the holes in which it was placed to lure them to destruction. The holes were so shaped that the greedy rodents were unable to escape, and, says a historian of the siege, ' they were captured by thousands.' They proved a boon indeed to the starving city, despite the filthy surroundings in which they were taken. For 'hunger is insolent and ivill be fed,' even though its meat be rat-meat that comes from a hole in a city sewer. Empty stomachs cannot aitord to be over-squeamish when hunger presses hard. So well did men search the city that at the close of the siege there was not a live dog or cat within its circling walls — a tew of the specially cautious old rats probably escaped. But alack ! for the insufficiency of it all. The cemeteries told the tale of the dead -and among the living there was not left so muchas one fat man with supplementary chinstogabble politics to his next door neighbour. Thesurest anti-fat is evidently a siege on short rations. Memo : Perhaps short rations would do quite as well with the siege omitted.

We commend to our health authorities the Paris chemists' recipe for soape de glucose. If it should prove the success at rat-catching in our sea-port towns and cities that it is recorded to have done amidst the sewers of Paris, it will probably be our nearest practicable approach to the magic pipe of Hamelin, and will do more to exterminate the furred bearers of bubonic plague germs than a regiment of cats and a shipload of iron traps. At .my rate the experiment is worth inquiring into.

1 OR THE DEAD SOLDIhRs

tary Forces now in South Africa.' It occurs as a petition in the last of the five alternate Litanies which are provided, and which may be used instead of the Litany in the Anglican Book of Common Prajer. The petition runs as follows. — ' Tor all those who have fallen in the true faith of Thy holy Name — that they with us may enter into the rest which Thou hast prepared for them that believe in Thee : Hear 7/s-, good Lord.'

ChLIU^Ci

The busybody interest taken by nonCatholics in our clergy and nuns was recently evidenced in Glasgow in an attack upon clerical and monastic celibacy by — of all other persons Sarah Grand, author ot the Beth Book. The controversy that ensued in the columns of the Glasgow Herald was a decidedly unpleasant one for Sarah's supporters. It concluded with a letter signed ' Matthew Grant,' trom which we make the following extract: 'Soldiers, sailors, fellows of colleges may with impunity remain single, and live as they like and where they like; but it a Catholic lady exercises her freedom of choice, and elects to retire from the world to a life of voluntary seclusion, she is to be the object of slander and suspicion ; Mr. Rhodes

and Lord Kitchener may be " invincible celibates," and the latter an ardent advocate of celibacy, and no one therefore attacks either gentleman ; but let a Catholic •• receive this word,"and make himself an eunuch for the Kingdom of Heaven's sake (Matthew xix., 11-12J, and he is, according to your correspondent, " a monstrosity." However, the Catholic celibate priest can point to the Highest Exemplar of all ; and he knows that he that is without a wife is solicitous for the things that belong to the Lord, whilst he that is with a wife is solicitous for the things ot the world, and " is divided." '

' CIVILISING ' THE 1 ILIPINOS.

Learning is usually none too easy a task. Unlearning- is almost invariably ' dour wark.' Filling- the braui-cells with new ideas may be no worse than filling the cavities of a carious molar with amalgam. But the grubbing out of cherished old ideas that have grown to be, so to speak, the bone of your bone is generally unpleasanter, because more prolonged and radical an operation than tooth-extraction without the aid of cocaine or nitrous oxide or the other adjuncts of what is termed painless dentistry. Just now the Filipinos are going through the agony of shedding some of their old ideas as to the meaning of the word civilisation. Under the kind old friars who won them from the savage state and led them gently up the long ascent to Christianity and a high degree of virtue, comfort, education, and industrial development, they had been taught that religion and virtue lay necessarily at the root of all true civilisation. But other times, other ideas. True civilisation is one thing. ' Western civilisation,' as now in evidence in the Philippines, is quite another thing. And Uncle Sam is zealously forcing his idea of it, to the best of his ability, upon the luckless islanders— hypodermically, with the aid of sundry thousands of daggerbayonets and Krag-Jorgensen bullets and shrapnel shells. It finds its chief outward expression in much bad rum, in drunkenness, in church-looting, in a brutality of manners to which the courteous islanders were strangers before the advent of Uncle Sam's rough volunteers, in a flood of immorality till now unknown and undreamed of by a population that was singularly chaste, and in a shocking disregard for the sanctity of life, the sacredness of the domestic hearth, and the rights of property of the Filipinos. We have from time to time given specimens of the methods of the American white savage at large among the virtuous and educated brown people of those unhappy islands. Here is a further instalment, from a letter which appeared in the Springfield Republican of February 8 :—: —

An advance party went forward, but they were ssen too soon, and the natives had fled when we entered the village. We got a pop at a few, however, H dead being counted ; no prisoners were taken. Looting: was in order after our entrance. Little was found, however, a few bolos, a piece or two of jewellery, and some native cloth. Several shacks had smallpox patients in them. I saw a little boy about 10 years old and a little yrirl about eight years old led out of the town by their mother, after we had fired it, and they were a pitiful sig;ht. All had smallpox, and not a bit of clothing on. After the burning the town, we marched back.

How the Filipinos must indeed regret the Spanish occupation ! At his worst the much-slandered Don respected the people's churches, left their domestic hearths undefiled, and, even amidst the troubles of a double siege — by sea and land did not turn Manila by their vices or their cruelties into what an American writer describes it now with the stars and stripes floating peacefully above its ramparts : ' a hell upon earth.' Alas ! for the pleasant days when the Philippines were in fact and in name the Paradise of the Pacific. But when and oh ! when is the international code to be so modified as to effectually and for ever prevent the savage warfare against unarmed combatants — sick and dying women and children included — which has formed such a disgraceful feature in the American campaign in the Philippines ? It this is a ' benevolent assimilation,' what, in heaven's name, is conquest ?

WHAT AMASA THORNTON SAW.

The man who persistently shuts or bandages his eyes or perversely looks the other way won't see Mount Cook— or Mount Everest, for that matter — even though you plant him full square in front of it. But Mr. Amasa Thornton — who is an American Protestant — is evidently not afraid to look full at some of the big social-religious facts of his country and to make (so to speak) a trigonometrical survey of them and to draw them to scale and duly estimate their importance in the past and future of man-making — as opposed to mere porkraising or monev-getting — in the United States. He has (says the S. H. Review) recognised ' the absolute necessity of belief in revealed truth if a people are to remain civilised in the true sense of the term and moral.' The purport of a recent letter of his to the New York Sun was to 'deplore and oppose all things which tend to destroy religious faith, no matter what the character of that faith may be.' He points to the strong faith of the Puritan colonisers of New England and of the Catholic colonisers of Maryland as having produced a high standard of morality, and declares that 'the student of human development will be compelled to say that no stronger

Thk Privy Council has sanctioned the use of the following prayer for the dead as part of ' A Form of Intercession with Almighty God on behalf of her Majesty's Naval and Mili-

set of men and women were ever produced than were produced under the influence of the strict religious faith which existed in the United States up to a few years ago.' And (says our Boston contemporary) he adds what equally is largely true — that ' the men who have conducted the affairs of this country for the last 50 years, with its tremendous industrial developments, are men who were brought up and educated under the influence of an orthodox religion. 1 Mr. Thornton greatly deplores the manner in which the various Protestant denominations in the United States are drifting «o fast from belief in the Bible and from the old moorings of their faith, and adduces the Catholic Chuich ia the Republic as the best present and living proof of his statement that a strong religious faith conduces to the greatest purity of life. He says :—: — The best evidence of this is seen in the purity of the Roman Catholic women in the United States. Every man who knows anything at all about the subject will say that Catholic women as a class are very pure, and this is so becau°e of the religious faith which they posssesa. Here is another passage worth quoting fioin Mr. Thornton's letter to the Sun :—: — The Catholic Church teaches and insists upon a religion which accepts the doctrine of reward and punishment in the next world. There 19 no equivocation about it, and the result is that the training and education of the average Catholic in the United States makes him a respecter of property rights, keeps the lives of his wife and daughters pure, and is making the young American Catholic among the best of our citizens. That Church permits no divorce, and lam compelled to admit that it is very wise in that position. I do not gay that the Catholic Church is the ideal one, but I am compelled to say that the result ot its form, religious principle and uniformity of doctrine and teaching is tremendously in its favour. These two passages are worth remembering by New Zealand Catholics at a moment when their womanhood is assailed with foul calumnies and the Church of the ages denounced as the enemy of free institutions by wandering money-grubbers who, in the words of the Boston Pilot, started with no character, and who ' can no more be damaged by truth or falsehood than you can hurt a bad egg by pointing at it with the finger of scorn.' But, then, from such folk such attacks might be reasonably expected. To their followers we may aptly apply the words of the Eastern proverb : 'He that takes the raven for a guide, shall light upon carrion.'