Current Topics

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXV, Issue 7, 14 February 1907, Page 9

Current Topics

Basil and Julian

Bad example, in the home, and evil associations outside the home, sometimes taint and poison ,the good that is instilled" into the souls of little men and maids in the Catholic school. The fault lies'- not with ' the teachers, the system, or the school. The parents are here chiefly " -responsible for the .failure. 1 Basil and Julian,' says Cardinal Newman, "' were fel-low-students at the"" schools of Athens, and one be-

came the Saint and Doctor of the Church, the other her. scoffing and relentless foe.' Many lesser Basils and some minor Julians ' 'have passed through our schools. The Basils had 'the foundations of • their goodness well and truly laid in home and school ; the defection of the - Julians can easily be traced^ to causes that lie outside and beyond the Catholic school.

Habitual Drunkards Bacchus (according to an old Spanish proverb) has drowned more than Neptune— strong drink more than

salt water. Last year the New Zealand Parliament rendered what we hope will be an important service'

to the cause of temperance by -an eff o"t to raise' a few of Bacchus's ' submerged tenth ' and restore them to a wholesome mode of living. This was done by the Act 'to make better provision for 'the care" .and detention of habitual drunkards.' ' Under this Act,' says last Friday's ' Otago Daily Times,' ' ' a magistrate is empowered, upon the _ conviction for drunkenness of any person who, having been thrice convicted for the same offence within the preceding nine months, has become an habitual drunkard in the eyes of the law, to commit him to any recognised institution willing to receive him and make provision for his proper care .and ' detention. Further, the Governor-in-Council is empowered to "authorise any institution, . by gazette warrant, to receive and detain 'habitual drunkards, and it is prescribed that regulations may be issued by OrdeMn-Council to . ensure that the objects which the legislalion has in view may be efficiently .carried out.' A recent ' Gazette ' contains - a copy of the regulations which are to ' apply to every institution • that is authorised under the Act-to receive and detain habitual drunkards in terms of the law.' Inspectors are to be appointed by the Minister of Justice to see that the regulations are properly carried .out, and idleness, disobedience, insubordina-, tion, profanity, assaults, indecency, obstruction of officers, misbehavior at religious services, etc., will be visited upon the offender in one or othef of the three following ways (we quote from our local" morning contemporary) :— 'He may have to submit to a withdrawal of tobacco or other indulgences comprehensively described in the regulations as " extras," or he may be sentenced . to confinement to a room- or cell for a limited period, or he may be placed upon a special scale of diet inferior to that in general use. In the case of the occurrence of -an offence of a graver order, such as that of offering personal violence to any officer or inmate, or of aggravated or repeated, assault, or of wilfully destroying the property of the institution, 'or of any act of gross misconduct or insubordination, the regulations contemplate that the offender shall be brought before a magistrate in court and, upon summary conviction, sentenced to a ie-m of imprisonment, at the expiry of wMch he shall be returned to -the institution to complete his term of detention.' * A previous, and not well considered, State experiment in the reclamation of the habitual drunkard ended in failure. But it was "not all a failure ; for the*warning danger-notice on precipice or hill - serves its purpose as well as the finger-post that points out the true road. ' To climb steep hills, Requires slow pace at first '.

And in a problem of x such enormous difficulty as the reformation,of the habitual drunkard, t"he mount of vision —success— is not scaled at the first venture. The present effort of the Government, to grapple with tlfe problem is* an -earnest, well-in tended," and one, and 1 will be watched with sympathetic tiape and. "interest by every friend of temperance. And there will_ not, we ween,, bea ny lack of institutions v for the reclamation of the .unhappy 'ones who have ' put an enemy x into their mouths to steal away their brains '.

Thirsty Lawmakers There is a certain amount of human nature even' among legislators. The later private, history of • most parliamentary institutions in English-speaking countries records (though,. we are glad to say, very • exceptionally) a few law-makers who, like Artemus Ward 1 , never allowed public business to interfere their drinking habits.

A recent .scandal in the House of Lords— when two members appeared in the gilded' chamber obstreperously 1 under the affluence of the intoxicating bole_' — serves, „ however, to point a moral and adorn' a tale that is not without its pleasant side. In the first place, Home iournalism was sufficiently restrained and self-resp.ecting to- avoid making the ' scene in the Leads ' the occasion of a first-class sensation of the ' yellow ' order. Which is something to be thankful for. And in" the second -place, the incident ("which 1 was obviously np reflection •upon the corporate honor of the upper House) serves to illustrate the vast distance that law-makers ' in . the Mother of Parliaments have travelled on the road of temperance since the days of the Restoration, and even since the time of Pitt and his contemporaries.

In the days between the Restoration and ~the"Revolution, what were called the ' upper .' classes were mighty swillersof 'mum' (very heady wheat-beer), spirit ol • clary, usquebaugh, sack, brandy, spiced ale,- wines, hypoeras, and other specimens of the potent liquids of the time. They had, perhaps, nothing quite so deadly"- as some of the special ' liquid fire and distilled darrtna.tion ' (as Robert Hall calls it) of our time, that' would eat the sulphur out -of a vulcanised tyre. But what they had ' got there '•by a pretty short cut. Deep pota-

tions, and frequent, were (says Sydney in his ' Social Life ' of the period) ' almost imposed by the social code of the age, were most marked among all statesmen, and were- countenanced to a- very extreme degree by the king himself. . . Hard drinking was quite the fashion. Even ~ members of Parliament found it difficult to keep sober. Good, garulous old Samuel Pepys delivered his great speech of 1688 to a House thafr was in great part half intoxicated. Those were the days" of Rochester and Sedley, "of Bully Dawson and Fighting Fitzgerald. They were succeeded by the deep toping, the bravado, and the easy-going devil-y of the days of Queen Anne and the campaigns 'in Flanders. These were the palmy days of the St. James's" Coffee House, of Steele- and his : revelling cronies, and of the bibulous joviality of the 'threebottle men 'at the October Club. And fustian foregathered with frills and ruffles to celebrate in heavyheaded revelry the Great Duke's rushing victories of

Malplaqoiet and Ramilies. ' They knew how to * Maffick ' in the days of Anne. Both as Secretary of War and.as Secretary of State, Lord BoAngbroke spent whole nights fuddling his fine brains with fiery fluids. And did not Robert Hailey7 first Earl of Oxford, when Premier and Lord Treasurer, sometimes present himself before Queen Anne — in his cups ? Yet, for his time, this devotee of the wine' when it was red, was looked upon as a man among men. ' - In a later day, it so befell that Pitt and . Henry Dundas (Lord of the" Admiralty in Pitt's second Ministry) were in so - ' ilivaied ' a condition that they, could not be ' got .ready '-to meet an attack in the House of Commons. One of the wits of ' the day celebrated the event in the following lhymed dialogue ra-

' Pitt : "I cannot see the Speaker, Hal, can you ? " 1 Dun'das : " Not sec the.. Speaker!" Hang - it, I two I ," ' The extreme prevalence of drinking among ' the classes ' at, the close of 'the eighteenth century in Great BAtain and Ireland is testified to in a sufficiently emphatic way in ' Courts and Cabinets of George III.' (vol. iii., p. — 189). In time, that deep-swilling period is close at hand | to us— only a little beyond .the reach of ' the oldest inhabitant \ Our drinking habits still sorely need mending. Ye-t, thank God, we have in one short century moved worlds away from the state of heavy toping a,nd leaden fuddledom that characterised the- days from the Restoration to the reign of the fourth George. And in few departments of life is the change more marked than in the vastly higher state of general sobriety'that marks the various parliamentary institutions throughout the Emigre, as compared wit-h the conditions that prevailed in the Mother of Parliaments for nearly one hundred and twenty years of its history. Herein the progress has been indeed great and gratifying.' France : Some Compensations The numerical losses sustained by the Church dvr T ing the great religious revolution of the sixteenth century'found their compensation in the spread of the ancient faith ia the East, and still more ml the new * world that the genius of Columbus' opened up to missionary enterprise in the New World beyond the " Atlantic. And now the war of plunder, confiscation, and proscription that, is bSng carried on by the Ohristhuivters in France is destined to serve the cause of God; perhaps by ,the triumph of religion over the lodge" in the Third Republic, certainly by an enormous accession of skilled and devoted workers to the foreign mission field. From time to time our news and editori? 1 columns have borne evidence to the signal manner in which the expulsion of religious from France has. aided in the spread of the faith and the cause of charity all over the American continent, in the Pacific islands, 'and in the near and distant East. England, too, has benefited by the persecution beyond the Straits of Dover. According to t-he Eriglish ' Catholic Directory ' there was in 1906 an increase of seventy-nine religious "in Great Britain— an unusually large addition to. the ranks of workers in education and charity that is accounted for in gfeat part by the banishment of nuns from France. The number of cler<gy in Great, Britain was, at about the close of the past year, 4024— an increase of eighty-five. on. the figures of the previous year. ' Closings ', says the London 'Tablet' of December 29,

• may be the order of thie day. in F rance, but here'inEng-: land there has been a busy time of openings, for there are sixty-three more churches and chapels than there \\eie at this time last year '.

The chemist knows how to • make a healing balm from the root of the dead Iy"" aconite. And" God is wont lo bring good out of seeming evil, as Samson, drew 1 out of the eater meat, and out of the lion's mouth honey. All such trials as those through which the Church in France is passing- have their compensations. Persecution pasisesi nations, -as suffering passes •individuals, through the crucible; and the shortest cut, to our Thaboi'j is over our Hill of Calvary.' It is an incident; if a physically unpleasant ' incident, of progress, as is the training and ' hardening up 'of the athlete. With Catholics there never can' arise the cry : ' The Church in danger ! ' With the illumined eye of fait-h we see whereon we believe. And with our bodily eye we -can behold how ' what came to us as seed goes to the next generation as blossom, and what came .to* us as blossom goes to" them as fruit V And- so-rwith only' a halt here 1 or there ior repairs, replacements, or the cas ting-off of useless or injurious burdens— the forward march of "God's Church goes grandly on. '

St Patrick's Day Concerts

We are nearing Hie season 'when the monkey-faced • scarecrow known as the stage Irishman 1 reappears with a war-whoop, and proceeds to travesty in a gross^ way.the modes of .thought, the raoraf conduct, and the speech of a faithful and much-tried Catholic people. Shakespeare's Captain Macmorris (the Welsh Fluellen^s, friend) was a fast and faithful friend and a brave and' determined, if hot-headed, soldier, England's greatest dramatist knew nothing of the wild, coarse, apish, fuddled, whoojAnig, red-headed idiot who in- a later day posed as a" type of^ the .humanity that inhabits the Green Isle. The modern conception of the -'■ stage Irishman ' seems, to have grown out of the literary decadence that followed the destruction of. Ireland's separate political, life in 1800. He was, so to speak, swathed in vulgar, though some- ■ times smart, street ballads by young Trinity • bloods '. Then, in an evil .hour, came Samuel Lover— <a " graduate of . Trinity in its Orange days— with his blundering 'Handy Andy ' and more or less fixed the type.

• Will Carleton was even a worse offender.' He was an idle, worthless wight, without a sense^>f .' honor or. of shame. He sponged on -friends acquaintances till he ■ was- a weariness of the ..flesh to them, and they, cast him oH^witb a" collective boot-toe. We next hear -of him' in a , "debtors' prison/" Then," like another" Mick M&Quaid, he appears as a pervert from the;faith.of his fathers. His ' Life ' (published by Downey and Co. in IS!) 6) tells the simple story/ of his ' conversion '. He came across tihe Rev. Caesar Otwaj r , a leader in an organisation^ thdt was endeavoring to rescue Ireland .from - ' Popery ' by vitriolic tracts and newspapers, and by inducingj the poor of the slums and the hunger-driven peasants to --•.--

' Sell their— sowls ' For penny rowls,

For soup and hairy bacon \ In furtherance of the first part of the ' sotrper ' propaganda, Otway had started the ' Christian- .Examiner \ He .hired Carleton to write stories that would convey to the reader, a lurid idea . of the • superstition ' and savagery of Irish 'Papists '. These stories would, said Caesar, 'serve the cause if properly prepared. 'Paddy-Go-Easy ' was the grossest and most vulgar of those,-'pro-perly prepared ' libels on . Irish CathoAcs. But even Otway could not stomach Carleton very long. In, the* height of his' financial suceess-this joint creator of the modern ' stage -Irishman .' went ■ -into the Insolvent Court. He remained a sponger, a toady, .and, a,auisanco tol the last. And to the end of his days his venal, pen' was at the' service of any- party or any creed that was willing to hire him. • > < .

Dion Boucieault did not, make, his characters speak the impossible x Jabberwocky that passes for Irish dialect in Cockney music-halls and on some of our stages oiv St. .Patrick's nights. But in the ' Shaughraun '• "he at first staged a wake-scene of so disgusting a nature that *(, was, liisscd and greeted with ostentatiously ancient eggs until he modified it. . J\Ve believe we -have killed off the ' stage Irishman ' in many- parts of " New Zealand. But we have^ reason to think that there are some people in the Colony who are content " to. sit still and applaud the monstrosity. The -awakened sense, .of race pride and race dignity has already sternly rebuked " this, 'form of insult in Great Britain, Canada,- Australia,and the United States. And we hope that" his reappear-^ ance upon any stage ih New Zealand, at least at, Catholic- concerts, will be greeted with such .emphatic marks of disapproval as will lead. to his -nearly ' and 'permanent retirement. Strict previous v *supervision of programmes — and especially of;' the alleged 'comic' element in * the programmes— -is a precaution that organisers of such concerts would do well, to take. It is r high time that a 1 halt should be cried on such caricatures of a highly moral and comparatively crimeless Catholic people.