OBITUARY

New Zealand Tablet, Volume 27, Issue 21, 27 May 1909, Page 819

OBITUARY

MR. JOHN LYNCH, ST. BATHANS. Thei-e passed away at Naseby Hospital on the sth inst. (writes a correspondent),, one of the old pioneers of the goldfields in the person of Mr. John Lynch, a native of Kilmacduan, County Clare. .He arrived in Victoria in the early sixties, and after spending some time on the diggings came to New Zealand: _at the time of the Dunstan rush. He also worked at S£* Bathans and Nevis, and later on went to the West Coast, where he remained for a number of years. Returning to Otago, he worked at Black's Flat, and was a member of the Shamrock company. The deceased was, like nearly all the old miners, hospitable, cheerful, and kind-hearted. He was a generous supporter -of the Church and all charitable institutions. The deceased had been in failing health for some time. He was attended in his illness by the Rev. Father McMul.lan and Rev. Father O'Dea. The remains were interred in the Catholic cemetery, St. Bathans. Father ODea celebrated a Requiem Mass and conducted the burial service at the graveside, making feeling reference to the many good qualities of the deceased. — R.I. P.

once seen, can never more forget — and which even a Premier might be expected to know. Thank God, the worker can now live humanly and hold his head up in the manly independence that becomes the primeval and perennial nobility of labor. But it is a mistake to suppose that his rise to better things is the conquest of a new right, the capture of a new height, achieved in our day. In great part it is the re-conquest of rights which were won under the a?gis of the Catholic Church, which were recoguised four centuries ago, which were trampled upon and covered up during the great religions revolution of the sixteenth century, and which tjie worker has been slowly winning back once more in our time. The learned Anglican Bishop Stubbs, writing of the condition of the poor in the Middle Ages, states that ' there is very little evidence to show that our forefathers in the middle ranks of life desired to set any impassable boundary between class and class. . . Even the villein, by learning and craft, might set his foot on the ladder of promotion. The most certain rise was furnished by education, and by the law of the land " every man or woman, of what state or condition that he be, shall be free to set their son or daughter to take learning at any school that pleaseth him within the realm." ' That first-rank authority on such questions, Brofessor Thorold Rogers, describes the thriving condition of labor in England during the century and a half which preceded the Reformation. The last decades of Catholic England were (he declares) ' the golden age ' of the British worker* In The Economic Interpretation of_ History (p. 63) he says: 'In the age which I have, attempted to describe, and in describing which I have accumulated and condensed a vast amount of unquestionable facts, the rate of production was small,_ the conditions of health unsatisfactory, and the duration of life short. But, on the whole, there were none of those extremes of poverty and wealth which have excited the astonishment of philanthropists and are exciting thy indignation of workmen. The age, it is true, had its discontents, and these discontents were expressed forcibly and in a startling manner. But of poverty which perishes unheeded, of a willingness to work and a lack of opportunity, there was little or none. The essence of life in England during the days of the Plantagenets and Tudors was that every one knew his neighbor, and that every one was his brother's keeper.' ■m In those days the British artisan was protected by his guild against arbitrary dismissal ; he was insured against sickness and the ordinary accidents of life-; work at night, on Saturdays, and on the eves of feasts was forbidden; Sunday closing was rigidly enforced; low fixed rents contributed to his prosperity; and for a considerable period his. .working day was only eight hours. The eight-hours' day of our time is simply a reconquest of a privilege that grew up in the middle ages, under the protecting eye of the Church. The rights of the craft-workers were effectively protected by fines and otherwise. Thus, in 1466, we read that the London Pinners' (pin-makers') Guild fined a man two shillings (equal to £2 of our present currency) for setting a child to work before he had been fully apprenticed; another was mulcted in the same amount for having worked after seven o'clock on a winter's night, a third for keeping a shop before he was a ' freeman ' of the society, and yet another ' for that he sold Flaundres pynnes for English pynnes.' Professor Thorold Rogers says of the law of Henry VII., cap. 22 (of the year 1486) : ' A schedule of wages is given, which, considering the cheapness of the times, is exceedingly liberal. At no time in English history have the earnings of laborers, interpreted by- their purchasing power, been so considerable as those which this Act acknowledges. ' We will conclude with a few remarks about German workers. As in England, so in Germany, the generation that preceded the Reformation was the workers' golden age. Belfort Bax is no friend of the Catholic Church. Yet in his German Society at the Close of the Middle Ages he shows how the peasant of those days had his abundance of flesh-meat of various kinds, fish, bread, fruit, and wine. Such, indeed, were the prosperity and reputed extravagance of the working classes of the decades preceding the Reformation that a sumptuary law, passed in the Reichstag held at Lindau in 1497, provides that the common peasant man and the laborer in the towns or in the fields ' shall neither make nor wear cloth that costs more than half a gulden the ell, neither shall they wear gold, pearls, velvet, silk, nor embroidered cloths, nor shall _they permit their wives or children to wear such.' In England, as in Germany, the middle ages had their drawbacks, their big and little . tyrannies, their „ manifold hardships arid discontents. But they were the times when the Church, in the face of many social and political difficulties, did so much

to place the worker upon a pedestal. The religious revolution of the sixteenth century v ' downed ' him into the dust. And he is still toilfully winning back his way to some of his olden rights once more. If Mr. Fisher had possessed even an elementary knowledge of social and industrial history, he would never have launched out in his crude generalisations about the Church and the worker.