Current Topics

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXIX, Issue 52, 26 December 1901, Page 1

Current Topics

Greetings ! The present number of the N.Z. Tablet will reach many of our readers during the joyous time When the soul exults And seems right heavenward turning, When we love and bless the hands we preps, As the Christmas log is burning. It will be placed in the hands of our more distant friends on the last day of the old year, when they will be preparing to pass by another mile-stone on the road of Time — when they will be leaning, so to speak, on the hitherward side of the time-post, and, hke the old Roman new-year god, turning the face of imagination to the future and that of memory to the past. To each and all of our friends we cordially wish • peace on earth,' and a happy New Year, and every blessing that the Babe of Bethlehem came to bestow. In Tiny Tim's brief, but glorious, prayer, we say : ' God bless everybody ! '

Record Rains. It has been raining * rnyther numerously ' in New Plymouth of late. ' Three and a half inches of rain,' says a telegram in last Friday's daily papers, ' fell during the night, the heaviest for over 30 years. Cellars and yards in the centre of the town were flooded, and a large number of poultry drowned, but no serious damage is yet reported in town or country.' We doubt if Hokitika can equal this performance. The New Plymouth people must not, however, lay the fluttering unction to their souls that their recent downpour establishes a world's record. An equal amount sprinkled London on April 13, 1878, and Mulhall, in his greatest work, tells us that seven inches fell at Ardrishaig (Argyle, Scotland), on December 7, 1863, that in twenty-four hours twenty-four inches fell at Bombay, thirty in the Khasi Hills (India), on each of five successsive days, thirty in Genoa, and thirty-three at Gibraltar. * A recent writer on meteorology has the following : ' One of the heaviest rainfalls yet recorded in the British Islands was 2*24 inches in 40 minutes in Lednathie, Forfarshire, during a severe thunderstorm on June 18, 1887. At Camberwell, London, 3*ll inches fell in 2 hours 17 minutes on August 1, 184.6. Of heavy rains during one day the following may be mentioned : Ben Nevis Observatory, 7.29 inches on October 3, 1890; Seathwaite, 6 7 inches on May 8, 1884; Tongue, 6 inches on September 7, 1870; Newport, Wales, 5*33 inches on July 14, 1875; and Camusinas, Argyllshire, 560 incr<es on January 24, 1868. The same authority give the following records of heavy one-day rainfalls in the United States : Brownsville, Texas, 1294 inches in September, 1886; Pensacola, 1070 inches in June, 1887; Key West, 7.80 inches in March, 1886; Shreveport, 7-54 inches in January, 1885; and a day's rainfall of five to seven inches,' he adds, ' is repeatedly recorded in the United States.' The storm-drenched inhabitants of New Plymouth can, therefore, extract some comfort from the reflection that other people, both white and dark, are in a worse case than they 'We have all strength,'

says La Rochefoucauld in his Moral Reflections, ' to endure the troubles of other people.' And this is, no doubt, calculate^ to give us some patience with our own.

Significance of Invective. When Daniel O'Connell found the London Times silent as to his general perversity and chuckle-headedness, he began seriously to examine his conscience to find out in what he had offended. The stage thunder of the Times and the tornadoes of abuse which it hurled at the Liberator were to him the most satisfactory evidence that the great cause for which he labored was progressing. English Catholics may find similar comfort in the whirlwinds of language, painful and frequent and free, that are made to circle around them by the various organisations who believe in the doctrine, falsely attributed to the Jesuits, that the end justifies the means and that the cause of the God of all truth may be legitimately advanced by methods beloved of the father of lies. A curious sample of this form of pious invective was submitted by Cardinal Vaughan to the recent half-yearly meeting of the Catholic Truth Society at Westminster. It is a manual of personal and domestic piety, bearing the rather vainglorious title, The Bible Reader's Very Best Companion. The Cardinal laughingly read trom it the following sample of ' langwidge ' that a decent Hottentot would have hesitated to use : ' That religious impostor and blasphemer, Cardinal Vaughan, is guilty of , the crime of supporting that old swindler, the Pope of Rome, and both of them ought to be sent to jail as religious rogues and vagabonds. Cardinal Vaughan is also guilty of breaking the law of 1850, and if he had his deserts would be imprisoned as a dangerous criminal. Possibly he will be at an early date. Let him expect to be dealt with in a thoroughly effective manner by several true Protestants, who are determined to cleanse our Protestant Empire from the pollution of his leprous presence. He is a most dangerous Jesuit, absolutely unfit to be allowed to li\e under the British flag.' * Cardinal Vaughan subsequently remarked that he thought there were at the present time a good many people who had become a little scared by the violence of attack of some of their non-Catholic opponents. There was (he added) no need, for that. To ascertain the position, about a year ago he went to the clergy of the Diocese of Westminster for a return of the number of converts during the preceding year, thinking that possibly it would be less than for the previous year. To his surprise, when the returns were tabulated, he found that the number of converts during what it was supposed would be a disastrous year had run up to about 300 more than in the preceding year. They were 1500, as against 1200. 'Therefore,' said he, ' you need have no fear of the bluster which has been made. Keep a good temper, and be good friends with opponents through all their controversies.'

A Proposed Established Church. The idea of making the Anglican denomination the Established Church of Australia displays the persistence of the Californian thistle — it is hacked and cut down and dosed with sulphuric acid, and you think it properly and peimanently

dead, when, suddenly, it throws up a sprout right under your feet. Some seventy years ago, before Victoria was colonised, the question of an Establishment was a particularly live one. It shook and jolted the whole of the struggling convict settlement that centred about Port Jackson. The British Government, however, gave the proposal its quietus at the time. It cropped up again, however, and has now been revived in the Imperial Review, a magazine published in Melbourne. In the course of an interview accorded to a representative of the Catholic Press, Cardinal Moran said that ' the movement seems to be taken up very extensively, especially by the representatives of the Evangelical persuasion. They are anxious to unite all the different forms of Protestantism, to have one strong phalanx to resist the domination of the Church of Rome, and they are ready to surrender their own individual tenets to have the Anglican Church recognised as the Established Church of Australia, corresponding to the Established Church in England.'

'There is nothing new in this movement,' said the Cardinal with a smile. 'It goes as far back as 1834, when there was an attempt made to have the Protestant Church officially declared the Established Church of Australia. One of the judges of the Supreme Court declared from the Bench that as a matter of fact the Anglican Church had as firm a hold in Australia as in England. However, this matter was referred tb the Home Government by the then Governor Bourke, the most enlightened Governor that has yet come to Australia from the Home country, when the Home Government decided that there was no Established Church in Australia, and that all denominations were on the same footing in the presence of the law. Successive Governments in Australia have professed to recognise this decision of the Home Government ; but as a matter of practical policy both the Australian Government and the Home Government have acted as if the Protestant Church had an established position among us. Hence all the appointments made, almost without exception, have come from that favored Church.'

Colonial Youth. To judge from an article in the N.Z. Times, most of the bad qualities of New Zealanders seem to have been imported along with our French ball-shoes, Brummagem watches, and American plug tobacco. Our good qualities are our own, and that, at least, is a comfort. Thus, our solecisms of speech came from the region of the Seven Dials, our low birth-rate is, like Worth gowns, a Paris fashion, and the spirit of irreverence of our Colonial youth — the theme of a thousand sorrowful or indignant pens — arrived by the 'Frisco boat. ' American methods- and ideals,' says the writer, ' have unconsciously permeated our family life, just as American machinery and implements are crowding our factories and farmyards. Children join in conversation ai table, expt ess contrary opinions to those of their parents, and d fend thuir vi ws with a courage worthy of a better cau-e. Any one who lias watched the young Colonial addressing the Premier or Governor has been astounded at the complete " sang froid " if the youth, his easy familiarity, his keenness in pressing his point and his complete unconsciousness of any social gulf between notabilities and himself. In the majority of Colonial homes we allow our children a latitude which gives newcomers quite a turn ; we tolerate objection and contradiction and even what looks dangerously like impertinence, and we correct the children when they overstep the mark not by the old-fashioned methods of external application, but by a mild remonstrance which only aggravates the evil. We consult the child, consider him and entertain him, are kind to him in the matter of his stomach, his back and his amusements ; but we are utterly inconsiderate to him as a being with a will to be trained. We make a god of him and then wonder that he does not worship us. The result raises the quesiion whether Plato's advice that no child should be reared by his own mother is not worth considering in modern times; and were it not that the method recommended by the Greek sage had been superseded by the Christian ideal of the home it would have been in vogue long ago.' Better things are, however, promised for the future. ' But,' says the writer of the article, 'the fault is with parents, for, according to the ancient philosopher, while few men feel themselves qualified to break in a colt, every man seems to think himself able to rear a child.'

Wanted: More Consideration. We are all familiar with the class of enthusiastic disputants who, having been convicted ol evolving- argumentative matter out of their inner consciousness, retort, in effect : Tant pis pour les faits — so much the w.orse ior the facts. It seems to be forgotten by them that a fact or two are at least as useful in discussion as an occasional joke is, according to Artemus Ward, in a comic paper. Of late we must have seemeti (to use Kingslake's words) ' odiously statistical ' and unpleasantly fact-full to those who, in the hope of securing a passing po'itical advantage, have been beating a clamorous tom-tom regarding the alleged

1 stuffing ' of the public service with Catholics. At any rate, we have succeeded in at least partially stifling the outcry, for the present, so far as Otago is concerned. The Oamaru MaiLi quoting our figures, says that our exposure of the charge 'mf* conspicuous for its calm dignity,' that * it is most convincing,' and that we did not, like those who raised the clamor, write 'at random, but after careful investigation.' ' The Colony,' says the Mail, ' is is much indebted to the Tablet's editor for having thus exposed the fallacy of a venomous accusation which is all the more dangerous because it tends to excite religious rancor.' And it appropriately suggests that, 'as other religionists, not Catholics, have been given the preference — if their preponderance in the service, in proportion to population, be an evidence of preferential treatment ' — those who have raised this theatrical storm about ' stuffing ' should, to be consistent^ 'insist on Catholics being treated with more consideration.' This is a phase of the question with which we intend to deal at the proper time.

The Anarchists. The anarchist question — which in these colonies is practically confined to sundry exhibitions by ' Weary Willies ' on the Melbourne and Sydney wharves — has bulked up pretty vastly in the American press since the murder of the late President M'Kinley. ' Arnychists,' says Mr. Dooley,' 'is sewer pas.' They go * again polis'men, mostly,' he adds — probably ' because pohsmen's th' nearest things to kings they can find.' A proposal has been made in all seriousness to deport the whole American fraternity, with their carving-knives and picrine bombs and infernal machines, to some desert island where they can hack and hew and blow one another to smithereens in peace. w

' Modern anarchy,' says the Boston Pilot, * had its origin in Communistic Socialism when at the Sociolist Congress, at the Hague, in 1872, the Russian Bakunin broke away from its too moderate propositions and set up the International Federation of the Jura in Switzerland. On the death of Bakunin, Krapotkin and Reclus, both men of a high order of intellect and liberal education, became the leaders of the movement. But mere expositions of the philosophy of anarchy — the right of the individual to happiness and the free development of himself, with the included right to oppose and destroy whatever stands in his way, as centralised power, religion, family, property, patriotism, etc. — did not satisfy the ignorant, irreligious, idle, or unfortunate and disconsolate men that rallied to the call of the cultured Krapotkin and Reclus. The anarchist mob wanted deeds, not talk. Bomb-throwing, with its hecatombs of dead and wounded, as in Chicago, Barcelona, Paris ; the assassination of rulers, as President Carnot in France, the Empress Elizabeth in Austria, King Humbert in Italy and finally President McKinley in the United States, " meant business," to the poor dupes of the anarchist philosophers, who cannot see that their own condition remains as bad as ever, for all the blood-spilling.'

Bakunin — who, by the way, was a dilapidated aristocrat from Moscow — 'passed in his checks' in 1876. But he was one of the leading spirits in the anarchist propaganda and is to this hour a living force in the movement. Here is a fragment of the anarchist creed, as it appears in his Revolutionary Catechism :

' First, the Revolutionary is vested with a sacred character. Personally he has no possessions, neither interest, sentiment, property, nor even name; all in him is absorbed by one object, by one thought, by one sole passion, the Revolution, Second, in the depth of hi 3 being he has broken in an absolute manner every bond with all the civil existing order, with all the civilised world, with all the laws, customs and systems of morality ; an implacable adversary, he does not live for other motives than to procure the destrucion of these. . . . The Revolutionary despises public opinion, and simultaneously hates and despises morality as it is practised in all its various manifestations. For him, all that favors the triumph of the Revolution is legitimate, and all that opposes it is immoral and criminal.'