Notes

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXII, Issue 14, 7 April 1904, Page 18

Notes

Maori Girls

North Canterbury Board

All's well that ends well. The North Canterbury Education Board has made arrangements for the inspection or the Catholic schools within the faur corners o£ its jurisdiction. r l his pleasant upshot to a long-drawn struggle for justice to tihe Catholic children in the district is creditable both to the Boar.'d and the VicarGeneral of Ohristchurch, who is a believer in the philosophy of ' pegging away,' and to whose gentle persistence the Board's change of heart is, no doubt, in a great measure due.

The Church in Tokio

Dean Slattery, of Newtown (Sydney), recently completed a girdle of travel round the earth. In the course of an interview with the Sydney ' Freeman ' he gave the following interesting item regarding the capital of Japan. ' Tokio,' said he, 'is a wonderful city, the seat of an Archbishop, who has an energetic Coadjutor. We visited the schools which were ion splendid condition. Strange to say, the daughters of the Protestant Bibhop of Tokio, and the daughters of other ministers, attended the convent schools — a high tribute to their educational value. They were also thronged with the daughters of respectable Japanese. Both pagan and Protestaint knew that their beliefs would not be interfered with.'

In the world of books we often hear of the jealous ■s-cri'Wbiler who damns with faint praiiserin others the literary excellence to which he cannot attain. But missionary rivalry has found a deeper depth— the deadly jealousy that cannot even mention the work of an older and rival organisation. A few months ago, for instance, the New Zealand public were regaled by a returned missionary with statistics of the number of ' Christians' in New Guinea. AU mention of Catholic effort and success was carefully withheld. And this, by the way, is the common experience. A short time ago the President of the Methodist Conference declared, in the cofurse of an extremely laudatory account of the work of his co-religionists among our aborigines, that ' the higher education of the Maori woman has been entirely ignored.' He has since then received a metaphorical black eye from Mr. H. B. Kirk, who was formerly an inspector of native schools and is now professor of biology at ttie Victoria University College, Wellington. ' Whoever, ' says he in a recent article in the 'N Z. Times,' ' first made the statement, does not " explain away " (to adopt a phrase from the address itself) the existence of those fine institutions for Maori girls, H\ukarere and St. Joseph's Convent School at Napier, the formejr am Anglican school, the latter a Roman Catholic school. At these schools a succession of Maori girls and young women have, during many years,

been teailned, not only in the knowledge of the schoolroom, but also in the essentials of housekeeping, and in all that higher knowledge that maflces for true wtorqanhood. Maori girls who have passed the fourth standard have the same facilities for entering these schools tjiat are afforded to Maori boys who have passdd ttfie fdurth standard for entering Te Ante or St. Stephen's. I can testify that ota the staffs of these schools one finds teachers not only of great ability, but of a loftiness of aim and an utter devotion that may make anyone proud to be a worker in the same field with these women. Why the magnificent work of these schools, reported on year by year in a Parliamentary paper, should be ignored by public speakers, as it has been more than once, is a complete puzzle.'