The New Zealand Tablet THURSDAY, APRIL 24, 1913. A DISGRACEFUL BUSINESS

New Zealand Tablet, 24 April 1913, Page 33

The New Zealand Tablet THURSDAY, APRIL 24, 1913. A DISGRACEFUL BUSINESS

N the letter which appeared in the Otago 'Milo Daily Times of Fri day last, and which is reproduced elsewhere in this issue, Mr. J. fN -A.* Scott refers in a appeared the Otago Daily Times of Friday last, and which is reproduced elsewhere in this issue, Mr. J. A. Scott refers in a general way to an incident which is deserving, of a more detailed notice and. which calls for a still more emphatic censure. That incident is nothing v-r ' more or less than the manipulation of a public document by some member of the Bible-in-Schools League in such a way .as to make it convey an absolutely' false statement in regard to the facts with which it purported to deal. The document is an official return published by the New South Wales Education Department; and the exposure of the amazingly unscrupulous methods employed by the League is due in the first instance to the energy and vigilance of Mr. John Caughley, a, Presbyterian public school teacher who happens also to be President of the New Zealand Educational Institute. A leaflet recently published by the League states that : ‘The following official statistics of New South Wales show that visits were paid to State schools by Roman Catholic priests to instruct the Roman Catholic children.’ (The italics are ours.)

The leaflet further sets forth the conclusion which it professes to draw from the above table. ‘ Thus it will bo seen from the above figures that the system obtained for the Roman Catholic Church the valued opportunity of “visiting and instructing” an annual average of 31,423 children.’ - V-v. « The League was enabled to foist this grossly, false conclusion upon the public only by deliberately tampering with the official document. In the return as published by the New South' Wales Education Department the words at the head of the third column were Children oiled j and the return gave, and purported to give, not the number of Catholic children instructed, but the total number of Catholic children enrolled in all the 3000 public schools*©! New South' Wales. The League writer deliberately altered the words Children Enrolled ’ to ‘ Children Instructed,’ and retained the original figures;' That was false statement No. 1. . Then he proceeds to base the following conclusion upon the words of the heading as he had himself altered them : ‘Thus it will be seen from the above figures that the system . ' . . obtained .for

the Roman Catholic Church the valued opportunity of “visiting and instructing” an -annual average /of 31,423 children.’ That was false statement No. 2. Then he * reached the climax of this fact-twisting performance by adding the following : .‘ It should be remembered that all the State schools cannot be reached by the;;priests, and that therefore the actual number of Roman Catholic children in the State schools is larger than the figures above quoted.’ That was false statement No. 3the ‘ figures above quoted ’ representing, as we have said, the full total of all the Catholic children in all the 3000 schools of the State. * So far no explanation of this ugly-looking ‘ fake ’ business has been' forthcoming. In the Outlook of April 15 Canon Garland admitted the ‘error’ but declared that it was ‘accidental and wholly unintentional.’ Does Canon Garland think the public of New Zealand are utter simpletons ? Does he suppose that anyone not in his dotage' would believe' that the heading of an official column of figures altered itself ‘ accidentally,’ or that a series of conclusions based upon the alteration —and wholly favorable to the League’s propaganda—were elaborated ‘ unintentionally ’ ? A conclusion may be false or erroneous but if we are to regard the person making it as being compos < mentis it cannot be ‘ unintentional.’ There is a saying regarding a certain class of over-cunning people that if only given rope enough they will compass their own undoing. That is whathas happened -to- the League writer in the present case. His cunning has over-reached itself.. He has over-stepped all reasonable limits; and has brought shame and confusion both to himself and to the League of which ‘ he is the mouthpiece. It would be interesting, by the way, to know if this ‘faking’ of New South Wales official statistics played any part in the Queensland propaganda, ■ Canon Garland has lamely attempted to extenuate the New Zealand offence by saying that the error ’ has been ‘ corrected ’ in subsequent issues of the leaflet. Even this is only partially true. We have a copy of the ‘ corrected ’ leaflet before us; and in it the utterly false statement That the League system ‘ obtained for the Roman Catholic Church the valued opportunity of - visiting and instructing in seven years an. annual average 0f,31,423 Roman Catholic children’ still .remains.,:. Moreover, the correction, such as it is, was only made after Mr. Caughley’s'exposure of the League’s trickery in the columns of the Lyttelton Times. Referring to Canon Garland’s paltering excuse for the gross distortion of an official document, Mr. Caughley, with obvious truth, remarks: ‘Such pitiable shuffling only intensifies the blame due to the League’s dishonest attempt to hoodwink the public with garbled statistics.’ The matter is, we understand, to be still more thoroughly and effectually ventilated and exposed. In;. the meantime, until full acknowledgment and reparation have been made, the League stands discredited and disgraced in the eyes of all honest men.

- Children Year. Visits. Instructed 1905 ... 797 29,662 1906 ... 1127 30,419 1907 ... ... 1100 32,673 1908 ... 1032 32,544 1909 ’ ... ... 936 ; 31,378 1910 ... 840 31,755 1911 ... 711 31,940