Current Topics.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXIX, Issue 22, 30 May 1901, Page 1

Current Topics.

' Expansion ' has been for a good while very much in the air. Great Britain, Russia, Germany, France, Italy, have all been letting out their belts. Even Mr. Seddon has been casting about with a view to the formation of

UNDER THE STARS AND STRIPES.

an archipelagic commonwealth — the nucleus of a little empire — in the southern seas. It was, of course, inevitable that Uncle Sam should be bitten with the mania and search for some smaller neighbors whom he might devour — as inevitable as it is for a wealthy retired soap-manufacturer or maker of iron pots and brass kettles to purchase a gallery of ' ancestors ' and start a Family.

But in Uncle Sam's case, the expansion policy has had a result which is calculated to send an icy crickle down the spine of some even among those who in the most frenzied tones urged the Great Bird of Liberty to fix its talons in the ribs of Cuba and Puerto Rico and to flap its disengaged wing over the clustering and parti-colored populations whose home is in the distant Philippines. The result referred to is briefly this : that there are now considerably over twice as many Catholics under the Stars and Stripes as there are members of any other creed. They number close on 20,000,000, as against about 11,000,000 under the British flag. Of these Catholic subjects in the 'expanded' realms of Uncle Sam, there are in Cuba about 1,600,000; in Puerto Rico 1,012,400; in Hawaii 33,000 ; and in the Philippines (according to the report of the Taft Commission) 6,559,998 souls who are devotedly attached to their faith. Moreover, the United States now has under its allegiance more Catholics than any other country on the American continent. Brazil approaches it most closely, with a Catholic population of 14,179,615 in 1890. Mexico is a good second : it had about 12,500,000 Catholics in 1895. Peru lags far behyid with about 4,500,000 of our co-religionists in 1896. Argentina had less than 4,000,000 in 1895. And the rest are, in sporting phrase, simply nowhere.

FIVE MILLION VICTIMS.

of varying degrees of interest are being published with regard to the movement of population. A melancholy interest attaches to the statistics to hand from the two sick members of the Empire, Ireland and India. Those that regard Ireland aie dealt with elsewhere in our present issue. The partial census returns from India make heart-riving reading. They give, for the first time, a true conception of the results of the lean years that began with sharp and long-drawn starvation in 18961897, pinched and gnawed through a less aching scarcity in the two following years, and broke out in 1900 in the fearful spasms of one of the most agonising famines ot history.

The smug minimisers who affect to cure great social and political cancers with dainty sprayings of rose-water, cried

pooh-pooh when the agony of Black Forty-seven set its grip on famine-stricken Ireland. It was the same in India when the long-drawn drought of 1876-78 evicted 6,000,000 souls from the ribs and timbers of their starved and uninhabitable bodies. This is probably the greatest famine of which history bears a record, with the exception of that which swept China in 1878 and found 9,500,000 victims among the subjects of the TienTse or ' Son of Heaven.' Three quarters of a million of lives was the officially-estimated cost of last year's famine in India. But it was hopelessly short of the mark, and now, with the diminished census returns coming in from the famine-stricken areas, it is estimated that the two late famines have probably slain at least 5,000,000 persons — or far more than the total population, white and colored, of the Australian Commonwealth and New Zealand. In great portions of the vast hunger-provinces population has declined at a phenomenal rate. The Banswara and Khuvalgarb provinces, for instance, lost 22 per cent, of their population ; Jeysalmir, 35 per cent*; Bandi, 42 per cent. (124,000 souls); Bhopal's population is docked by 808,000 ; and the State of Oodeypore shows a decrease of 840,000, or 45 per cent. Famine deals out death wholesale ; war in penny packets. And yet through the clang of war the wail of the victims fell faint upon our ears and was but little heeded.

WATER, WATER !

Artemus Ward found that it rains ♦ rayther numerously ' in England. So does it, tpo, upon our West Coast, and — sometimes' at least — in Otago and Southland. People who live under mild and tearful .skies can scarcely appreciate the poetry of rain -drops ; it is only dwellers in hot summer-lands that can put ' beef ' into that sort of literature. Longfellow in one of his poems exclaims : ' How beautiful is the rain !' But he wrote of ' the rain, the welcome rain ' that comes After the dust and heat, In the broad and fiery street, In the narrow lane. One can fancy how welcome would be a pelting shower on that parched portion of the inhabited Peruvian littoral where (according to the auther of the Peruvian at Home) rain never falls. But the night-dews act as a tolerable substitute, and shrubs and vegetables have learned the art of temperance and manage to get on somehow on the short allowance of drink. But it is different with the rocky ridges and sandy plains of Central India. The rainfall is very uncertain. Night-dews don't come, or don't count for much. Nine-tenths of the population depend on agriculture for their modest subsistence, and when the clouds fail to break, the rice-harvest fails, and they are face to face with the slow torture of famine.

No fewer than 238,000,000 of India's teeming- population are living in this state of perpetual liability to famine. According to Lord Curzon, a quarter of all India suffered from the famine of last year. Besides the three great periods of scarcity already referred to above, 1,450,000 people (according- to Mulhall) died of starvation in India in 1866, and 'no fewer than 11,300,000 persons' perished from the same cause in the same afflicted country between 1866 and 1878. Other fearful famines swept the country in 1837- 1838 and

Prom end to end of the Empire census officials have lately been busy counting heads. Their returns are being gradually sorted out and added up, and from time to time figures

at various other times during the nineteenth century. And one of the recurrent periods of starvation in the preceding century carried off 3,000,000 victims. Government aid and private benevolence went hand-in -hand to relieve the everrecurrent distress of the later famines. But they merely touched the thin outer fringe of the trouble. They had perforce to leave the great mass of the sufferers to patch their grief with proverbs and die or recover as circumstances dictated, until, in a happy hour, Government decided to inaugurate a great irrigation scheme which would protect the dwellers on the plains of India from the hopeless irregularity of the rainfall, guarantee them a regular rice-harvest, and place them beyond the reach of their old terror, death by starvation. A good beginning had been made in the Ganges irrigation canal by the ' John Kumpanee.' The Government constructed the Nira Canal, the Periyar irrigation works, the Western and Eastern Jumna Canals, and a number of similar canals in the sterile province of Agra, that lies close to the first slopes of the Himalayas. Altogether some 30,000,000 acres of Indian soil are irrigated now, and the estimated increased yield is set down at not less than £60,000,000 a year. The first half of the nineteenth century • gave up ' the riddle of recurrent famine and handed it on to the Tatter half to solve. And for India the solution clearly lies in an enormous extension of irrigation throughout the provinces that have been scourged by a calamity compared with which war would be a dispensation of that mercy which droppeth as the gentle dew from heaven.

lowered national morality. In the ticklish question of comparative national morality one has to consider not merely the quantity of convicted crime in a country, but, above all, its quality— the relative proportion of grave to minor offences, etc. The ultraofficiousness ol the Irish constabulary is probably without a parallel even in Russian Poland. If practised in these free young countries it would create a little revolution within forty-eight hours. Is there, for instance, any civilised country where a small boy of eight years old could be arrested and placed in th*» l^ck-np and d'lly md solemnly hrnughf before a bench of magistrates for the crime of whistling a popular (not party) air called ' Harvey Duff' ? Or where else vii the surface of this planet could a desperate rebel of maturer age be not merely arrested, but arraigned and actually convicted of ' smiling comically at a policeman ' ? or another unspeakable traitor receive a sentence for ' winking at a pig ' while said pig was under the protection of the police pending its sale by auction to satisfy the claim of a rack-renting landlord against an evicted tenant. It reads like comic opera or the doings of Sancho Panza in his little island-kingdom of Barataria. And it is cornedy — high comedy, too. But comedy and tragedy sometimes meet and kiss, like summer sun-ray and summershower in a gold-fields valley. But desperate criminals of the type mentioned above swell the crime-list and enable honest but shallow nib-twisters in far New Zealand to pen paragraphs on the irredeemable perversity of those Catholic Irish.

THE * MODEST PROPOSAL.'

posal, which is a suggestion to relieve the distress by turning Irish babies into an article of food. The Modest Proposal is, of course, • writ saracustical,' as Artemus Ward would say : the product of that sceva indignatio, or fierce indignation at things in general, which gnawed at Swifts heart till its pulses were stilled for ever in death. After a characteristic preface the Dean discloses his proposal in the following words : ' I shall now, therefore, humbly propose my own thoughts, which I hope will not be liable to the smallest objection. I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance that a young healthy child well nursed is at a year old a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled ; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricasee or a ragout. Ido therefore humbly offer it to public consideration that of the 120,000 children already computed, 20,000 may be reserved for bread, whereof only one-fourth part to be males. The remaining 100,000 may at a year old be offered in sale to the persons of quality and fortune throughout the kingdom.' ' I have reckoned,' says he further on, 'upon a medium, that a child just born will weigh I2lbs, and in a solar year, if tolerably nursed, will increase to 281bs. I grant this food will be somewhat dear, and therefore very proper for landlords, who, as they have already devoured most of the parents, seem to have the best title to the children.'

Dean Swift had a remedy all his own for the recurrent and artificially produced famines that desolated the face of Ireland in his day. It is contained in his Modest Pro-

A MATTER OF RELATIVE CRIME.

land's 305, and of Ireland's 440.' And the inference drawn is decidedly uncomplimentary to the good behavior of the most Catholic portion of the British Isles. The curious averages published by our two contemporaries are decidedly open to objection— like Tom Hood's decomposing oyster. Suspiciously enough, they are accompanied by no tag giving information as to their source or age. But they have, to our palate at least, an ancient, fish-like flavor. They seem to be at loggerheads with some odd yards of columned returns before us on crime in the British Isles from sources that are both known and authoritative, and which cover the ground from 1876 to 1896, The suspicious-looking figures in our Auckland and Oamaru contemporaries have, indeed, the air of those statistical ' facts ' which are made to order for the edification of the marines.

• * • Of course only a person in imminent risk of a padded cell would contend that the moral character of a country is determined by the mere number or ratio of arrests or trials to population. The question is not definitely settled even by the mere number or ratio of convictions. There will be offences and misdemeanours and crimes, and consequently work for the ' pleeceman,' till the crack o' doom. But an over - loaded statute book or an overofficious police force or a long-drawn industrial crisis or a season or two of scarcity, or chronic poverty and discontent might swell the number of arrests and trials in any particular country without necessarily fixing upon it the stigma of a

SAINTS OF A CENTURY.

But for Catholics one of the most interesting summaries thahave come under our notice is a list of the decress of beatifica c tion and canonisation ordained by the Holy See during th c departed century. The list was recently prepared by th g Sacred Congregation of Rites. 'It shows,' says the St. Loui Church Progress, ' that the Pontiffs, Pius VII. (1800-1822) 1 Leo XII. (1822-1829), Pius VIII. (1829-1831), Gregory XVI* (1831-1845), Pius IX. (i846-iß7B),and Leo XIII., have pronounced 310 beatifications, while the names of seventy-eight holy men and women were put on the roll of saints. Leo XIII. has pronounced thirty-one beatifications and ten canonisations during his pontificate. Leo XIII. has taken particular interest in the martyrs who suffered under Henry VIII. and Queen Elizabeth. Nothing, it is said, gave him greater pleasure than the beatification of Cardinal Fisher, Margaret Pole, and Sir Thomas More. Two hundred and five out of the 310 persons beatified during the century were martyrs. Of the seventyeight canonised forty-six were martyrs, twenty-four confessors, and seven virgins. Of the 310 beatified, 206 died for the Lord, most of them in Japan during the slaughter ot the Christians there. The majority of the forty-six martyrs canonised suffered death in Tonqum in 1855, and later.'

Two correspondents of inquiring mind send us the following extract from an Auckland and an Oamaru paper : ' Out of every 100,000 of England's population 215 are tried for various offences in a year, of Scot-

THE PACTS.

hardly any crime in Ireland. The entire convict population of the country, male and female, numbers fewer than five hundred persons.' And again : 'In the whole of Ireland last year [1894-1895] only one hundred and seven males and eight females were sent into penal servitude, and the largest number of sentences were for the shortest term of penal servitude, namely, three years.' On a careful analysis of the gaol returns he made the significant discovery that at least fifty per cent, of the convictions were for no more heinous crime than drunkenness. Larceny and assault filled in a goodly portion of the remainder. No less than eighty-two per cent, of the convictions carried sentences not exceeding one month's imprisonment, and only three per cent, were for periods of imprisonment extending over three months.

All this is easily accounted for. There is very little serious crime in Ireland. ' Prisoners as a whole,' says a writer in the Pall Mall Gazette last year, ' have decreased by more than one-fifth during the last 20 years, and serious offenders are only i6 f3f 3 per 10,000 of the population, as compared with 25*4 per 10,000 in England.' Mr. Tighe Hopkins says in his Kilmainham Memories : ' 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 ' practitioners ; 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.' Once remove the causes of agrarian and political discontent, and Ireland will be about as nearly crimeless as it is well possible for any country to be.

In 1896 Mr. Tighe Hopkins published his Kilmainham Memories. In the course of this interesting book he says : ' There is

The facts and incidents of the nineteenth century have been classified and catalogued and summarised in a thousand various forms' since it took its flight * afay in de ewigkeit.t