Current Topics

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXII, Issue 4, 28 January 1904, Page 1

Current Topics

Inspecting Our Schools From the time of Father Cummings the North Canterbury Education Board has been wearily besought to undertake the inspection of the Catholic schools in the district that is under their jurisdiction . Till last week their reply was a monotonous refusal, aggravated in some instances by an altogether needless display of high temperature in discussion. We have now at last the pleasure of congratulating them on acceding, though so tardily, to the reasonable and repeated requests of the Vicars-General of the Christchurch diocese. Only one Education Board in New Zealand now stands in opposition to the Ca'thohc demand. It will, we assume, be again approached on behalf of the Catholic schools in its district. The motto ' nil desperandum ' (' never despair ') has been translated : ' Never mind ; at them again !' The constancy of purpose and the persistent policy of ' pegging away ' in the face of every discouragement, displayed by the two Vicars-General of Christchurch, have had their reward. And their success furnishes a good leverage for a fresh application to the last Education Board that still offers a churlish refusal to the claim for the inspection of Catholic primary schools. The New Syllabus It is a sound axiom in education to let the child's brain go at ari easy pace in the early years of its life. Professor LJuxley, lately deceased, even went so far as to say that a boy's- education should not begin till his tenth year. At any rate, ' racing ' a child's bram, like ' racing ' a gas engine, usually .leads to rapid wearout) and an early and inglorious stop. The elaborate system of cramming devised in our new State school syllabus may have been merely intended to create a tribe of ' infant prodigies ' in New Zealand. It would be much more likely to work havoc among ' young idea ' by developing the internal structure of their brain at a faster rate than its external growth and general development. It may now be regarded as certain that the cumbrous and unworkable system devised by Mr. Iloe;ben will be seriously modified while passing between the hammer and anvil of discussion He has struck oiut hard at the present system of cramming children's brains with words, words, words — mere vocables, as Carlyle puts it— instead of things, and has strongly emphasised the need of cultivating the faculty of observation So far, he has done a good work. But his system is, in

many respects, overloaded beyond workability or endurance. Like Tom Moore with his ideal garden, the revisers will, we trust, • reject the weeds and keep the flowers ' of the new system. And then, perhaps, a real advance will have been made in our educational methods. Counting the Cost ' I hear of peace and war in newspapers,' says Sidonia in Disraeli's ' Comngsby,' ' but I am never alarmed except when I am informed that the sovereigns want treasure ; then I know that monarchs are in earnest. 1 Japan and Russia seemed, externally at least, to be less bellicose than usual for a few days lately. But the preparations of men and treasure are going feverishly forward, and each negotiates with its eye on its antagonist's optic and its right hand upon the revolver-grip in its back pocket They are probably restrained from drawing on each other by reason of their uripreparedness, by the knowledge that an armed struggle would be the Armageddon of one or the other, and by lack of sufficient funds to enter upon so costly a game as that of war The Napoleonic campaigns added 350 to 400 millions sterling to our national debt. Next in order of costliness came the great American Civil War of the sixties, which coffined some 700,000 men and cost in treasure fourteen hundred million pounds. The foolish and blundering campaign of the Crimea ate up about £350,000,000, and the Franco-German war, in round. numbers, £500,000,000. To the vanquished a modern war spells ruin. To the victor, it is a disaster second only in intensity to defeat In his recently published memoirs, Lord Wolseley tricks out war as an exhilarating sport. To Wellington and Napoleon Buonaparte, far greater captains than Lord Wolseley, war was a hideous scourge and the soldier, in effect, one of the gladiators of historyi Some of our readers may have seen the fearfully realistic scenes of war, from the brush of the artist Verestchagin, that form such a ghastly attraction in the Musee Wiertz in Brussels. Verestchagm's eyes rested on all the horrors that preach peace with a thousand fiery tongues from the walls of that noted Musee. 'It is all very well,' says he, ' to say that war is grand and heroic and that fighting is a glorious thing. So it is— to read about 1 . But I have seen war ; I have fought for my country ; and I have killed a man and many men in the terror and excitement of battle. I know what a horrible, savage, inhuman thing it is, and it is my busi-

ness to let the public see what I have seen. They tell me I should paint war in beautiful colors, as if an honest man could paint a lie and call it truth ! ' Disraeli was in a sense right when he said that war is a greater calamity to human nature than a famine. Russia and Japan may well pause upon the brink of conflict and cast about for cooler counsels than those .which proceed from drum-beating mobs in the public squares or hot-pated editors ensconced in easy chaurs at a safe and assured distance from any place where boillets are likely to hum in the air like bees in swarming time. Pius's Winning Ways Some poet has said that life's latest sands are its sands of gold. The expanding charity of Pope Pius Xi Appears to grow more precious as the months roll by. He seems to win all hearts and to diffuse about him an atmosphere of good. A non-Catholic writer (Mary Gray Morrison) tells in a recent issue of the Boston 1 Transcript ' how winning and gentle the peasant-Pon-tiff is to those who have the good fortune to come in contact with him. ' Pius X.,' says she, describing an audience 'at which she was present, ' was all in white, from head to foot, even to the small cap behind the white locks above his forehead* He walked slowly along the kneeling line, holding out his hand to each figure before him as he went. Now and then he stopped and spoke a few words with someone ; once he laid a kindly hand upon an old man's shoulder. His face, as I looked Up at it when he had nearly reached me, is one I never shall forget, dignified but gentle, pathetic as if with a great sympathy and utterly without human pride. As I bent to kiss the quiet hand he held out to me, heretic as I was from a far country, I thanked Him who had given to a great Church a leader who had the look .which should be in the face of the Vicar of Christ.' [The Pope and the King' Lewis Carroll peopled Lookinglass Land with curious, burrowing, inquisitive, and meddling little animals which he called ' toves.' ' Toves,' Humpty Dumpty explained to Alice, ' are something like badgers— they're something like lizards— and they're something like corkscrews.' The no-Popery Scottish parson, Rev. Jacob Primmer, is a sort of human ' tove ' It was no particular concern of his that the Catholic bishops and priests, at the opening 1 of Blairs College, Aberdeen, toasted the Pope and King and sent a loyal telegram to their Sovereign. But "the Reverend Jacob corkscrewed his nose into the affair all the same. He pestered the King and the Secretary of State with insinuations against the loyalty of the Scottish bishops and priests and with protests against their toast of the Pope and the King. The meddling impertinence of the notorious Scottish clerical firebrand has at last been met with a well-merited snub from King Edward, who, through his secretary, has informed the reverend Jacob that, in effect, he declines to take any notice of the latter's communications. But welldoubt if even this snub from his Sovereign— the second that the reverend Jacob has received — will teach that inveterate meddler the lesson which the Duchess impressed in such quaint phrase to 'Alice in Wonderland : 'If everybody minded their own business, the world would go round a great deal faster than it does.' ♦ * As to the form of the toast, ' The Pope and tlip King,' it is the Catholic counterpart of the common English and Protestant toast ' The Church and the State ' Catholics, as well as Protestants, are entitled to fhus recognise the Higher Power in their sociall gatherings. What may be considered an official sanction was given to the toast of the Pope and the Sovereign' by a former Secretary of State for the Colonies — the Earl of Kimberley, if we mistake not. It was in 1874. St. Stephen's Cathedral, Brisbane, had been opened. At

an informal luncheon on the same day, Sir Maurice O'Connell, Acting Governor of Queensland, was present. The toast of the Pope and the Queen was proposed and duly honored. Then the trouble began. Some neurotic enthusiasts of the yellow stripe thereupon petitioned the Queen! in Council to disqualify Sir Maurice from holding the position of Acting Governor. The Secretary of State for the Colonies replied that her Majesty had the fullest confidence in the loyalty of Sir Maurice O'Connell, and, in terms of delicate sarcasm, regretted that the memorialists should have experienced alarm at the circumstances set forth in their petition. In 1893 Alderman (now Sir) Stuart Knill became the first Catholic Lord Mayor of London since the Reformation. During his term of office he, at a Catholic gathering, toasted 'the Pope and the Queen.' Some foolish people raised a fine buzz about it in the daily papers. The Court of Common Council, before whom the Lord Mayor explained a/nd defended his position, stood by 'him. And the late Queen's attitude on the subject may be gathered from the fact that, some months later, during his term of office, she conferred upon him the honor of knighthood. The King's snub to Rev. Jacob Primmer is a further indication that long-eared and busy-body protests against this time honored toast will meet with an icy reception at the hands of British royalty. Those Financial Hoards It is now thirty-three years since Pius IX. refused to become a pensioner of the Italian Government. Since that time the Prisoner of the Vatican has been living on the freewill offerings of his faithful children throughout the world. From time to time since the days of Pius IX. all sorts of flagrant falsehoods have been sent out from some mysterious source in the Eternal City about immense treasures of chinking shekels in the vaults and safes of the Vatican. The apparent object of these idle and malicious tales was to dry up the fount of Catholic charity. During the later years of the reign of the late illustrious Pontiff, the Ananias who stands behind the cableman was more than usually busy with his visions of fanciful papal millions. One envenomed story, for instance, that found publication in the secular press of this country, represented the generous and great-hearted old Pontiff as rising at midnight to gloat over his wealth and bury his shrivelled arms to the elbows in ' Unsunn'd heaps Of miser's treasures.' Since his death further grotesque tales of hoarded coin were cabled to the ends of the earth. Here in New Zealand, for instance, we were told that a sum equal to £1,600,000 was discovered by his executors in a lum-ber-room adjoining his apartments, and that rolls of notes and coin were found stuffed promiscuously into drawers all over the place. The story had an ancient and fish-like smell. But it passed current all the same and— if we may judge from remarks recently made to us and from a letter of inquiry received during the past few days — soaked into the public mind. The whole story was, of course, a fairy tale. The special correspondent of the New York ' Freeman ' writes in its issue of December 26 : 'It may be that the fables were merely invented to fill up space in a sensational manner, and it may also be that they were devised with a view to diminishing the generosity of the faithful in contributing to the support of the Holy Father. But whatever the 'inspiration, they certainly were fables. Leo XIII. left nothing to his relatives except what he was bound in justice to bequeath to them out of the family estate, and he left comparatively little to the Church. It could not well have been otherwise, for the} demands made upon him by foreign missions, by the movement for the reunion of the Churches, by the different Congregation's, by the maintenance of the art treasures of the Vatican, and by a hundred other claims were quite sufficient to exhaust the income de-

rived from the collection of Peter's Pence throughout the world.' One of the first things*, which Pius X. found it necessary to do was to exercise the most rigid economy in the Vatican and in the administration of the various Congregations that are engaged in transacting the external business of the Universal Church. Arrangements are being made to reduce the number of functionaries, to diminish expenditure, to abolish sinecures, and, at the same time, to reorganise the Congregations and increase their efficiency.