Current Topics

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXI, Issue 21, 21 May 1903, Page 1

Current Topics

w The Victorian Strike The Victorian railway strike has happily ended. The loco-wheels spin round again, and the State's disorganised traffic is gradually resuming the even tenor of its way. The strike makes history as being, perhaps, the only ' call-out ' in the story of the labor movemenl that was wholly unconnected with questions of wages or conditions of work. It paralysed, for the time being, the internal and external trade of Victoria, cost the State some £10,000 a day while it lasted, inflicted serious hardships on the poor by the partial cessation of factory and other employments and the greaitly enhanced cost of living, and has resulted in making the last state of the strikers themselves worse than the first.

Kings alone formerly made war — this sacrosanct right was one of their little perquisites. For some decades after the rise of constitutional monarchies, Ministries succeeded to the function of national blood-letters. Then for a time — so far as Europe was concerned — the Trothschilds took a hand in the game. But during and since 1870 the great daily papers have been the arbiters of war and peace. For this reason Mr. Labouchere recommended the poisoning of newspaper editors, as a procautionary measure of public safety, when any grave trouble begins to orise between two nations. The big Australian dailies, which represent the capitalist interest, seem to have been the chief mischief-makers in connection with the recent railway troubles in Victoria. The difficulty that cropped up between the railway unions and the Government was capable of easy and pacific adjustment. But a large class of secular dailies cannot see the flicker of a small fire without jabbing a poker into it, pouring the crude petroleum of their ruurk,y thought upon it, and warming themselves at the blaze. They hastened from the outset to fan into a public crisis what began, and might have ended, as a passing departmental difficulty ; they obscured the issues by party watchwords and much whooping and view-hallooing, ; they needlessly nroused angry passions on both sides ; and their action set labor and capital for the time being at each other's throats over a question that did not properly belong to the domain of either. In public ferments sane people try to keep their feet warm and their heads cool. But the atmosphere with which the Australian capitalist press surrounded the railway disptate was not suited to cool thinking. It was as irritant as if charged with vapor of ammonia. To this circumstance were, no doubt, in great part due the needless bluster and the lamentable want of tact on the part of the Victorian Ministry which ended in that angry and peremptory ultimatum to the unions, when the whole question in dispute — the legal value and Interpretation of Railway

Regulation No. 33— could and ought to have been settled by the simple resort of a friendly test-case in court, or set at rest beyond even the forlorn-hope appeal of a strike by the legislative voice of the very Parliament which was specially summoned to deal with the crisis. ' No,' said the Yankee quack to the anxious mother, ' I can't cure your boy's jaundice. But let him take thia bottle. It'll give him fits. An' I'm death on fits.' The Victorian Ministry seems to us to have been a contriUuting cause of the ' fits ' from which the State haa just been suflering. And we are by no means disposed to add a contribution to the ' cords of glory ' which mostly party newspapers have piled upon them over the termination of this strange, eventful strike.

There can be no dispute as to the necessity end benefit of union among- the workers. It has raised them up morally, mentally, and socially, improved their wages, shortened their hours of toil, brought about conciliation and arbitration in trade disputes, and ended those inhuman conditions of labor that made ilactory life in England a form of slavery from the early days of the industrial revolution till close on the middle of the nineteenth century. There should be no restriction on the workers' right of association beyond those that the service of the State and the best interests of the public clearly, demand. Dut a strike is a dangerous weapon. It claps a brake on the wheel of national progress, it commonly furnishes an occasion for bitter enmities and gra\e disorder, and it usually inflicts hardshipa (upon innocent poor who he outside the scope of its immediate interests and operations. Like the war of rifle-bullets and shrapnel-shells, it should be entered upon only as the last remedy for serious wrongs when all other reasonable means have failed. In his ' Economy,' (one of the Stonyhurst Manuals of Catholic Thilosophy), Mr. Charles S. Pevas says :—: — ' Strikes are only justifiable when they aim at some benefit for the workmen which it is unjust in the master to refuse, and which can only be obtained in this way ; and it is only too unlikely that these two conditions will not bo fulfilled, and that the strike will in consequence be an injustice. And in some industries and employments which minister to the daily wonts of society, strikes produce such inconvenience, that if they became frequent, no civilised Government could endure them : for example, general strikes of coal-miners, or dockworkers, or even local strikes of workers on railways, or tramways, or „in gas-works.' It would be difficult to justify, on any grounds, the railway strike that has just come to an end in Victoria. But now that the state of war Is over, men of prudence will find only words of comdemnation for the undignified exultation and the intense party bitterness with which a section of the Victorian daily press adds a fresh and needless aggravation to a situation that requires a judicial frame of mind, tern*pered with that mercy which seasons justice.

Mixed Marriages < There is hardly a point of religious doctrine or practice, however vital to man's eternal well-being, that has not been made by those outside the Catholic Fold the subject of endless clapper-clawing and more or less violent debate. But, amidst all this turmoil of contending theories, there is one point on which the heads of all the various Protestant creeds, as well as of the Hebrew faith, are in practically full agreement with us : namely, in their objection to mixed marriages. In the Jewish Church the legislation against such unions is oven more drastic than ours. Under a Williamite law in the defunct and unlamented Trfsh penal code, if any Protestant woman, possessed of land to the value of £500 or over, wedded any man without a certificate from a bishop, minister, or magistrate, that he was ' a known Protestant,' both she and her husband forfeited their estates. Any person who gave a" Protestant in marriage to a Catholic was liable to a year's impi isonment and a fine of £20. An Act passed in the twelfth year of George I. imposed the penalty of death without benefit of clergy upon any ' Popish priest ' convicted of marrying two persons, either of whom was a Protestant. By an Act of the nineteenth year of George IT. all such marriages were declared null and void. And till 1870 it was a crime punishable by two years' imprisonment, or a fine of £500, for any priest to celebrate a marriage between two Catholics if either or both of the contracting parties had not been Catholic for at least tweho months beforehand. We may add that in the Orange lodges to this hour expulsion and all its attendant disabilities await the ' brother ' who marries, or even keeps company with, a Catholic girl.

A few weeks ago, at Newton-le-Willows, the Protestant Bishop of Liverpool poured a salvo of hot-shot at marriages between Anglicans and Catholics. In his ■>. lew, those mixed unions operate to the benefit of the Catholic faith and to the disadvantage of Anglicanism. The Catholic Bishop of Liverpool (Dr. Whiteside), howe\er, put a different complexion upon the affair in a subsequent discourse in the same town, and bacVed up his contention with figures which are of interest to us m these countries and add a fresh justification — if that were needed — for the attitude of strong disapp,ro\ al with which the Church regards unions between peisons of difTeient faith. ' From the returns of the Newton mission,' said Bishop Whiteside, ' there were 144 mixed marriages m a period going back it might be forty Amis, and in all those cases Catholics entoi tamed the \eiy strongest hopes that the non-Catholics would come o\or to the Catholic religion. But in how many cases had That hope been realised ° In only 13 cases In I.M cases they had not resulted in comers-ion to the Catholic Chinch Had there been any iases in which Catholics had become Protestants? He was sorry to fay 4.'i Catholics had become Protestants N T o wonder the Chinch detested mixed marriages What could a priest say when a girl talked to him about the hope of comeision with those figures befoie linn? And the figures weio almost the same thioughout the diocese r J he pi lest might ?-a\ , and with truth, to anyone who spoke of comeision, that there was jrst as much likelihood of a Protestant becoming a Catholic as a Catholic becoming a 1 rotestant And ho they could judge of the past Theie weie no less than 87 child ten the is±,ue ol those 4.) mixed rnatnagis, and they wete being brought up as Ii i.U stants No wonder the Chinch hated and detested such marriages when she saw her children being lost in that way. It was the duty, therelore, of the paients to put down their feet when their children kept company with those who were not of the faith.'

Statistics that appear in Dr. Williams' ' Christian Life in Germany' (published m 1897), gi\ c substantially similar results. Exceptionally — and owing in a gieat measure to the possession of a catalogue ot laic good qualities by both patties to the conttact — n; \ed marriages may turn out well But the coninon expetiemem these counti les as itt (.Vrmutiy is this : that no form of religious behet benefits by them . that, ta T en altogether, Christianity is the loser and lnditTerentisin and infidelity the ultimate gainer by those ill-assoited unions, the parties to which are out ot tune with each other in those sacred beliefs and emotions which should i crietrate and direct every thought and act ol their lnes.

Rough on the Stage Irishman One of the peculiarities of the French theatres is the corps of paid claqueurs whose business it is to bestow upon the actors, at judicious intervals, a warm measure of that applause which is supposed to be a stimulus to noble minds It is a bad principle that does not work both ways, like a double-ended ferry-boat. And the coarse degeneracy of the French stage of late years gave Senator Beranger the idea of organising a hissing brigade, on the lines of the claq,ueur corps, for the purpose of discouraging the growing indecency of dramatic representations in the gayest capital. ' True stage censorship,' said the Senator to a representative of the New York ' Herald,' ' has become such a mockery that I have favored organised hissing. No law permitting hissing is needed. Buying a ticket gives the right to hiss. The privilege is undisputed. But one man's hissing starts a not, and he is ejected as disorderly. Right-minded men and women must act together. Then the police will not dare to interfere. There is a sort of freemasonry among authors and journalists here, and often the latter produce the worst plays, as no help comes from that direction.'

A somewhat similar organisation has been created by the Irish societies in New York and Philadelphia for strewing the path oi the ' stage Jlnshrnan ' with thorns and spikes and broken glass. Their first organised efforts were directed against a coarse caricature entitled •McFadden's Row of Flats.' The ' demonstrators/ howe\er, went far beyond the modest and reasonable campaigning methods of Senator Beranger. They pelted the periormers with apples and vegetables ; they shelled them with over 200 conspicuously ancient eggs ; they painted the stage pig and donkey an odorous and dripping yellow, landed an omelette in his ear, smote the whiskers of the loud Yahoo who played the part of the Irish p'leeceruan, damaged the green beard of the ape who took the part of McFadden, and chased the slatternly, drunken ' Irishwomen ' off the stage amidst a scene of great excitement. A few nights later the ' play ' was repeated in Philadelphia. So was the demonstration Over-ripe eggs and other promiscuous missiles are, not, howexer, the most effective method of dealing with the sometimes indecent, always coarse and \ulgar and apish \ allots who hold up Jiishmen and liishwomen to ridicule and derision upon the stage. 'If the lush people,' sa\ s the Boston 'Pilot,' cannot cut off t hi-, duty stream of immorality and insult they are themsehes to blame. Aim at the pockets, not at the heads, of the enemy , the shillelah is played out ; the inoi'em Jrihh weapon, the boycott, is the thing , absent tiiatment is the medicine '

The hissing brigade or a departure en masse from the hall is effect i\e where — as sometimes happms e\ en at Catholic concerts in New yeahuul — items aie sprung upon the audience that are a lough and idiotic burle.sque upon, a huthiul and sot ely-ti led Catholic people. We hope that something practical will come oi the action t.il en in the matter by the II A CB S. at their recent conletetue in S\dne,v, on the motion of one ol the New '/i aland delegates It is. also about time that the stage Jew should be taken by the poll and bundled off the boat ds We ha\e no stage Englishman or Russian or Frenchman or Scotsman But all those dramatic caricatures that publicly hold up any race or class m the community to contempt should be suppressed as dangers to the public weal as real as those of Uphold or the bubonic plague