Current Topics

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXX, Issue 17, 24 April 1902, Page 1

Current Topics

The Cost of the War. The National Budget was delivered last week in the House of Commons by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and the figures he submitted and the increased taxation proposed will bring home very forcibly to the British taxpayer the enormous cost of the present war. According to the official figures, the cost of the war up to the end of the financial year 1899- 1900 was £33,000,000 ; at the end of the financial year 1900-iyoi the total had reached £96,000,000 ; and, according to Sir Michael Hicks-Beach, up to March 31 last, the aggregate expenditure on the war had mounted to £165,000,000. This, be it remembered, represents only the direct war charges, and takes no account of indirect expenditure. Some idea of the amount of indirect expenditure which this struggle has involved may be gathered from the fact that the total expenditure of the nation has more than doubled itself in the last three years. In 1898-9 it was, roughly speaking, £96,000,000; and in 1901-2 it was £196,000,000. To meet this growing expenditure there has been a heavy increase in the burden of taxation every year since the war began. In 1900 the income tax was raised from 8d in the pound to is, and heavy duties were placed on beer, spirits, tobacco, and tea. Last year the income tax was increased to is 2d, and fresh duties of 4s 2d per cwt on refined sugar, and is per ton on exported coal, were imposed. This year another penny has been added to the income tax, and new stamp duties, together with duties on corn and flour, have been imposed. Even with all this increase of taxation, the anticipated revenue falls short of the estimated expenditure for the year by £41,000,000 ; and to meet this the Chancellor of the Exchequer has been compelled to issue Treasury bills for £9,000,000, and to raise a loan for the remaining £32,000,000. Nor is this increase in the burdens of the people a merely temporary charge, to be withdrawn as soon as ever peace is declared. Competent authorities have gone into the question as to what the future has in store in connection with the administration of the new territory which is being annexed, and their estimate is that even after the war is over there will be an annual charge of about £20,000,000, left as a permanent legacy which the taxpayers at Home will be called upon to meet. Little wonder that John Bull is looking round for someone to help him, and that the Imperial Government are inviting the Colonial Premiers, during their Coronation visit, to consider a scheme by which the colonies will be called upon to share in ' paying the piper ' in all the Empire's future struggles.

Heavy as has been the mere money loss, the awful loss in men is much more serious. Month after month brings its fresh quota of victims and the terrible total steadily mounts up. In the official returns up to the 31st of January last the total casualties were set down at 86,459, but this does not include casualties among Colonials, civilians, and others of which the War Office .takes no account. Nine hundred and fifty one officers and 18,735 men were represented in this list as having been killed in action or died of wounds or disease. That was nearly three months ago and there have been heavy losses

since then. Altogether it is safe to say that considerably over 30,000 officers and men have lost their lives in the present struggle, to say nothing of the wounded, or the large number of men who have had their health and usefulness wrecked for life through the hardships they have undergone. No friend of humanity who reflects on these facts and figures can do other than express the hope that a settlement may be soon arrived at and that the present negotiations may be the immediate prelude to an honorable and lasting peace.

Savonarola. During last week a lecture on ' Savonarola * was delivered in the leading Baptist church in Dunedin by a clerical visitor from America in the person of the Rev. John R. Ward, of Chicago. As this is one of a series of lectures regularly given by Mr. Ward while on tour and will probably be repeated at all the other centres of the Colony yet to be visited by him, it may be well that we should make some brief reference to the matter and clear away some of the misconception and misunderstanding commonly current amongst our Protestant friends regarding the career of the great Dominican. As to the main facts of Savonarola's life there is little room for dispute. He was born at Ferrara in 1452. At the age of 23 he entered the Dominican Order in the Convent at Bologna, and six years later, in the year 1481, he was appointed to the Convent of San Maro in Florence. At first his preaching at Florence was an utter failure but, later on, his penance, zeal, and prayer were rewarded and his audiences outgrew the capacities of even the largest churches in Florence. The people flocked in thousands to hear him ; the confessionals were crowded with penitents; the very streets were filled with the music of hymns and psalms. He gained so complete a hold on the hearts of the people that at length, though nominally only a Dominican friar, he became virtually and by his influence the lawgiver and ruler of the whole city. Then came the inevitable reaction. His enemies, both ecclesiastic and lay, whose bad lives he had denounced, accused him to the Pope of heresy, of which he was undoubtedly innocent ; of disobedience ; and of imprudent zeal. He was forbidden to preach. For a time he obeyed, but believing, and with no little truth, that the Pope had been grossly deceived regarding him, he considered the inhibition as void and entered the pulpit again. In this he undoubtedly erred, and gave his enemies real ground for appeal to the Pope. In 1497 Alexander VI. excommunicated Savonarola, not on the ground of heresy but solely on account of his disobedience. He was subsequently arrested, tried before the Pope's Commissioners by the magistrates of Florence, and sentenced by them to be strangled and then burnt. The sentence was duly carried out. Savonarola was done to death ; the Medici and the licentious young nobles who had been driven out of the city returned, and ' things went on pretty much as before.'

The Rev. Mr. Ward's statement of the facts of Savonarola's life, is, so far as we could judge from the Press summary, reasonably fair and moderate. The only point that calls for criticism is his statement as to the significance of that life. The usual Protestant view is that Savonarola was the ' harbinger ' or precursor of the Reformation, whose special merit was that he prepared the way for the great upheaval of Luther's

time; and this is practically the view placed before the Dunedin audience by the Chicago lecturer. According to the Evening Star report the lecturer, asking the question as to the value of such a life, said it had its value; that ' it showed the impossibility of reforming the Church from within, and thus paved the way for Luther's reform from without, and all the advantages of the world's civilisation which the Protestant Reformation pave to us.' In othor words, the suggestion is that Savonarola, like Luther, attempted to reform the Church as a Church, the only difference between the two being a difference as to means and method. There is nothing whatever in the history of Savonarola, not a syllable in his preaching- or his teaching that would give any warrant for such a conclusion. His conflict with the Pope was in every instance connected with political, moral, or disciplinary issues, and had nothing whatever to do with any questions of doctrine. In every controversy he declared himself ' true son of the Church.' He was a reformer, indeed, but a reformer of morals and men, and never so much as dreamt of changing the constitution, the doctrine, or the nature of the Church. On this point all the authorities are agreed. The Protestant Sismondi admits that 1 Savonarola in no way departed from Catholic teaching, but confined his efforts to the restoration of morals and discipline.' ' It did not occur to him,' says Mrs. Oliphant, in The Making of Florence, 'to doubt the institutions of his Church or to question her authority.' 'He was no apostle of reform,' says J. A. Symonds in his History of the Renaissance. ' The spirit of Savonarola,' writes Macaulay, ' had nothing in common with the spirit, religious or political, of the Protestants of the North.' And Professor Villari, in his two-volume Life of Savonarola, sums the whole matter up in the following words : 1 To regard him as the leader of a party, a sect, or a system, is an error only to be committed by those unacquainted with the friar and his times. . . . It is impossible to read his books without being firmly convinced that, to the day of his death, Savonarola remained unswervingly faithful to the dogmas of his faith ; and that instead of seeking- to destroy the unity of the Church, it was his constant desire to render it more complete.' In the face of testimony such as that it is manifestly impossible for our Protestant friends to establish any sort of connection between the devoted and unselfish Savonarola and the turbulent, self-willed, domineering Luther. As to the rev. lecturer's remark about the necessity of reforming the Church from without, we need only point out that though Savonarola failed in his noble effort to effect reformation from within, the Council of Trent tried in after years, and succeeded.

'Through German Eyes.' Of late years the English people have had more than one opportunity of ' seeing themselves as others see them ' and the experience, though it is supposed to be a profitable one, has not usually been over-pleasant. John Bull, however, is getting so used to being criticised by candid friends that he takes it now quite philosophically, and it is probable therefore that the latest disquisition on England, though it seems to be the most vigorous that has yet appeared — and that is saying a good deal — will not receive an) thing more than a mere passing notice. It is embodied in a little book called ' Happy GoLucky Land,' written by Mr. Max Schmidt, and published by T. Fisher Unwin. Mr. Schmidt has lived for upwards of forty years in England, and in this little book he describes with remarkable plainness of speech the impressions and opinions he has formed of the English people during his long stay amongst them. Here is a specimen of his st>le, which v\e reprint from our contemporary the San Francisco Monitor. After a brief introduction Mr. Schmidt informs his English friends in a general way that, ' Upon the whole, you are the most ignorant of the great nations, and, at the same time, the most self-opinionated. You have more than the pride of a Spaniard, yet jou have but an apology for courtesy. You have more than the frivolity of a Frenchman, )et your frivolity is without intelligence. Hardly once, since I have known you, have you entered upon any .big undertaking without, at the outset, committing blunders which would have brought shame, if not ruin, upon any other people, yet you scarcely know how to blush, save at the behavior of your neighbors ; and certainly you are not ruined. 1 Providence permits you to prosper, and to prosper exceedingly ; but only congenital hypocrisy can allow one to suppose that it is because of your merits. Nevertheless, you all do suppose so. You all, I am suie, have a real belief that the Omnipotent congratulates Hims(lt daily on having such fine fellows as yourself as His allies, and that never can He properly repay the debt He owes you. While, therefore, you court national disaster continually, jou take the trouble neither to ktep dry jour powder nor, in any becoming sense of the words, to trust in God.'

Mr. Schmidt tlim descends to particulars. The Btitish Government, the Army, the Navy, the Church, the F.ducation System, the British devotion to sports, are all dealt with in the >.ame diastic fashion, and denounced in terms which Kipling

himself might almost envy. Then Mr. Schmidt sets himself to describe the social life of the people, and begins with the casual intimation that Britain is ' the most drunken of nations.' Here is the introduction, as given in the Monitor, of his chapter on ' British Drunkenness ' :: — ' One of the most depressing-, and, indeed, sickening characters of the British Empire at home and over sea, is the prevalence of habitual and swinish drunkenness. The vice is not confined to any class, nor is it invariably the outcome of misery and want. Especially in Scotland, and in some of the colonies it is common among people who are ostentatiously, and, perhaps, in their way, sincerely religious. It is not, as elsewhere, almost entirely restricted to men. In the streets of all your big cities a drunken woman is so common an object as to be scarcely remarkable.' If this sort of thing came from what Mr. Dooley calls the * rapid-fire pote ' Kipling, or from our own Bulletin no one would feel at all astonished, but it does give one a shock of mild surprise to find anyone with the unaggressive name of Schmidt letting off such a fusilade. One thing is certain. If Mr. Schmidt expects to get any sale in the ' Happy-Go- Lucky Land ' for any of his future publications he will have to revise his vocabulary and cultivate the apparently neglected art of ' breaking it gently.'

An Anglican View of the King's Oath. It is sincerely to be hoped that the agitation for securing a change in the terms of the blasphemous Coronation Oath which the King is, under the existing law, compelled to take, will not be allowed to die away or slacken off, for while there is undoubtedly an overwhelming weight of public opinion throughout the Empire against the odious Declaration it is equally certain that the Imperial Government are not themselves sufficiently interested in the matter to make any active move in the direction of reform unless the force of this public opinion is brought very strongly to bear upon them. In this connection we are glad to note that the Catholics of Ontario, Canada, have recently sent a vigorous and outspoken protest to the Home Government against the insults levelled against the King's Catholic subjects by this impious oath, this being the second remonstrance from Canada on the subject. We note also that the matter still engages the attention, from time to time, of various Protestant bodies and the general trend of enlightened non-Catholic opinion is strongly against the oath. At a recent Anglican Synod held in Goulburn, New South Wales, the Rev. J. A. Newth moved a formal resolution protesting against the insult to Catholics involved in making the King declare their doctrines • superstitious and idolatrous, and in doing so gave perhaps the best exposition of the objections to the oath that we have yet seen. The rev. gentleman's speech not having been fully reported, the Catholic Press wrote to him for his manuscript and the extract which we give below is taken from our contemporary's full report of the address.

After referring in a very gentlemanly and Christian way to the doctrinal differences betwrtn the Church of England and the Catholic Church, Mr. Newth continued : ' And because, forsooth, we do not hold Rome's doctrine of the invocation of saints and of the Mass, we must insist on the King's making a declaration that they are " superstitious and idolatrous," must we ? The Presbyterians in the General Assembly in Sydney have said " No," even the Wesleyan Methodists in tneir conference have said " No," and we, I hope, for the credit of the diocese, will also say " No." In the first place, because it is absurd for the King to have to make this declaration ; for the King is not a theologian, and no one supposes him to be competent to lay down the law on these vexed theological questions, to really know anything about them, and why, therefore, should he be expected to say anything about them? In the second place, because it seems preposterous that the King, who is only the temporal head of the Church of England, should, as a condition of receiving the Crown, be subjected to a more rigid religious test than is demanded of even the Archbishop of Canterbury, its spiritual head ; for the Archbishop of Canterbury is, I need hardly say, only required to give a general assent to the 39 Articles as a whole, and not to declare that he receives what they say of the Mass, etc., " without mental reservation of any kind whatsoever " — in the third place, because it is no real safeguard, for if the King were secretly a Romanist, it is not likely that he would not find some way of making the declaration for all that. He might be advised, perhaps, that it was virtually an oath taken under compulsion, and, therefore, null and void ; or that he might take it " without any mental reservation of any kind " that his subjects were entitled to claim of him, or with some other grain of salt that might be offered. ' And last, but not least, we object to this oath, because it is wrong, because it amounts to persecution, for which no good cause can be shown, wounding to the quick as it does a large and influential section of the community, many of whom fill the highest positions of rank and honor in the Empire, and are among the most loyal of his Majesty's subjects. No wonder

that King Edward's voice is said to have barely risen above a mutter when he made the declaration on the last occasion upon which, we hope, it ever will be made. ' If the Roman Catholics were not allowed to celebrate Mass in the British dominions, as was of course the case at one time, then there would be some consistency in the King's declaration ; but if, as we do, we leave them perfectly free to carry out their own forms and ideas of worship, and not only this, but if these very same for ms and ideas of worship, if the Mass and the invocation of Saints, are tolerated in the Church of England itself, surely we are only straining at a while we are swallowing a camel if we object to the King being excused from calling them names.' That is admirable and we commend it to the favorable notice of our Anglican friends throughout this Colony.