The New Zealand TABLET THURSDAY, JANUARY 25, 1906 ' DISLOYALTY ' AND ' INTOLERANCE'

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXIV, Issue 4, 25 January 1906, Page 17

The New Zealand TABLET

THURSDAY, JANUARY 25, 1906 ' DISLOYALTY ' AND ' INTOLERANCE '

To promote the cause of Religion and Justice by the ways of Truth and Peace. Leo. XIII, to the N.Z. Tablet

§N British politics, the London ' Times 1 )' is sane, if Tory. But Ireland is its monomania. Towards the vast majority of the people of the ' sister r isle its traditional attitude has been one of unrelenting and truculent hate. When, on rare occasions, it spoke of O'Connell in terms that were not savage, the Liberator forthwith examined his conscience to discover wherein he had offended against his country or his faith. In regard to Irish matters— and especially Irish Catholic matters I—censure1 — censure from the 4 Thunderer ' is the highest praise ; praise the highest censure. It has in no manner changed its heart, and little, if at all, the venom of its hostile expression, since the days when it exclaimed with glee that the starving and typhus-stricken peasantry of Ireland were 1 going with a vengteance ' ; and when in later days it became the ,patron, confidant, and employer of the forger Pigbtt, in order to blacken the reputation of the chosen and trusted leaders of the people whom it hated. Events of the past few months go to show that the anti-Irish journalistic leopard has

not changed his spots. The old-time bitterness broke out in the old-time way in the course of a truculent article on a demonstration made some time ago by students of the Royal Dublin University when an attempt was made to play the National Anthem at the conferring of degrees. The ' Times ' comment thereon was made in the acrid words that ' Turn the sweet milk of kindness into curds.' It read into the incident active disloyalty, personal hatred of the King (who, by the way, is personally popular in Ireland), rebellion, intolerance, tyranny, and the assured certainty of persecution and a whole litany of other future terrors if Catholics in Ireland ever come to be treated on an equality with the members of other and more favored creeds. • The ' Times ' article received hospitality in the columns' of some of the larger New Zealand dailies. Broken fragments of it are still making a belated appearance among some of the lesser luminaries of our journalism, and are disc-harrowing the feelings of some of our over-sensitive readers. But neither the big journals nor the pigmy ones seem to have thought it necessary to give the public, of their own accord, the other slide of the question, or to record the farcical fiasco of the ' investigation,' or to tell how ' the British public '—whose dire anger was threatened by Lord Meath and the ' Times ' — seemed, when all was over, more inclined to laugh at the noble Lord and the ' Thunderer ' than to use birch-rod or boot-toe .upon the ' disloyal ' undergraduates of the Royal University. Irish Catholics have of late been getting many scoldings and touch platitudinous advice from quarters in New Zealand (' yellow ' ones included) that are not particularly competent to give it, or to give it with consistency and good grace. For their benefit, as well as for the comfort of those simple folk who take seriously a verdict on Irish affairs by the Pigottist paper, we append hereunder a few judgments from saner and more authoritative sources. The first is an official statement by the Rector of the University College. This institute, which was singled out for special castigation by the ' Times,' has within its halls a majority of Catholic students, but a considerable percentage of nonCatholics— Anglicans, Presbyterians, Methodists, and Jews. The Rector writes in part :— ' The manifestation at the Royal University was not due to the "intolerance" of ' the students at the University College. What, then, was the cause of it ? It is not far to seek. Injustice, always and everywhere, breeds discontent ; and in colleges and universities, as amongst nations, discontent is the fertile mother of disorder, culminating often, especially in youth, in words and acts of open disrespect to the authorities wh© are held responsible for the injustice. And among Irish-Catholic students there ds discontentuniversal, profound, bitter discontent— for there is grievous injustice. And this, Sir, is the explanation of the at the Royal University. The students who took part in it repudiate the charge that there was intended, or even thought of, any act of personal disloyalty or disrespect to the King. Their protest, they declare, was not against the King, but against the King's present Government— the Government whose Pnime Minister again and again publicly acknowledged the grievous educational injustice under which Catholics labour in Ireland, and who yet never .lifted a finger to remove it, and who, they complain, in this, as in other Irish questions, govern Ireland at present entirely, at the bidding of the Ulster Orangemen. ' They objected, they say, to the playing of " God Save the King," not from any personal disrespect to. the King, but because in Ireland the party of ascendancy, who claimed a monopoly, as they did of everything else, had made the people at large look on that air as a party tune, closely akin to that. of "Croppies, lie Down," and under that aspect these students objected to having it forced on them, as a matter of course, on such an occasion as the general meeting of the University.' Here was a sufficient answer to the charge both of 1 intolerance ' and of ' disloyalty.' And such, in effect,

is the verdict of a number of prominent newspapers in Great Britain. ' The outburst in the Royal University against " God Save the King," says London 1 Truth,' ' had nothing to do with the King himself, but only with those— they are many! in Ireland— who make the National Anthem a party cry.' Here is the verdict of the ' Manchester Guardian ' :— 1 At first glance this might seem to the careless observer a mere case of the usual degree-day " ragging" which prevails at all British u*niveEsities, and it no one is hurt, is winked at by sensible authorities. He might even have thought that a much more serious insult to the King was committed when a foreign Prince, the King's guest, had his clothes torn from his back a short time ago by the frolicsome students of a Scottish University on the occasion of his receiving an honorary degree there. Oi it might have been thought that since some English Unionists try to make "God Save the King " a party song, and decorate their election posters with the standard as a party device, the Irish Nationalist students were to be excused for slipping into a similar error.' ' It seems unfortunate,' says the ' Manchester Guardian,' in concluding its article, ' that a little more genuine and thoughtful loyalty to the King, and a little less eagerness to make party capital, did not save a few heated Unionists from courting this fiasco.' One man may steal a horse, while another must not look over the fence. Critics of the ' Times ' variety, both in England and New Zealand, are ever ready to a find a pretext for a cry of ' disloyalty ' against Irish Nationalists, both Catholic and Protestant. But they have only sympathetic silence or'wreathing smiles of approval for the outbreaks of the one faction in Ireland that, while claiming a monopoly of ' loyalty,' have ever been and still remain, a party of organised lebellion. The Australian and New Ztealand secular press had, for instance, no word of disapproval of the following threat which came .from the rasping tongue of Colonel Saunderson, when speaking on behalf of his brother Orangemen at a Unionist meeting :— ' The very moment there is a chance of a Home Rule Parliament, we shall arm, we shall drill, and in a fortnight we can put fifty thousand men in the field under arms. 1 Some three weeks ago what amounted to a similar threat of rebellion was made at a ' loyalist ' meeting In Belfast, over which Lord Abercorn presided. But our newspapers did not go on fire. Of course it was all Saundersonian bluff and Abercornian slap-dash. But if an Irish Nationalist Member of Parliament said onetenth of it, his face would be broken by a constabulary baton, and he would be placed under lock and key to purge his ' treasonable ' language in gaol. And the ' Times ' and its colonial echoes would deliver further vinegared homilies on the virtue of loyalty. As to tolerance : they have no word of condemnation for the systematic and wholesale boycott of Catholics in Belfast, Derry, Portadown, and other ' loyalist ' centres of the saffron stripe in Ulster, and in the great public Departments that rule the unhappy country with a regime from which the people are flying every day in shiploads, as from a pest. Earl Spencer had, as Irish Viceroy, abundant opportunities of observing on which side lie both the tolerance and the intolerance in Irish social and public life. ' I will not deny,' said he at Chester in 188U, ' that I have known instances not a few, while I was in Ireland, of bigotry and religious intolerance which, under conditions which would allow of it, would have developed into religious persecution.' There was a pause (says the report), and then Earl Spencer thus addressed his startled audience : ' But I am bound to say the bigotry and intolerance were on the side, not of the Catholic majority, but of the Protestant minority.'