THURSDAY, OCTOBER 15, 1903. THE ASCENDENCY SPIRIT

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXI, Issue 42, 15 October 1903, Page 17

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 15, 1903. THE ASCENDENCY SPIRIT

• USH says in Disraeli's ' Tancred ' : 'He who serves queens may expect backsheesih.' A turbulent Irish secret society—those of the saffron sash and the July madness—made abundant backsheesh the condition of faithful service to their lawful Sovereign. They were not content to ' expect backsheesh '—they demanded it in the midst of rough-and tumble initiation ceremonies as a condition previous

to service. Their oath of allegiance was, in express terms, conditional, and, therefore, illegal. They bound

themselves to support their King and his successors only 1 so long as he and they will maintain the Protestant ascendency.' 'And by ' Protestant ascendency ' they meant ' a Protestant King of Ireland, a Protestatot Parliament, a Protestant hierarchy, Protestant electors and government ; the benches of justice, the aimy and the revenue, through all their branches and details, Protestant.' In other w.ords, their conditions of allegiance demanded a strict and perpetual monopoly of place, power, and pelf for themselves and their co-religioniists, anid tihe operation of the penal laws against Catholics and Dissenters—who were over five-sixths of the population—until the crack o' doom. Through the pressure of the British Parliament this illegal and treasonable oath was at length and with sore unwillingness abandoned by, the Yellow Agony. But to this hour the saffron brethren bind themselves by an oath to exclude Catholics, as far as lies in their power, from every office of honor and emolument in the gift of the State or of the people, and in effect, to do what in them lies to restore the vanished days of the Orange ascendency.

Laws may be turned out of Parliament as fast as rocking-chairs out of a steam furniture factory. But ingrained social customs are not legislated away by royal assent or Aot of Parliament, especially when they have grown by long use into the structure of the nation's life._ In Oowper's hackneyed words, ' Such dupes are men to custom and so prone To reverence what is ancient, and can plead A course of long observance for its use, That even servitude^ the worst of ills, Because delivered down from sire to son, Is kept and guarded as a sacred thing 1 ' The Catholic Emancipation Act was passed in 1829. It took nearly two generations to get it into even partial operation. The legalised principle of equal rights to all Irishmen, irrespective of creed, is still, so far as promotion in the Civil Service is concerned, a legal fiction. And in the great Orange headquarters of Belfast and Derry, Catholics are, to all intents and purposes, plajced by the operation of a violent and disloyal secret organisation outside the benefits of the Emancipation Act. Long after the fiction of legal equality had been created by that great measure, public appointments of every kind continued, as before, to be the monopoly of the favored creed. To this hour the positions of ease, of command, of high emolument in the Civil Service are almost altogether closed against Irish Catholics in their native land,, and are kept as strict preserves for the enjoyment of which ' no Papist need apply.' The evil tradition infects even great public companies to an amazing degree.. In the Great Southern and Western Railway, for instance,, ' the head manager, the secretary, the chief auditors, the engineers, the cashier, the general superintendent, five out of six of the district superintendents, all the chief clerks, with three-fourths of their staffs in the Dublin offices, an 4 more than 75 per cent, of the first, second, and third class stationmasters are all nonCatholics.' Members of the proscribed creed hold only some two out of the forty-seven highest offices in the Company. An even more scandalous condition of things exists in the Midland Great Western Railway. The boycott of Catholics by this monopolist corporation is open, systematic, thorough-going, amd uridis&uised. ' During all the years that this Company has been in existence,' said a prominent shareholder at the recent half-yearly meeting, ' the proportion of Catholics to non-Catholics in the various grades of the service has been, roughly speaking, as one to a hundred.' This was not denied, but the meeting witnessed the strange Spectacle of an Anglican Church dignitary wrathfully defending this disgraceful survival of the rancorous spirit of sectarian ascendency ! The venemous and decrepit thing is stumbling along a rugged road to the grave. But it keeps the undertaker waiting a weary time.

The remedy proposed, and just now in part conceded, for, those crying scandals is the introduction of competi-

tive examinations for all appointments. We have sttorigly Purged the same system as a partial remedy for the absurd Anomalies that exist in the modes of making appointments and promotions in the public service in New Zealand. We sorely 'need a PHihlic Service Board that shall be as free from even the suspicion of political • pull ' as the judges that with cold and passionless neutrality administer justice upioa our Bench. The Act of 1886 provides that (except in the case of known experts fai certain branches) all permanent appointments in cur civil service shall be by Competitive examination and by that alone. Let that Act be administered. And let us have, as its natural and necessary complement, a just and rational scheme which shall place the vexed and knotty (Question of promotion beyond the reach of either friendship, enmity, or caprice. Catholics, of all others, have the greatest reason to be dissatisfied with the present clumsy, capricious, and out-of-date methods of determining appointments and promotions in our civil service. Tihe one angry certainty which they cajtry in their minds is this : that their portion of public appointments will be a relatively few petty posts as wood-hewers and water-idfcawers, with odid hungry clerkships thrown inmere sops to Cerberus ; and that the positions of comfort, influence, and bountiful emolument are reserved for the members of more favored creeds ot no-creeds. For these •no Papist need apply.' It is high time that parliament sh|ould pole-axe this administrative anomaly and see that the State should, once and for all, secure its servants by no other test than that of merit shown in fair and open competition.