Current Topics

New Zealand Tablet, 26 November 1908, Page 9

Current Topics

Roma's Luck Up in Roma (Queensland), they were boring for water, but literally ' struck ile. '.. The incident reminds us of the American whom fortune dogged through a lifetime with persistent failure, and who, when he one day bored for water, struck only a goldmine. The Egg Argument Last week the Feilding magistrates inflicted the salutary penalty of £$ or a month's imprisonment on an ill-conditioned wight who threw an egg into an election meeting in that rising centre of commerce. The egg was ostentatiously ancient ; its odor was strong enough to draw the Auckland express ; and it rendered unwearable and unapproachable several suits of clothes with which its contents came into contact in the crowded gathering. John Mitchel, who, as a public speaker, had had some experience of this sort of unsavory suasion, reminded one of his assailants that it was easier to go to a meeting with rotten eggs than with sound arguments. A similar experience once befell Charles Burleigh, the American Abolitionist. He was once addressing a crowded audience, in the anti-slavery interest, at a time when that particular political kettle was boiling fiercely. An advocate of the continuance of black slavery, who was present, threw an addled egg and scored a bull's-eye — he smote Burleigh full in the face. Burleigh produced his handkerchief and serenely wiped the foetid flow from his face and clothing, coolly remarking, as he did so : ' There's a proof of what 1 have always maintained, that pro-slavery arguments are very unsound.' Eggs that were conspicuously ' high ' were once upon a time favorite arguments of both Whig and Tory. It is about time that they disappeared from the political arena. At £$ each for such ' arguments,' they are not likely to be much in evidence in future electioneering contests in New Zealand. A Dire Threat The brethren of the Saffron Sash in Bendigo (Victoria) threatened (it is said) to boycott the popular and successful ffite which was recently organised in the Golden City in aid of the splendid local orphanage and Magdalen Home conducted by the Sisters of the Good Shepherd. The threat was as barren a one as that of the Roundhead cavalryman who was pinned beneath his slain horse at the reliei of Pontefract. Three of the enemy's musketeers attacked the helpless warrior, and he threatened to give them no quarter if they so much as touched him. The only power of offence left him was, however, his lung-power. It was even so with the brethren in Bendigo. Their power to injure the fete was in no way commensurate with the lung-power of their threat. And those who have a knowledge of the organisation and of its ways are aware that it has never yet turned aside from its cherished task of fomenting sectarian strife to aid, in ever so small a degree, any Catholic charity, or *o found or endow even one solitary hospital, one home for the aged, one orphanage, or one. institute of f.-ducation, or to send a missionary to the heathen, or a voice to speak of Christ and His love to the dwellers in the slums. Where are the trophies of its charity? Echo answers : ' Where? ' Kilkenny-cat Resolutions The British Baptists, in annual meeting assembled, have passed two resolutions which, like the two historical cats of Kilkenny, have eaten each other up. In the first place, they passed a resolution, in unrestricted terms, in favor of equal religious liberty for all. They followed this up by another resolution ■ approving of a penal law being put into operation by Mr. Asquith, depriving Catholics, at the recent Eucharistic Congress, of a liberty of worship that is accorded, as a matter of course, to Baptists, Anglicans, Presbyterians, Dippers, Jumpers, Quakers, Shakers, Little-endians, Big-endians, Turks, Jews, Mahommedans, and the thousand-and-one other creeds that, throughout the broad .expanse of the Empire, point a thousand-and-one different roads to heaven. Our English Baptist brothers' idea of liberty of conscience recalls a historic dictum of Oliver' Cromwell. During his Irish campaign, he was once negotiating with a Catholic garrison for the surrender of a fortress which they held. To the Governor of Ross he wrote saying that he ' would not meddle with any man's conscience.' This was a fair and comprehensive statement, akin tb the first resolution of our Eng-

lish Baptist friends. -Then followed the grim old Puritan's, equivalent to the second resolution referred to above.. ' If,' added Cromwell, ' by liberty of conscience you mean a liberty to exercise the Mass, I judge it best to use plain dealing- and to tell you now that, where the Parliament of England have power, that will not be allowed of.' History has a trick of repeating itself. Poisoned Books People do not need to be told that a mental diet of criminal narrative has a dangerous influence upon the conduct of children and of persons of weak and impulsive character. - Herein lies, for boys, the peril of the ' penny dreadful ' and its stories of the exploits of ' Daring Dick ' and other-such criminals with alliterative names. Last week, in Christchurch, a magistrate found it necessary to give a taste of ' the butt-end iv the law ' to some young criminals who had evidently been lured off the path of righteousness by a desire to emulate the tinselled heroes of sundry ' penny dreadfuls ' which were found in their possession. The magistrate pointed out the dangers of this class of printed rubbish that is, by courtesy, termed ' literature.' The moral of it all is this : that parents need to exercise' as much vigilance over the reading of their children as over the company that they keep. The professional poisoners of the middle ages received short shrift and little mercy when their crimes were brought to the light of day. Far more insidious, far more ruinous, are the operations of those coarse-grained writers of the stye who in our time poison the souls of youth with novels and romances that are reaching, practically unchecked, into every corner of ' God's own country. 1 A few weeks ago a Christchurch bookseller declared that the authors of some of this unspeakable stuff ' deserve to be boiled alive.' Mr. Bram Stoker writes as follows of the same class of foetid fiction in the September issue of the Nineteenth Century and After : ' Within a couple of years past quite a number of novels have been published in England that would be a disgrace to any country even less civilised than our own. The class of works to which I allude are meant by both authors and publishers to bring to the winning of commercial success the forces of inherent evil in man. . . The merest glance at some of their work will justify any harshness of judgment ; the roughest synopsis will horrify. It is not well to name either these books or their authors, for such would but make known what is better suppressed, and give the writers the advertisement which they crave. . . The evil is a grave and dangerous one, and may, if it does not already, deeply affect the principles and lives of the young people of this country. . . The offenders are such as are amenable only <o punitive measures. They may be described as a class which is thus designated in the searching Doric of the North of Ireland, " They would do little for God's sake, if the devil was dead!" The • 80,000 Converts ' Some sixteen years ago there arose a foolish and hot-headed schism, against the Catholic episcopal authority, among a few Polish congregations in Cleveland (United States). The author of the Recreations of a Country Parson says that few people can resist the temptation to deepen or heighten the color of a narrative. And in Lhe case of the Cleveland schism there were a good many people who did not try to resist. They sent to the newspapers portentous accounts of the numerical strength of the troublesome Poles, credited them bodily, now- to one religious organisation, now to another, and exaggerated the rumpus, even on this outer' rim of the earth, in a manner worthy of the abortive and treasonable los von Rom movement in Austria. The Cleveland Catholic Universe, the Philadelphia Catholic Standard, the Milwaukee Catholic Citizen, and the rest of our many American exchanges, tell the sequel of the Cleveland schism : ' By an unanimous vote of the members of the Polish " Independent Catholic " Church of the Immaculate Heart of the Blessed Virgin Mary, in Cleveland, to return to the true fold, the schism led by Rev. A. F. Kolaszewski, which sixteen years ago caused grave scandal, was terminated.' lhe Catholic Universe states that Father Kolaszewski himself took a prominent part in influencing those who followed him to return. He announced that he had performed his last act as an " independent Catholic." : He publicly acknowledged his fault, and advised all to return to Mother Church. The independent church in Collinwood, a suburb of - Cleveland, has also (according to the Universe) petitioned for a return to the fold of Catholic communion.

♦ Driftwood * One can hardly expect that Protestant Episcopalian leaders in the United States would view with anything like equanimity the large, numbers of # conversions to the Catholic Church that have, during the present year, taken place among their clergy and their sisterhoods. But one expects, at the same time,, something better than the contemptuous term 'driftwood' that the Episcopalian Bishop of Philadelphia lately applied to clerical converts generally to the Catholic faith. This verbal missile is illaimed and wasted— like the copper coins and the flour that the Italian lackwit, Bertoldino, threw in his anger at the fishes. The ' driftwood ' epithet moved the Western Watchman to make the following remarks : ' If there is any more " driftwood " like Manning and Newman and Spencer and Faber and Maturin and Dalgairns and scores more in England and the United States, not -mentioning those who have recently come over in his own diocese and Philadelphia, we wish he would push them into the current. Rome can use such timber in the upbuilding of the glorious Church of God.' Elections Then and Now __ Sterne sighed over ' the sad vicissitude of things.' But ' the glad vicissitude of things ' better expresses the change which the secret ballot has introduced into the recurrent political spasms of parliamentary electioneering. Byron tells how ' One by one in turn, some grand mistake Casts off its bright skin yearly, like the snake.' But it took many a weary year before the humble and dependent elector had thrown around him the welcome protection of secret voting. From the end of the eighteenth century the movement for the secret ballot in the United Kingdom made slow and toilsome headway, with many a check and many a stop. With us in New Zealand, voting by ballot is so far, and has been so long, bone of the bone and flesh of the flesh of our parliamentary and municipal institutions, that it seems to be, as it were, of the nature of things And the young New Zealand elector who dropped his folded voting paper into the urn last week can hardly realise that, only a little over thirty years ago, elections in Great Britain — and to a vastly greater extent in Ireland — were accompanied by all the intimidation, the disorder, and the corruption to which the open ' system was so liable. Secret voting was introduced into the British Isles by Mr. Forster's Ballot Act of 1872. There are those who miss the tornadoes of ' fun ' that whirled around the old open-voting single polling station for borough or county, with its hustings, its stormy oratory, the bantering of candidates, the whisky-drinking and the skull-cracking, and (further back) the duelling contests, in which such redoubtable knights of the hair-trigger as ' Bully ' Egan figured of a frosty morning. But people with little taste for the gladiatorial side of life will welcome the peace and order and decorum which the ballot has thrown around this exercise of a grave citizen right and duty. The last open-vote ele'etion in Ireland — perhaps in the British Isles' — W as ' the Kerry election of Home Rule.' It took place • on February 9, 1872, and resolved itself into a trial of strength between the spirit of Nationalism that was stirring in the hearts of the people, and the might of the landlord party, who made a last desperate effort to drive their tenants to the polls, in the old way, like so many head of cattle driven to fair or market. And the power of rackrenting, eviction, and confiscation of tenant-property that still rested with the landlords made opposition to their plans a rather risky piece of amusement. The rival candidates were Blennerhassett (a young Protestant Home Ruler), .and Dease, the landlord and- Tory nominee. The. description of the contest forms one of -the most enlivening chapters in A. M. Sullivan's New Ireland. Troops — horse and foot — were • poured into Kerry county for the contest. ' The landlords,' says Sullivan, who was an eye-witness, ' hired vacant buildings, courts, or yards, in which to secure their tenants the night before the poll. In virtue of their powers as magistrates, they requisitioned' detachments of foot and lancers for the purpose of " escorting " those voters to the booths. The streets of Tralee rang with the bugles or echoed to the drums of military arriving by train or departing for Dingle, Lis towel, Cachirciveen , Castleisland, etc. All this intensified the prevailing excitement.' * Here is an incident of > this historic election which is worth transcribing as a fair sample or the methods that were followed in dealing with voters as ' dumb, driven cattle ' :

• From Dingle, distant some twenty miles, a great avalanche was to have overwhelmed us.. The story of "the Dingle;contingent " was told me in great delight. Mr. De Moleyns, it seems, had gathered as many conveyances as would transport a small ; army corps, and quite a formidable body of cavalry had proceeded to Dingle to escort the cavalcade. When it started for Tralee it was fully a quarter of a mile in length ; Mr. De Moleyns riding proudly at its head. After it had gone some miles he turned back to make some inquiry at the rear of the procession. Great was his dismay to behold the last five or six cars empty. " Where are the voters who were on these cars?" he stormily shouted at the drivers. ' " The wothcrs, Captain? Some of them slipped down there to walk a bit of the road, and faix we're thinking that they're not coming at all." • " Halt! halt!" he cried; and, full of rage, galloped to the head of the cavalcade. He called on the officer in command of the cavalry to halt for a while, and detail a portion of his men for duty in the rear ; when, lo ! he now noticed that half a dozen cars at the front had, in his brief absence, totally lost their occupants. According to my informants, Mr. De Moleyns, losing all temper, more forcibly than politely accused the officer of want of vigilance and neglect of duty ; whereupon the latter sharply replied : • " What, sir! do you think I and my men have come here to be your bailiffs? I an-, here to protect these men, if they want rrotection ; not to treat them as prisoners. And now, sir, I give you notice I will halt my men no more. Ready, men! Forward I March!" ' By this time fully a third of the voters had escaped. There was nothing for it but to push on. At the village of Castlegregory, however, the severest ordeal awaited them. Here they found the entire population of the place — men, women, and children — occupying the road ; the old parish priest standing in the middle of the highway, his grey hair floating in the wind. The villagers, chiefly the women, well knowing how the voters felt, poured out to them adjurations and appeals. The priest, in a few brief sentences, reached every heart. " Ah, sons of Kerry," said he, " where is your pride and manhood, to be dragged like prisoners or carted like cattle in this way? And for what? That you may give the lie to your own conscience, and give a stab to your country, poor Ireland!" With one wild shout the voters sprang fiorn the cars and disappeared in the body of the crowd. The grand " Dingle cavalcade " was a wreck, and Mr. De Molejns, sad at heart, rode into Tralee at the head of an immense array of empty cars.' That was the last open-vote election in Ireland. The popular candidate (Blennerhassett) won the day. Five months later — on July 13, 1872 — the Ballot Act received the royal signature. ' That Act,' says our author, ' gave a death-blow to electoral intimidation from whatever quarter directed, and delivered the reality of political power at the polls, for the first time, into the hands of the people themselves.'