Notes

New Zealand Tablet, 13 November 1913, Page 34

Notes

Father Vaughan and Hall Caine Speaking the other Sunday at St. Mary's, Douglas, on 'The Inner Life of the' Catholic Church,' Father Bernard Vaughan delivered a scathing indictment of Hall Caine's new novel. Never, in any part of the world,' he said, have I come across a group of such vapid, inane, and deadly, dull nincompoops as the group of "Catholics" created for Mr. Hall Caine's latest novel. When I put the book down I felt that

I must have been following a love story got up for a picturedrome. The title ought to have been “ The Woman Thou Gavest Me NOT.’”

Sir Edward Carson's Wealth .;. Sir Edward Carson, who was announced to have given £IO,OOO to the * Ulster Indemnity Fund, could very well afford the donation, for he has during the last few years made more money at the Bar than any other man. [ His annual income for five years, according to the Daily Sketch, cannot have been less than. £30,000, which was what Sir Rufus Isaacs earned before he took office with the Government. The two are easily the richest King's Counsel,' says the Daily Sketch. Mr: F. E. Smith is earning something like £15,000 a year, and bids fair in time to equal the records established by Carson and Isaacs.

An Australian View of Carson The Sydney Sun, an exponent of Australian nationalism, says—' Sir Edward Carson is undoubtedly preaching rebellion. Bismarck in such circumstances would no doubt have recommended his famous remedy—"a little hanging." Some instruction may be gathered from the story of Coxey's " Army of the Commonwealth of Christ" in America in 1894. It was to march to Washington and compel the Government to issue irredeemable paper money. ' Coxey was not hanged. He was arrested for walking on the grass in the Capitol grounds. Similarly Ireland will find peace when Sir Edward Carson" is caught with a lighted cigarette in a non-smoking carriage.'

The Lost India Some time ago the cables informed us that the authorities in India were seriously concerned as to the probable effect on the native Indian mind of the lenient treatment extended to Sir Edward Carson in respect to his seditious deeds and words. There was good ground for the perturbation if the state of thing's in India is really that described by Mr. H. Fielding-Hall in an article in the Nineteenth Century. He declares quite frankly that already in sentiment India is lost to England. India is lost to us in sentiment. She can no longer bear our rule. It galls her, and she resents it. She waits now but her opportunity, and given that, she will depart from —will we or nill we. Yet that would be ruin to both of us; no one who looks facts in the face will doubt that this is so.'

Taking stock of the situation before it is too late, the writer maintains that the reason of the unrest is not difficult to discover. ‘To one who has been for twenty-seven years among the peoples of the provinces as non-official and as official it seems quite obvious. India dislikes our rule because it hurts her, and the reason that it hurts her is that it has become bad. It has for fifty years or so deteriorated and grown more harsh, more unsympathetic, and more pedantic, India, on the other hand, has grown. She wants more liberty, not less. We held her in elastic leading-strings some fifty years ago. Now she is stronger she wants the strings relaxed, but we have made them into iron and constricted them. , How does our* government hurt her ? _ In every way, I think,, wherever it touches. Criminal and civil courts, revenue administration, and education hurt. But, most of all, the destruction of the village organism bites and burns. The criminal courts are filled with perjury and false evidence; the police are most unsatisfactory; a . jury system could not be introduced because juries would always acquit. Our courts have petrified all custom into cast-iron precedent. Such are our courts. Our education is a failure, naturally, because its ideals are wrong. India is being lost to us, and the Civil Service is losing it.’

. And the writer’s remedy for the present distinctly serious state of things is nothing more nor less than a reasonable measure of Home Rule. ‘ The whole

ideal and personnel must be completely changed, and then self-government must be cultivated. This’must begin at the bottom, not at the top; in the villages, not in council chambers; and on a firm and enduring base must be assisted to slowly grow. So can we win # ~ J S ,v " VCA.XX nu WAUL back Indiathere is no other way.’*