Notes

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXII, Issue 3, 21 January 1904, Page 18

Notes

A Complaint A settler at Tawataia, in the Eketahuna district, pitchforks the .Government with the following complaint — ' My cow was suffering from tuberculosis. I wrote to the Department of Agriculture, and a veterinary surgeon was sent up to inspect her, free of charge. I myself am suffering from consumption, and if I want medical attendance it will probably cost me £10. Does this not go to prove that in this democratic country the life of a cow is considered of greater value than that of a human being ? ' The Smallpox Scare Great numbers of French infidels are like the Anglomaniacs in Bronson Howard's charming comedy, ' The Henrietta.' • Each fellow wants every other fellow to believe that he is a devil of a fellow— but he isn't.' He poses as a ' jolly dog.' But in the stress of a colic on land or a storm at sea the braggart commonly remembers his sins and flings himself with desperate energy at his prayers, beseeching mercy from the Providence that he had long affected to ignore. In an analogous fashion, great numbers of Christchurch parents and other adults long affected to despise or decry vaccination as a preventive of smallpox. Now that the plague is at their door their hostility or indifference to Jenner's great discovery has suddenly oozed out, like Bob Acres' courage, at their finger tips, and they are besieging the medical profession for the lymph which a kind Providence has endowed with preventive powers against one of the most contagious a nd deadily of all febrile diseases. A Question of Boycotting A cable message in Wednesday's daily papers runs as follows : « Dr. Walsh, Archbishop of Dublin, in a pastoral letter, denounced the new Catholic Association, who recommended the boycotting of Protestants.' We were not aware that boycotting of any class or in any shape formed part of the poiicyrof the Catholic Association. The association consists, we understand, of a number of laymen whose object was to protest against the open, flagrant, and systematic boycott to which Catholics, solely on account of their religious belief, have been subjected in the matter of appointments in the gift of the Government, of the great railway corporations, and of a large number of leading commercial firms in the country. To this undisguised and scandaJlous boycott, and to the wholesale Orange boycott of Catholics in Ulster, we have made frequent and recent reference in our news and editorial columns. Two wrongs do not make a right. If any ill-advised association of our faith in Ireland should endeavor, in this matter, to imitate the bad example set, and openly dofended during the past two months, by members of the favored creed, they will find not alone Archbishop Walsh, but the whole voice and sentiment of the Catholic hierarchy, priesthood, and laity of Ireland in open war against them. The facts and figures published by us so recently a s our last two issues point to the sudden death or early demise of any combination of misguided Catholics who, no matter under what provocation, would attempt to reverse the long-established and tolerant traditions of their co-religionists in the Old Land and endeavor to organise a campaign of exclusive dealing against their Protestant neighbors. Irish Catholics have thus far left a monopoly of this evil form of sectarian exclusiveness to their non-Catholic fellow-countrymen. At this period of the twentieth century they are not likely, despite the evil example around them, to use against members of other creeds a weapon of the penal days.

A Professor Dissected Professor Tyrrell, of Trinity College, Dublin, has re-

ceived abundant reasons of late for regretting the savage epithets which he applied to the churches which Irish Catholics have built to replace the desolation wrought by his co-religionists in ' the most distressful country.' It is no wonder that the people's gorge rose at seeing their most sacred fanes described by the Trinity professor as grim monuments ' Of cold observance, the incestuous mate Of superstition, destined of blind fate To draw the very marrow from the land's Poor starving delvers.' A fresh sting is in the sounet's tail, where the Trinity bigot adds this parting insult : ' Each soaring steeple " lifts its head and lies " ' * The ' Freeman's Journal ' (Dublin) took a hand with Bishop Dwyer in the public flagellation of Professor Tyrrell. 'It is mere insolence and something more,' says the ' Freeman,' ' for such persons to interfere in the domestic affairs of the Church of the people. Coming from members of a Church whose spoils are summed up for anybody that cares to read in " Thorn's Directory " it is a piece of glaring effrontery. Will Dr. Tyrrell's sympathy for the people extend so far as to suggest that they should be recouped a fraction of these millions by the so-called " disendowed " Church to which he belongs ? ' The ' Freeman ' then publishes the full details of the enormous sum of £11,398,950 which the Anglican Church in Ireland drew from the people after the passing of the Act of Disestablishment in 1869. ' When,' our Dublin contemporary continues, ' a Protestant critic comes forward to denounce the Irish priest for seeking the means to restore the ruins wrought by Irish Protestantism, let him explain on what principle these millions of Irish money have been pocketed. Even after all the waste by those who received the money in the first instance, over three millions of it, together with the Glebes, remain in possession of the Church to-day. The sum would give every Catholic parish in Ireland £2,700 a piece for church building. The eleven millions would have given each diocese £100,000 for a Cathedral, and each parish £7000 for a church. The " impoverished peasantry " would have had to provide very little if their Church received out of Irish pockets the endownmont which, as partial compensation for so-called disendownment, the Church of one-eighth of the people received in 1870. One's gorge rises when the sons of such spoliators come forward wth their lectures to the Irish Priests on the methods by which they are seeking to repair the destruction wrought by the connscators and persecutors. These gentlemen ought to have the decency to keep silence, whether they are Trinity College Dons, or Ulster Protestants masquerading as ' independent and trained observers ' from the English capital.' Professors Tyrrell's sectarian doggerel and his epistolary attacks on his Catholic fellow-countrymen are pretty sure to find an echo in the occasional ' religious ' columns of some of our New Zealand secular dailies. If they do, our readers have a reply to hand in the present issue of the ' N Z. Tablet.'