CARDINAL MORAN AND SAMOA.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXI, Issue 6, 5 February 1903, Page 16

CARDINAL MORAN AND SAMOA.

HE Sydney < Daily Telegraph ' and some of our New Zealand papers who were in a hurry to follow that rabid anti-Catholic journal in its recent abuse of Cardinal Moban are now probably feeling rather sorry for themselves. It > is fortunately seldom that a great city daily shows itself so ready, at the instigation of an utterly obscure and insignificant bigot, to make a set attack on a Prince of the Church : it is certainly seldom that a metropolitan journal of any standing meets with such a very bad ' fall in.' Nor, so far aa-the general public is concerned, is there likely to be any sympathy with the • Telegraph in its present humiliation. The animus of the paper was so unmistakable, the method of its attack was so thoroughly dishonest and discreditable, that fair-minded people of all shades of religious opinion could scarcely have any other feeling than one of positive enjoyment at the spectacle of its self-provoked and richly-deserved discomfiture. • The full details of this Samoan controversy and of the Cardinal's crashing reply to his critics are given in another column, and we only propose here to draw attention to one or two of its more salient points. Before referring particularly, however, to the Cardinal's latest utteiance°it may make the position cle irer if we briefly recall the incidents connected with the discreditab'e international squabble which ended in the high-handed action of the Gove. nments of Great Britain and the United States in Samoa in 1899. Samoa was famous as the spot where k three Empires meet * possession of the archipelago being shared by Germany Britain, and the United States. Neither of the three Powers, however, was willing to concede any advantage to any of the others, and a convention was signed in 1889 guaranteeing the independence of Samoa and the right of the natives to choose their own ruler in accordance with local custom. Unfortunately a somewhat arbitrary judicial organisation was also arranged, consisting of a Supreme Court with one judge, a white man, who happened in the first instance to be an \ merican. Under such an arrangement it was inevitable that there should be friction and serious trouble arose in 1898 over the election of a successor to King Malietoa Laupepa who died in that year. The native choice fell on Mataafa! an able and gallant chief, whom Kobeet Louis Stevens n has described as an ' ideal king.' Mataafa, however, was a devout Catholic, and his election was, consequently, intolerable to the Engish and American missionaries in' the island. Unfortunately for the natives the clause in the convention granting them full liberty to elect their king in theii own fashion was modified by another empowering the Chief Justice to set their nominee aside if such a measure were necessary in order to avert war. It was rot pretended in this case that such an emergency had arisen, but the Chief Justice, a Mr. Chambers, who is described as 'a third rate American lawyer, who identified himself in every way with the Protestant; missionaries,' vetoed the election on other grounds, and a young Protestant divinity student of seventeen, named Malietoa Tanu was nominated in his stead. Mataafa, of course, took up arms to defend his rights, and completely routed the weakling whom the missionaries were attempting to foist upon the natives. The

British then, in concert w.ith the Americans, began a campaign of their own on Tanu's behilf ; they refused to recognise the Provincial Government established by Mataafa ; and they entered on a course of practically indiscriminate burning of plantations and_ bombardment of native villages, it was iheir high-handed and altogether unwarrantable action in this regard that called forth the original striotures of the Cardinal, and it was by reason of the logs and damage inflicted by these proceedings that the two Powers had to submit the whole matter to the arbitration of the King of Sweden. So far as the islands were concerned the final outcome of the squabble was that the kingship was abolished ; that Great Britain, in return for compensation received elsewhere, ceded all her rights to Germany and America, that the magnificent harbor of Pago Pajjo passed to America, and all th 3 larger islands were annexed to Germany, and that thus, as Cardinal Moran expressed it, ' the wuole Saraoan group, the gem of the South Pacific, has been permanently withdrawn from the influence of the Australian Commonwealth.' * The comparatively mild controversy which followed the publication of the Cardinal's strictures in 1899 had long ago died dowa when the matter was renewed the other day by the publication by one Rev. Woolls Rutledge of a stupid falsehood to the effect that Cardinal Moran had been compelled to apologise to the British Admiralty for the statements he had made. Woolls Rutledge is a quite notorious firebrand who has, during the past twelve months, repeatedly made himself and his faction ridiculous by the publication of absurd statements about Catholics for which he was unable to advance a single particle of proof, yet so eager was the ' Telegraph ' to pander to its Oraage patrons that it at once took Rutledge under its wing, and on the strength of statements made by this insignificant zealot itself proceeded to make a violent attack upon the Cardinal. The Cardinal waited for a few days until his opponents had worked themselves up to white heat, and then delivered a reply which fell with crushing force, and which left the ' Telegraph ' a laughing stock in the eyes of the whole community. That journal, in a leading article iv its issue of January 8, had deliberately made the following charge against his Eminence :—: — ' The statement originally made by his Eminence was that ip the Samoan troubles of some years ago some of the Protestant missionaries at Samoa went so far as to use their influence with some of the commanders of British warships to get them to shell the Catholic presbytery and church, where hundreds of old and infirm had taken refuge. He (the Cardinal) proceeded to s;iy that the British guns were timed npon and shelled the church and pr>byte>y with the knowledge that they were filled with these defenceless people, and, indeed, upon that account.' The Cardinal, in a passage which loses none of its force because of its quiet dignity, explained euic ly what he did siy, and convicted the ' Telegraph ' out of irs own mouth of a distortion or suppression which it is d fficult to fittingly characterise. 'If we are to believe the editor of the " Daily Telegraph," ' said bis Eminence, ' I accuse the officers in question of perpetiating the outrage suggested by the missionary a rent. What 1 did pay was precisely the contrary, that is that they refused to perpetrate the wished-for outrage. . . . I turn to the columns of the " Daily Telegraph" of June the 26th, I8i)9, and I find the following report of my words :—": — " Some went so far as to vs 3 their influence with S)me of the commanders of the British warships to get them to shell the Catholic presbytery and church, where hundreds of ol 1 and infirm had taken refuge. Owing to the prudeme of the officers no such outrage was perpetrated." Thus, whilst t expressly stated that the British commander did not yield to the sugge-iion so foully made, and d:d not ptrpetrate the propose! outrage, and whilst I commended their prudeice. in adopting such a course, the elitor would f. in lead the public to believe that 1 imputed to the officers in qius ion the weakness and the guilt of yielding to the wicked suggestion and of perpetrating the desired outrage. I consider that lam more than justified in calling oi the editor of the '• Daily Telegraph " to acknowledge tl at in his over-hurry to cast a pebble at the Church hi was betrayed itfto an egregious error, and has made, in

ray regard, an offensive statement quite the reverse of the truth.' It will be seen at a glance how entirely the Cardinal was misrepresented, and how gross was the perversion of which he was the vie im. We would be glad to think that the mis-statemeut was the result, as the Cardinal charitably put it, of • over-hurry,' but the fact that the leader of January 8, in the first sentence of its accusation, uses identically the same words as occur in its report of 1899, seems to show that the earlier files had indeed been consulted, and forces us to the painf uj conclusion that the * Telegraph ' misrepresentation was wilful and deliberate. • So far was the Cardinal frqm imputing the evils of the war to the individual officers engaged in it that, as he said of himself in his recent speech, ' when Lieutenant Lonsdale and Ensign Monaghan were killed in the ill-devised attack on Vailele, I took occasion in a public discourse in Sydney to pass a high eulogy on those officers. I Delieve I was the only ecclesiastic of any denomination in Sydney who bestowed any words of praise npon them, and it was cheeiing to find that my feeble words of well-deserved eulogy brought consolation to many bereaved homesteads in the United States, as the letters addressed lo me attest.' The actual which the Cardinal has made in connection with this Samoan business is thus expressed : * I have repeatedly laid the blame of the disgraceful and disastrous struggle at the door of the Protestant [missionary agents, and I am convinced that it is on their shoulders the main share of the responsibility must ultimately rest. I do not, however, by this intend to exempt from all blame the other officials who were engaged in the shameful proceedings.' This charge his Eminence proceeded to prove to the hilt by citing the testimony of a great number of authorities — authorities almost all of whom were absolutely disinterested and unimpeachable. The ' New York Independent,' Mr John George Leigh, Mr Lloyd Osbourne, who was the son-in-law of Robert Louis Stevenson and Vice-Consul of the United States in Samoa, the ' New York Evening Post,' the * Fortnightly Review,' the London 'Academy,' the Protestant teachers themselves, all are called as witnesses, and their cumulative evidence as to the brutality of the war and the culpability of the missionaries is practically irresistible. His Eminence clinches his contention by an appeal to the award just made by King Oscar of Sweden, in which the Royal arbitrator, who was assisted by three eminent jurists, gives a final and authoritative decision that the action 'of the American and British warships in Samoa in April, 1899 was illegal and unwarranted, and orders that more than 1,000,000 dollars be paid by the two Governments as compensation for the damages inflicted by the bombardment. In the face of such facts and such evidence it cannot possibly be preti nded that the Cardinal made his charges recklessly or thoughtlessly or without first taking care to make perfectly sure of his ground. » The attempt made by the ' Telegraph ' and its friends to get out of the difficulty in which they found themselves after the Cardinal's exposure was feeble in the extreme. The ' Telegraph,' like a whining school-boy, said in effect : ' Please, sir, it wasn't me,' and protested that it did not make the scatemems which had been proved to be so absohrely false, but that it ' quoted them from letters which appeared in our columns within the last few days. 1 That of course, is mere subterfuge, as, in the passage quoted by the Cardinal from the leader of January 8, the paper makes, 'off its own bat,' the statement it now seeks to saddle on its correspondents. The Evangelical Council, as representing the Missionary Societies, tries to find a way of escape by calling for the appointment of a Royal Commission to investigate the matter, but in view of the well-known fact that even an Imperial Royal Commission would now have no junsdiction whatever in the Islands t'nd would therefore be incompetent to make a satisfactory mv stigation, it would setm that this move is made rather with the view of ♦ saving the face ' of the Societies than in any real hope of eliciting the truth. For the rest, all that the ' Telegraph ' can now find to cavil at in the Cardinal's position is his Eminence's statement that he ' should probably have said that the Samoan pro- - ceedings were far worse than the Armenian outrages, for th ; reason that two great Powers were responsible for them, and

they were perpetrated with the semblance of legality, in the name of civilisation and under the mask of justice.' We mention this matter because our contemporary the ' Otago Daily Times' — whose fairness in printing practically the whole of the Cardinal's reply we gladly acknowledge — also protfbts against this statement, declaring that it is an extraordinarily strong statement to make seeing that the Armenian atrocities" involved the murder of thousands of Christians and the torture of and violation of helpless women and children. Our contemporary has apparently missed the Cardinal's point. His Eminence clearly did not mean that the Samoan outrages were in themselves worse than the Armenian atrocities, but that, from the moral point of view, they were more blameworthy, seeing that they were perpetrated by two nominally Christian. Powers, under a show of legality and in the professed interests of civilisation and justice. On all counts, then, the Cardinal's position is practically unassailable, and he has manifestly nothing to fear from any number of Royal Commissions. • Although the position of the Church was not in reality in any way involved in the issue of this controversy, yet the Cardinal's victory over his opponents, and his complete vindication of his position, can hardly fail, from the Catholic point of view, to do real and lasting good. If the 'Telegraph ' made its attack in good faith — which we confess we honestly find it almost impossible to believe — the mess in which it landed itself will probably have opened its eyes to the true character of the company it has to keep when it elects to throw in its lot with the bigots and the Orange faction. If it was not in good faith the Cardinal has taught it a wholesome less and greatly weakened its power for mischief by making it ridiculous in the eyes of every intelligent member of the community. As for the smaller fry of faction-mongers it would be impossible to make them more ridiculous than they have already made themselves, but their exposure on this occasion will at least help to strengthen the feeling of contempt and disgust with which the better class of citizens in Sydney have now come to regard them. Notwithstanding the talk about a Royal Commission, the Samoan incident, for all practical purposes, may be considered cloßed, and the net result of the controversy, we venture to predict, will be that the Cardinal and his people will enjoy immunity from attack for some considerable time to come.