A NEW ZEALAND CATHOLIC BENEFIT SOCIETY.

New Zealand Tablet, 5 June 1913, Page 36

A NEW ZEALAND CATHOLIC BENEFIT SOCIETY.

TO THE EDITOR. Sir, —I wish to thank you and the other writers, for expressing your views on the suggested N.Z.C.B. Society. Others, who have as yet, hidden their light under a bushel, we invite to let their light shine before men. Messrs. Callaghan and Sheahan have devoted considerable space to prove that the H.A.G.B. Society is Catholic. To continue to write in that strain, seems to me a waste of time; it’s like proving that black is black—it is self evident. These writers come nearer the point when they state that the word ‘ Hibernian ’ is the bone of contention. Let me point out, that words but clothe ideas, and so it becomes not a discussion of words but ideas. Mr. Callaghan, though a New Zealander, says he wants Ireland to take first place, whereas being a New Zealander I want New Zealand to be first, and I know every right-minded Irishman in New Zealand thinks the same. Do not all upholders of Irish rights declare ‘ Ireland for the Irish,’ and must they not also proclaim ‘ New Zealand for the New Zealanders?’ Does not Mr. Callaghan say the same thing when he writes ‘ that the whole 36 officers of the H.A.C.B. Society in Wellington are New Zealanders .’ Give me every time the man who knows what he wants and is not afraid to ask for it. Make-ups even in the feminine garb are to be avoided, but when they don the masculine garb I have no time for them. M. J. Sheahan has never forgotten that an Irish mother suckled him in Ireland, and is true to the land of his birth. It is a good thing to die for one’s country. The trouble, however, with Mr. Sheahan and others is that, though New Zealand has grown they have not grown with it, they forget that the little boys they saw in petticoats and later in short trousers have, by the lapse of time, become men, and are, like the Irish stock they come from, intense lovers of their own country, and like their ancestors, prepared to die for the land of their birth. Let us try and realise that the genus of a country is a thing you cannot kill. It will out. And what I am trying to realise is that New Zealand has its own genus, and that as New Zealand grows this peculiarity of race will assert itself. Whatever may be the destiny in store for New Zealand, this fact must always be borne in mind, that the future greatness of New Zealand has. been in great part evolved from the sterling worth of the Irish character that came to New Zealand.—-I am, etc., Joseph Croke Darby, Dean of Waikato. The Deanery, Hamilton, Waikato, May 30.