Eating the Leek

New Zealand Tablet, 30 August 1906, Page 9

Eating the Leek

In the course of a controversy on missionary looting in the Boxer troubles, Mark Twain administered a nasty jab to his opponent, the Rev. Dr. Smith. • I make the proper allowances,' said the great humorist. 'He has not been a journalist, as I have been—a trade wherein a person is biought to book by the rest of his brothers so often for divergences that by and by he gets to be almost morbidly airaid to indulge in them. It is so with me. I always have U\e disposition to tell what is not so ; I was born with it ; we all have it. But I try not to do it now, because I have found out that it is unsafe. But with the Doctor, of course, it is different '.

And so it was with the reverend enthusiast who sent delightful shocks of horror down the spines of the Brethren in Sydney last month by his fairy tale about a Presbyterian girl who was (he alleged) employed m the Bathuist Catholic Presbytery, and afterwards robjbed, impiisoned, and forced to work like a galley-slave by the Good Samaritan nuns at Tempe. The Indra'ns credit a squaw's tongu« -with being fytfle to run faster than the legs of the wind. The undisciplined tongue of the reverend narrator of this painful yarn went fast enough to outrun both his wit and his discietion. lie spoke in his haste. He is now eating humble-pie at his leisuie. And he finds the taste thereof as the tabte of gall and quassia-chips and rue. The ' Watchman ' (the Orange organ of New South Wales) found it desirable to swallow the calumnymoved thereto, perhaps, by the persistent demands of Catholics for a criminal prosecution. Here again the medicine was bitter, and the ' Watchman ' swallowed it with a very wry face. Its grief was comically crowned by one small wisp of consolation — the ' happy thought ' that the gaol-bird author of the calumny 'is a product of Rome ' ! As 1 a common crimin-al, she may in a loose way be described as a joint product of her own unrcsisted vicious propensities and of her surroundings. As a fiaudulent and perjured agent of No-Popery, she may in the same way be regarded as a product of the Orange lodge. Without the constant market which it offers for No-Popery fiction, and the encouragement that it gives to gaol-bird ' witnesses ' against ' Rome ', she would have had no object in inventing the story of the Bathuist Presbytery and of the Magdalen Retreat at Ternpe. The Sydrrey ' Bulletin ' has a bit of sarcasm in this connection which is worth njuoting : ' The parsons who run the " Watchman " kind of literature don't blush worth a cent when their tale bursts, and their injured heroine proves to be a very ordinary kind of gaol-bird. A spieler or a bottle-oh may object to being proved a foolish liar, tjut a certain variety of parson only looks the more virtuous when he is shown up. Anyhow, why was this uninteresting female dragged into publicity ? Apparently she was a dreadfully commonplace person with a bad habit of getting into gaol, and why there should be columns of shriek on the " Watchman's " part because she was a renegade Protestant, and then more columns because she wasn't, passes comprehension. 1