Current Topics

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXV, Issue 36, 5 September 1907, Page 9

Current Topics

A Wakener-up v . According to an entertaining parliamentary letter in a Northern contemporary, some of our legislators seem to have slept as industriously during ,the late long-drawn ' stonewalling ' debates as did the congregation at Baldinsville under the poppy-and-mandragora preaching of the local pulpiteer. On April 17, 1725, a worthy Staffordshire yeoman bequeathed to the parish of N Trysuli a sum of money that brought in a revenue of twenty shillings a year. This was, by the terms of the will, paid to a poor man" of the parish, with the obligation cf going around the church during the sermon, keeping a sharp eye on those that were asleep or ' nid-nid-nodding,' and prodding them into wakefulness and attention with a long wand. In 1659 a similar bequest was made by one Richard Dovey to the church of Claverley in Shropshire. P'vtn * Solon, with all his wisdom, declined to draw up laws when his great head began to nod. And our legislative wisdom needs to be alert and open-eyed when it is 'en fonction,' as the French say. We make both Houses a present of the suggestion that is' enshrined in the examples of Trysull and Claverley. Pure Food 'In the matter of foods and drugs, things are not always what they seem. The clumsy wooden nutmeg of a generation agone was a harmless resort compared with sundry of the later exploits of *the mo-lern professional poisoner. Mr Fowlds's Pure Food Bill, which is intended to protect the public from the ungentle art of the adulterator, is working its toilsome wav through our Legislature. The penalties which it provides are sufficiently deterrent. In Ihe days of the old guilds, the penalties against adulteration were often ferocious in their severity. Among the miMest of them were the stocks and the .duckingstool. In England, the pillory — which was not abolished till the Act of June 30, 1837 — was a favorite punishment for adulterators, quacks, and mountebanks. The chronicle: Ttobert- Fabyan records- how Robert Bassett, who was mayor of London in 1287, ' did sharpe correction upon tfakers for making bread of ' light-weight ; he also caused divers of them to be put in the pillory, as also one Agnes Daintie, for selling of mingled butter.' Bax, . in his ' German Society at the Close of the Middle Ages ' (p. 216) relates the following facts :: — * • 'In some towns the baker who misconducted himself in the manner of f he composition of his bread was condemned .to be shut up in a basket, which was fixed , at the end of a long pole, .and let down so many _ times to the bottom of a pool of dirty water. In the year 1456 two grocers, together with a female assistr ant, were burnt alive at Nurnberg for adulterating saffron and 'spices, and a similar instance happened at Augsburg in 1492.' Up till the eighteenth century the fire-penalty was the legal punishment of women in England who murdered their husbands. They were deemed guilty of petty treason, and sent to the stake. In those times, the aim of legislators seems to have been to deter from crime by making the punishment excite more horror " than the offence. Such a course naturally produced a reaction, and in our gentler times legal penalties are .made to fit the crime— even the crime of that modern professional poisoner,- the adulterator— without being barbarous or vindictive. i ' Our « Bright Boys ' i An experienced and successful teacher, writes to us :— ' What becomes' of the " bright "boys " and the'"promising youths " that leave oui; schools ? We trace one ,

here, another i.here. But the bulk of them seem- to drop beneath the ' surface of things, or to sit down by the roadside of life and stay there. After/ many'years' experience of fetching, I am more and more inclined to pin my faith to the' mediocre boy that is a plodder^ The merely average boy that has learned the art of "sticking to it :) at" school is, I think— his chances being equal— the boy that will do most credit to ' himself in the great.battle of life. What think you ?' We have also tried at ' times to puzzle out the mystery of the ' bright boy ' and the ' promising youth' that go out into the world and fail to illumine it tfiih even the dull ray of a Will-o'-the-wisp, The boy who is to make his mark does not need to pray 'for genius, but for capacity for work and for ' sticking to it.' For genius has been described as a capacity for hard, methodical, perseyeriYig work. A navvy or a hod-, man can • better afford 'to loaf and laze than the youth who would be a skilful mechanic ,or electrical engineer or lawyer or journalist. And it» takes longer to learn how ~to use brain-tools than hand r tocls, such as shears or shovels, lasts or planes. The price of the best success is ever work, work, work. There is nothing for nothing, little for little, much for much. Steady, plodding work with hand and brain-pot is what in most cases makes so great after-life differences between boys that stood on a level in class. Meyerbeer worked fifteen hours a day. Handel is said to have done the work of twelve men. Hunter, the great medical scientist, slept only fne hours out of the twenty-fourr Edison's hours of rest ase sometimes shorter. And Lord Brougham's work was so great that Sydney Smith once recommended him to transact only as much business as three strong men could get through. These- arc, k of course, extreme cases ; but they serve to illustrate our point. Our correspondent gives us a list of the successes of mediocre boys, among his pupils, who had the art of 'sticking at it.' We • might . enrich his private list by citing scores of illustrious names. Thus, Newton, Wellington, Napoleon, Smer.ton, Watt, Stephenson, Hogarth, Wilkie, Peel, Scott, Chatterton, ' Stuttering < Jack Curran,' Swift, General. Ulysses Grant (his. mother . called him ' useless ' Gxant), were all considered dull boys r.t school. Their lives are a ray of hope to the average youth. Unfortunately, too many- cf our boys— including many of the ' bright ' arid ' promising ' ones— do with their books after school-days what their sisters -do with their music and painting after their' single days are over : they fling them aside. They turn their minds to grass,- and leave them there. That is, one of the ways in which so many ' promising youths ' never keep their promise— how so many bright mental tadpoles never grow irito honest frogs. So many people forget that school and college education is., and can be, only a beginning.- Its main use is the training of soul and . heart and mind, forming a habit of work, teaching how to study, and how to continue the work of" e"duc,ation after school-days I are over. The school or college that does thus much for its pupils has done "excellently well. For the world •is the great university of life, and the wisest men are those that are learners to the end. And at the end, even the brains of the whole Royal Society have only touched "sundry streaks on the outer fringe or hem of knowledge. ' - , Alpine Accidents The Alpine season, as it is called,' is .still comparatively young.' Yet- up to a few days ago (cccotding to a cable message) four-and-seventy fatalities have been recorded among the adventurous tourists who find their chief summer joy in toiling up the lofty and dangerous heights where the sunshine gilds ' the mountains' white diadems of snow. ' Mr. Dooley' ' once went so high up the mountains that (he de- ■ clared) he had to keep whiskin' the stars off his nose.

But he was never properly bitten by the mountainmania. Why do people go- risking their precious or useless necks in mountain-climbiing in Switzerland, where most of the Alpine calamities occur ? You might ■ as well ask why do people in New Zealand get the influenza and the whooping-cough. Just because they cannot very well help it. Mountain-climbing is the sun-.mer epidemic or mcriia of Switzerland. It comes as do the measles or the General Depression. And every year lengthens the list of foolhardy plains-folk from Germany, Italy. England, and elsewhere that sever the partnership between body and soul among, the ice-fields and the snows. Some weeks ago two members of the Italian Alpine Club fell a distance of over 1200 f-.et. They bumped ;t few /times against the jagged rocks in their swift 'descent— it is doubtful if the bumping did much good — and were crushed upon the hard, cold face of the glacier far below. Others a-many went to sudden doom— swept down deep crevasses, or flicked-off Avind-swept steeps by falling rocks or snow-slides or thundering avalanches. The venturesome new habit of going up unknown heights without guides- has also afforded sundry foolish people many- different ways of breaking their foolish necks. * - , There are, of course, the skilled mountain-climbers, " whose arduous and perilous toil has enriched the world with information of much scientific interest. But the Swiss summer tourist-climbers do not belong— except at ( extremely * rare intervals— to this category. With rV them, the risks are not worth the red meat that's in the, game. What do they do when they get on top ? ' " Jusiff slither down again, get their bruises 'patched, "cut •a.fresh notch in their alpenstocks, and go up in a fresh place. And so on, da capo, till the summer ends or an accident shivers thair timbers. But most of those whom we have met had no more scientific interest in their risky sport than had Hood's lackey who accompanied his master up ' Mount Blank ' one day when lit snew, then thew, and then friz.' He shot off his ' pistle,' but ' has it maid little or no noise, didnt ear the remarkably fine ekko.' And he forgot the chief object that brought him to the summit—' to thro a tumble over hed and heals.' For our part, we prefer 1o do our- high-mountain-climbing as Mark Twain did his— by deputy. Wasting Energy According to a list carefully corrected and brought' up to date by the Milwaukee ' Catholic Citizen ', there are in the United States 288 - Catholic newspapers and periodicals, exclusive of some 200 monthly and quarterly church calendars. Of the 2188 newspapers' and periodicals, 200 are in English and 88 in foreign languages — 45 in German, 15 in French, 12 in Polish, ' and 16 in other languages, 1 including Bohemian, Slovenic, Dutch, Italian, Spanish, and Indian '. There are 77 Catholic weeklies and 123 periodicals -published in' English, 49 weeklies and 12 dailies in foreign tongues. Here is indeed a terrible waste of effort. Of- the 126 Catholic weeklies, a good 100 arc probably superfluous ; of the 123 periodicals, another , 100. In our day of twelveinch guns and magazine rifles and melinite and Shimose powder, the broad principles of warfare are the' same as they were in the time of matchlocks, flintlocks, and iron ramrods. Concentration of force is as necessary now as it was in the days of the old Brown Bess. Despite their usual business acumen, our Catholic coreligionists beyond the Pacific are guilty of a wild and wasteful dispersion of journalistic energy. Half a dozen really strong weeklies, and as many magazines, circulating among even the same number of subscribers, would be a vastly greater power for good in -the landthan a whole army corps of journals that are more or less local, that jostle each other for standing room, and at times fight each other for life to the point of exhaustion. There are in the United States some

Catholic weeklies and Wo or three Catholic periodicals 2 that approach pretty nearly to the ideal of what such> ,■ publications ''should be. The cause of religion would he well served if some ten score of the weaklings were quietly consigned lo the lethal chamber, and their places taken by the more virile publications that we refer to. Some of our" non-Catholic friends are wiser' in their generation, and, instead of a multitude' of ' weakly ' journals, concentrate their . energies ■ upon one great family magazine-newspaper that finds its way week by week into tens or hundreds of thousands of homes. < Irish Outrages ': XII. ' Faking ' and Exaggeration "' The Irish ', says Sydney Sirith (' Works ', cd. 1850, p. 482), ' were quiet under the reign of Queen Anne— so the half-murdered man left on the ground bleeding by thieves is quiet ; and he only moan's, and eries -for help as he recovers. The Irish people were quiet after the Great Famine— with the ' quietude of spirits broken and forces exhausted. But their tranqjuility no more saved them from coercive -legislation after the famine years than it' mitigated the atrocity of the penal laws in the reign of Anne. Lord Chief Justice Pennefather's dictum of 1843 still represented both the state of the law and the aim of the dominant party policy of the day : ' The whole code relating to landlord and tenant, in this country was framed with a view to the interests of the landlords and to enforce the payment of rent by the tenants. The in- ■ terest of the tenants never entered into the contemplation of the Legislature>". Coercion Acts, as we have already sufficiently shown, were, all through the nineteenth century, mainly intended to strengthen the hands of the landlord, to enable him to- exact his rack- ' rents in times of famine and distress, and to suppress not only combinations, but also the expression of opinion, on the part of the poorer and more dependent party' in what was, in its last resort, a trade dispute. The head and front of the offending of the people during the famine of- 1879-80 was this : that almost fourfifths of. them had joined, or were in sympathy with, the organisation known as the Land League ; that so strongJy-knit was this combination that the landlords found it no longer possible to induce the tenant farmers to play the old cut-throat game of internecine strife for the privilege of paying rackrents ; and that evictions were rendered more and more difficult by the de- . termination of a people, heartened by union and exasperated 'by acts of repression, to defend by physical force the homes which they or their fathers- had built. Mr. Forster introduced his first Coercion Bill on January 24, 1881. He based his demand for coercion on' the usual plea, that there was an enormous — indeed, unprecedented — total of crime in the country in Ihe year that had just ended (1880). He secured his statistics of ' outrage ' by the good old rule, the simple plan of grossly misusing and misapplying the term k ' outrage ', by multiplying crimes in an amazing, ia v shion, and (says Mr. T. P. O'Connor, pl.p 1 . 214) by packing a' . fiercely passionate speech with c those asides and suggestions which were natural to one of the greatest ' masters of adroit suggestiveness the House, of Commons ever saw '. There were (according to Mr. Forster) 2590 ' outrages ' perpetrated' in Ireland in 1880. But it turned out that 1337 of these were the easy and suspicious form of offence known as threatening letters, representing (at the yery worst) ' outrages ' not actually perpetrated, but merely intended or promised for some future time. This reduced Mr. Forster's list of actual 1 outrages 'to 1253. But even at that figure, 1 he maintained that ' the actual agrarian • outrages ' were . ' more than double what they were in the worst year we have any record of, namely, the year 1845 '. Commenting on this statement, Mr. T. , P. O'Connor says' ( Parnell Movement', cd. 1887, p. 21"5) :—

' Here again we have a statement which is entirely untrue, to the extent that it gives a grossly — it may be said, a gigantically— false representation of the state of affairs. It is entirely untrue to declare that the year ] 880 was more criminal than any year from 1844. It would be far more correct to say that the year 1880 was a year startlingly free from crime in comparison with several of the years from 3 844. The criminal character of a year should assuredly be tested, not so much by the number of its crimes as by their character. A year that has had a hundred cases of petty larceny and no murder would certainly be less criminal than a year that had fiftytwo crimes, of which fifty were petty larceny and two were wilful murder, though there was a difference of forty-eight between the criminal totals of the one year and the other.' The writer ihen institutes three tabulated comparisons (pp. 215-61 between Mr. Forster's 'enormous and " unprecedented ' year 1880, and various years that had gone before, as far back as 1844. For his first test he takes ' homicides, whether murder or manslaughter • that are described in the criminal statistics as ' agrarian. ' ' Homicides, described as, Agrarian.'

'It will bd seen from this table,' says Mr. O'Connor ' (p. 215), 'that in serious agrarian crime, the year 1880 bore a most favorable contrast, not merely with many years since 1844* but also wiih the very year which preceded it.' * ' The distinction made between agrarian and other outrages,' says our author (p. 215), ' would seem to have been very lax in the early years of the- statistical records.' Hence the ' total of outrages ' constitutes the basis of the second form of comparison of " the criminality of 1880 and that of previous years. The years 1846-50 were, us the reader is aware, years of famine, clearances, and agrarian upheaval, and the bulk of the ' outrages ' (that is, offences) with which they are credited were ' the crimes of starving and desperate peasants fighting for their patch of land and their meals of potatoes ' (Op. cit., p. 126):—

Here, indeed, was further evidence that ' the year 3 880 was a 3 r ear startingly free from crime in connection with several of the years from .1844.' Here is' Ihe final comparison between 1880 and preceding years (p. 216) :—

The words of the Queen's N Speech at ,the' opening of Parliament on January 6, 1881, and the admissions of Mr. Forster and the Marquis of Hartington, as well as the official statistics; ' proved,' says Mr. O'Connor (p. 216), ' that in serious crime 1880, instead of being exceptionally criminal,, was, compared with years of disturbances, exceptionally innocent ; and that disposes of Mr." Forster's first plea for coercion.' * The following was, the second plea by which Mrl Forster endeavored to justify his demand for coercion: that there was an enormous increase of crime in the latter half of 1880 ; that this increase was most notable during the last three months of tfie year, which

lie credited with ' two-thirds of the total agrarian outrages ' of the entire year, and 58 per cent, of the lotal, exclusive of threatening letters ; and that ' the number which occurred in ' the month of December was much more than it is for October and November put together ' (' Hansard ', vol. cclvii, pp. 1209-10). From the comparatively clean record of serious crime indicated in the official statistics published in tabular form above, the reader will gather the impression that, Mr. Forster must have found it ' labor. "dire and heavy woe ' to make it appear that in the year 1880 Ireland was a whirling pandemonium of savage manners and revolting outrage. The Chief Secretary ' had, however, not inherited ,in vain a knowledge of the methods by which his.' predecessors in office had succeeded- in convincing ' legislative majorities across the Channel %hat the "Western Celts were a nation of lawless monsters,, to be kept in subjection only by a policy of whips and scorpions. ' Mr. Forster's chief device \> says the author already quoted (p. 217),' ' was to select some special and isolated case of horrible ill-usage, and represent "Ellis as of constant occurrence, and typical of the general condition of the country '. Thus, in the Blue Book ' detailing the crimes of February-October, 1880, he alighted upon' one solitary case of ' carding '—that is, curry-combing the naked body of some offender ' against the laws of what we may term the agricultural tradesunions. Mr. Forster did with this one grain of unwholesome fact what the goldbeater does with his tiny button of gold— he beat it out till it -covered an area hundreds of times greater than it previously occupied. In other words, 1 he led -the"; House— and, .through the newspapers, the country— to believe that this piece of cruelty was being perpetrated, as a standing resort, all over the country.- * For lack o£ murders, he also^wrought upon the feelings of his hearers by plentiful stories of cattlemaiming—a form of cruelty against which the heart of the normally constituted Celt and Briton rises in lighteous and indignant revolt. 'In 1880,' said Mr. Foister, ' the number of cases "of maiming cattle .imounted to lOi ' (' Hansard,' vol. cclvii., p. 1211). One. and- one acts of cruelty to animals, in a year in a population of some five millions represent, indeed, a total that people of kindly feeling for our dumb friends will heartily deplore. Nevertheless, it might fairly be urged, that it could hardly justify the British k Parliament in destroying the liberties of a subject nation, and delivering it over to something that (as it turned out) was little better than martial law. And this plea might have been urged with all the greater force if thb (Parliamentary majority in England had been prepared 1o consider in a spirit of calmness the beam that was in their own country's eye. Here are some figures in point (' Parnell Movement,' cd. 1887,., p. 218) :— 'In 1876 there were in England 2468 convictions for cruelty to animals ; in 1877, 2726 ; in 1878, 3533. In the very month of November of ' 1880, the Society for the Prevention of Crueity to Animals was able to advertise 323 convictions, or more than three times the number of cases in Ireland for the entire year! If the liberties of England, were at. the mercy of an ignorant 'and hostile public opinion in Ireland, one can well imagine how, by a judicious manipulation of these statistics, the habits of the English people might be falsely illustrated to the Irish people as those of a- nation ol savages or monsters.' The manner in which the other ' outrages ' of 1880 were ' faked,' manipulated, and exaggerated for the purpose of giving the ascendancy, party , in Ireland a fresh lease of unconstitutional power, was so startling that it deserves treatment in a separate article.

844 .845 .846 847 .849 18 1850 18 1851 16 1869 16 1879 15 1880 18 12 10 10 8'

Year Total of Outrages. 'Year 1849 1850 1851 18^0 \ Total of Outrages. 14,908 10,639 9,144 5609' 1844 1845 1846 1847 1848 6,327 8.088 12,374, 20,986 14,080

Year 1844 1845 1846 1847 1848 1849 1850 Homicides. 146 139 170 212 171 203 139 Year 1851 1852 1853 1870' 1871 1880 Homicides 157 140 119 77 71 69'