Notes

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXIX, Issue 45, 7 November 1901, Page 17

Notes

A Child's Prayer. The Hartford (Conn.") Courant tells a droll Btory of a little seven-year-old daughter of Secretary Chandler E. Miller, of the Connecticut Humane S >ciety. The night the late President MKinley lay dying, the little maiden was overheard by her mother adding to her customary prayers the following- petition : ' God bless Mr. M-Kinley, and make him well. Bless the man who shot him . mako him a good m in — then shoot him ! ' ' * We are rather inclined to think that it was a sturdy American lad who put up the following petition before retiring to rest: ' Lord, make me strong, like liona an' tigers an' things, 'coa I'vegot to lick a boy in the morning.' A writer in the N.Z. Tablet told, a few yeara ago, how a small New Zealand maiden put an end to the distractions at prayer that were caused by her little brother tickling her feet.. She bore the torture as long aa she coald. Then, without moving her head, she said quietly : ' O Lord, 'scuse me while I knock the stuffin' out of Herbie.' And forthwith she smote her tormentor until he was glad to sue for peace at any price. Then she pursued the uninterrupted course of her orisons aa if nothing had happened.

The New Elysium. The site of the earthly paradise has shifted a good deal. In the Bardic days it was O'Brazil, the Isle of the Blest. But a recent explorer has found it in an appanage of New Zealand — the Chatham Islands, to wit. He say.s :' A inagintrate (who has rarely anything to do) and three Js.P. act as school and licensing committee year after year. There are no roai boards, no voting, no electoral roll, do rates or taxe-* (the dog tax is evaded with great unanimity, and the land tax is never collected), there's no poverty, there are no rescue homes refugee, neglected children, or criminals. There are two drink Btorea, but little drunkenness. Population 400, and everyone on the islands owns a horse.' There are probably no disputes worth speaking about on the islands — or, if there be, they are probably settled by the rough and ready arbitration of the old gold-field days : a twenty-foot and a bout at fisticuffs. A few years ago there was an adventurous lawyer on the Chatharus. Had he ' hung' on 1 he might at last have secured a mortgage over the islands. But he waa Btirved out and had to emigrate to New Zealand. And perhap 8 that's one reason why the Chatham Islands are an Elysium.

Making History to Order. We have all heard of the man with the hoe. Bat the Rev. Mr. Greenhough — so much advertised of late — oomes among us from over sets as the man with the whitewash-brush. He hu, apparently, a faith that is simple and childlike in the pleiooene simplicity of New Zealand audiences, for (according to the Taranaki Herald of Ootobfir 30), he has been telling hia audienoes in the Garden Province that the Puritans were (among other very excellent tbiDgs) the creators of religious toleration and individual liberty I Our reverend visitor from afar is entitled to take oat a patent for this disoovery, which will oome upon historians who write history, and not historical romance, with the suddenness and aplomb of a shock from a battery of Leyden jars. As to personal liberty, it is rather unfortunate for the Rev. Mr. Greenhough's theory that the Puritans (despite their many stnrdy good qualities) were sadly given to imprisoning, branding with hot irons, and flogging people who dared to wear coats, hair, bonnets, or skirts in a way displeasing to the elders, or to attend theatrical or other amusement!", or to take ' a day off ' from toil on Christmas or other old ohuroh festivals, or to whustle on the Sawbath. As regards religious toleration, it was a thing quite unknown to them. Cromwell hanged ' massing priests ' and would not tolerate the Mass, even in Catholic Ireland. The Puritan New Ed gland States retained penal enactments on their statutebooks till a comparatively recent date. The real originator of equal oitil and religious liberty and toleration to every creed was the Catholic colony of Maryland, and there the Quakers and the thousands of other victims of Puritan persecution found a home and the right to worship God in any way they pleased.

The ' Root ' of the Problem. Mr. Neleon, a Scandinavian publican residing at Whakarevrarewa. has turned for the nonce into ' a lit'ry chap ' and has been telling his friends the 'old salts,' through the columns of the Auckland Weekly Newt, sundry facts and fancies about a hurried trip which he recently made to Europe. The flood of well-merited ridicule which greeted the attempts of Wilkie Collins and Max O'Rell to describe Australia and the} Australians from the windows of a railway carriage might well deter amateur casual penmen from perpetrating such impressionist folly in other lands. But such common-sense considerations do not seem to hare weighed with mine host of Whakarewarewa. He has a few harmless superficial nothings to say about France and Germany. But— venenum tn canda— the sting is in the tail of his letter, the part in which he refers to his vißit to Ireland. Our Scandinavian friend entered the country accompanied, apparently, by a bundle of Exeter Hall tracts and a large vinegar cruet. ' One must admit,' he writes, ' that it is an extremely difficult and delicate task for an outlander to get at the root of the so-called •' Irish problem." ' But the ' difficult and delicate task ' turns out to be the merest intellectual trifle for the penetrating mind of the outlander from the sulphur-laden atmosphere of Whakarewarewa. A squint at Dublin, a rush across th« Bog of Allen to Gal way, and then off to New York, and presto ! he has dug up the ' root of the Irish problem,' examined its every tendril with Sam Weller's double magnifying electroscopic spectacles of hextra power, and finds that the microbe which causes the wrongs and woes of Green Eire of the Tears is — the priest !

Whakarewarewa has spoken. The cause is en^ed. Political economists must now revise their theories. Historians (Leoky included) must burn their books. Nationalists, Liberals, Unionist-Liberals, and Conservatives muat recast their political histories. The British Parliament mußt repeal a few score of its Aota relating to Ireland. The priest— voila Vennemi ! We did not know it before, but we know it now : the priest (and not a certain specific series of Acts of Parliament) destroyed the once prosperous Irish woollen trade, in the interests of British manufacturer!. The priest contrived (not the saving ' Ulster custom ' but) the infamous Irish land laws, which legalised the wholesale confiscation of tens of millions of pounds worth of property created by Irißh tenant farmers, which tore the roof -trees from over the heads of hundreds of thousands of the hapless peasantry and forced them to seek a home or a grave in foreign lands, and which produoed the recurrent famines, one of which swept a million of the maddened people off the face of the earth. It is the priest who over-taxes the im. poverished country to the merry tune of some £10,000,000 annually above its proper contribution. The priest is, of course, responsible for the fifty Coercion Acts passed in eighty years, for the habitual jury-packing, for the organised police conspiracies, for the imprisonment and hanging of thousands of innocent persons. And if the gimlet-minded outlander from Whakarewarewa burrows a little further to the root of the matter, he will, no doubt, find that it is likewiae the priest *who ' fills the butohers' shops with large blue flies.' The obvious remedy for the ' root ' trouble discovered so suddenly aud so auspiciously by Mr. Nelson ii to hang all the

priests in Ireland on a sour apple-tree — at any rate, to hang them. No fresh Aot of Parliament is needed to effect this. The existing machinery in the hands of the Irish Exeoutive is amply snffloient for the purpose. Dublin Castle has only to direct into the proper channel the chronic police-conspiracy for the perpetration and ' discovery 'of crime. Packed juries and Jack Ketch may be confidently counted upon to do the rest. And when the last priest is left swinging- under the drop, over-taxed, landlord-ridden, polioe-ridden, place-hunter-ridden, paoked-jury-ridden, Castle-ridden Ireland will suddenly cease to be the earthly hell-of -the-damned of her people and will miraculously blossom into a matohless Elysium. Mr Nelson is at home in Maori art and curios. But he would hare done well to hare made a close study of the ' extremely difficult and delicate ' Irish problem before dogmatising: upon it in the public press. His great discovery of the microbe of the ' Irish problem ' reminds us rather forcibly of Sir Paul Neal'a discovery of the elephant in the moon. The elephant turned out to' be a dead mouse in the telescope. Mr. Nelson's disoovery id likewise a ridiculug mmAnd after reading of it in the Auckland Weekly Aews we can well credit his statement that he began this famouß trip on All Fools' Day.