Current Topics

New Zealand Tablet, 4 July 1918, Page 14

Current Topics

The Exemption of Teachers A few days ago we read in a Wellington paper that Mr. Poynton, S.M.,' had no hesitation in exempting two teachers of Banks College on the grounds that education was one of the most essential things even in war time, fie also pointed out that the Germans had a proper sense Of their duty in this matter, and that even when struggling under the heavy burden of the present expenditure they did not forget to finance generously their schools. If well paid teachers are essential there surely can be no question about the exemption of our self-sacrificing Brothers, who devote their lives to the task of giving our Catholic boys a real education, asking no more on earth than their daily bread. Still, we do not read that the P.P.A. had any hard things to say about Mr. Poynton for exempting teachers who were both well paid and non-Catholic. If he had said what he did say about two Brothers what a chorus we would have had from the ranters of the Dominion who respect neither truth nor common sense when the No-Popery cry is raised ! We are learning something—even if it be from the Germans. A Challenge We note with satisfaction that the Xew Zealand Herald has published by arrangement a challenge to the P. P. A. in which Father Brennan undertakes to pay the sum of .£SOO to the Red Cross if the orators of that august body will prove a single one of many false assertions which they have been spreading throughout New Zealand "from the platform and through their publications, with the object of stirring up sectarian feeling against Catholics. From time to time we have noticed the absurdities of their dastardly campaign, calling attention to the forged oaths and the bogus summaries of Canon Law which they put before the more foolish members of the community. We have been satisfied that the common sense of the people of the Dominion would in time put the P. P. A. and its leaders in their proper places, and we have had ample confirmation of the fact that throughout New Zealand no decent Protestant would descend so low as to lend his name to the campaign which was disgraced from its beginning by the tactics of its chief spokesman. Apart from the sensible and thinking people there is a substratum of those who are neither sensible nor thinkers, and who owing to the prejudices of their early training are ready to believe that the Pope has horns. The direct method now employed by Father Brennan will leave no excuse to even these persons, while it will effectively give the lie to any man who has again the hardihood or the effrontery to repeat such statements in face of such a plain challenge. The plan adopted by Father Brennan is far more effective than any argument. People whom argument could not reach for many reasons must open their eyes to the fact that here is a plain contradiction of the statements on which the whole P. P. A. campaign bases its attacks, and that no man who has made such charges against the Catholics as are now challenged can keep silent, if he has a spark of honor. To come forward and prove the truth of the charges or to retract them is henceforth the plain duty of Messrs. Elliott, Earnshaw, Knowles, Scorgie, Griffiths, etc. Mention of the Hon. Mr. Earnshaw reminds us that once upon a time the same gentleman used to be a strenuous Labor Advocate. " We wonder how many horny handed laborers would now shake hands with him. Irish Stew t i The inimitable Hughes is a Welshman so is Lloyd George. But they have more than that in common. The threats of Hughes and his daily vows to deport or otherwise dispose of that sane Irishman,

Archbishop Mannix, have afforded much amusement to all rightminded Australians in these days of storm and stress; and nobody seems to get much fun out of the little Welshman's can-can as his Grace of Melbourne, who goes on smiling as he knocks out poor Hughes round after round. Over the seas Lloyd George is determined not to allow Hughes to have a monopoly of the serio-comic business, and in this he is efficiently seconded by the Press Association, which for many of us has eclipsed Punch. What will the next generation think when reading the history of our time? How they will marvel at the bland simplicity of the alleged statesmen who imagine they can hoodwink the world by issuing items of Irish news which would disgrace the intelligence of the denizens of the Zoo! And when the day comes, as it must come, when newspapers will be primarily concerned with telling the truth, how people will wonder at the degeneracy of our age in which the most obvious falsehoods and the most laughable canards are offered to an amused public by editors who have already been left hopelessly behind by their readers! The ring of newsmongers gathered around Northcliffe has been so often exposed that at present no sane reader takes any cable issued from that quarter seriously ; and of all the enormities they are guilty of none are so great as their extravagances about Ireland. We saw that some months ago our press, in obedience to the nod of Northcliffe, continued to tell us plain lies about the Sinn Feiners after the truth had been told in the House of Lords by the Lord Lieutenant. And when the Lord Lieutenant kept on being sane they engineered his removal and replaced him by one of their own tools, who at once lent himself to a course of action against which such honest men as Lord Wimborne, Mr. Birrell, and Mr. Duke had set their faces through sheer love of truth and justice. Now the world laughs at the tale of a pro-German plot and at the wholesale arrests for which not a tittle of evidence has been adduced, for the very simple reason that there is no evidence. Again Lord Wimborne's innate honesty compelled him to speak the truth and tell the world that Sinn Fein is not pro-German. He also added the salutary remark that it were far better forthe Empire if the army of soldiers at present in Ireland were employed elsewhere. For the rest of the world it may be a farce, but for poor oppressed and calumniated Ireland what a tragedy it is that such thing's should take place at the hands of a Government that tells- the world that it is fighting for the freedom of small nations! The play goes on, and the conviction grows on us that the longer it goes on the worse it will be for England and the better for Ireland when the day of reckoning comes at last.. For the day will come as surely as truth must prevail.. What a weapon against England Lloyd George and» hisGerman advisers, Carson and Milner, are for forging; for the Peace Conference which must come sometime !: It may be taken as a golden rule now that we cannot, believe any cable about Ireland, and though we are in the dark we are confident, with the vast majority of the people at Home, that all will be well. God will not ask the land of our fathers to carry the cross: always. Her crown will come too. What a light a. remark of "Tay Pay's" threw on the cables that told' us that the Irish in America had no sympathy with the men at home who refused to. fight for a tyrant ! "Tay Pay" did not find it advisable to address Irish.. meetings in the United States what time he collaborated with Galloper Smith ! There were volumes ini that little admission. Slavery In the famous Encyclical, ,"Serum Novarum," which ought to be in the hands of every laborer in the world, Leo XIII. says: "A small number of very rich men have been able to lay upon the teeming masses of the "laboring poor a yoke little better than that of slavery itself." In these words the greatest Pope of modern times lays his finger on the root of the social

trouble which bids fair to loom larger than ever on the horizon of our day. 1 Twenty-three years ago these words. were written, and they are truer now than they were then. Leo XIII. did not hesitate /to call the evil by its true name when he described it as a state of slavery. Five years ago Hilaire Belloc wrote a brilliant book in which he pointed out that the menace of such slavery was daily assuming more alarming proportions, and that it was fast becoming actually a State institution. "Where," he says, "there is compulsion applicable by positive law to men of a certain status, and such compulsion enforced in the last resort by the powers at the disposal of the State, there is the institution of slavery; and if that institution be sufficiently expanded the whole State may be said to repose upon a servile basis, and is a Servile State. . . We call the Servile State that arrangement in which so considerable a number of families and individuals are constrained by positive law to labor for the advantage of other families and individuals as to stamp the whole community with the mark of such labor." In ancient times we are told that the slaves were driven by the whip and the dagger, and that enforced labor was sanctioned by positive laws. Modern slaves are not. legally recognised as such, nor are they, scourged by their masters. But they are compejled to slavery by the prevailing economic conditions, and they are scourged by dread of starvation in some cases, and by the dangerous conditions amid which they must labor if they will live in others. In a time when huge war profits are being made how little heed is taken of the needs of any but skilled workmen ! The cost of food has increased by fifty per cent., but there, is no corresponding increase in the workman's wages. The sovereign has lost fifty per cent, of its purchasing power, but who takes this into account when dealing with th laborers ? And because there is no consideration of these circumstances the unrest daily becomes more acute. At the root of the social problem, as at the root of the war, is the same want of Christian charity which makes it possible to have amongst us at this ape of the world the existence of such conditions. The following extracts from a report of the United States. Commission on Industrial Relations is ominous reading: "The rich, comprising two per cent, of the people, own sixty per cent, of the wealth." "The middle class, comprising 33 per cent, of the people, own thirty-five per cent, of the wealth." "The poor, comprising sixty-five per cent, of the people, own FIVE per cent, of the wealth." The sam£ is proportionately true of England. And of such countries Bishop Huntington declared: "A society that has all its property at the top and all its discontent at the bottom will tumble over into ruin." According to an American expert Persia, Egypt, Babylon, and Rome all collapsed after the wealth had accumulated in the hands of the few. It is small wonder considering all these indications that serious thinkers believe that when the great war is over many countries will have to face a social upheaval in comparison with which even the war may become insignificant. And the worst of it is that no warning is of any avail. As long as men deliberately set Mammon before God Christian charity will never have a chance to make all things right in the world: the Auri sacra- fames will continue to turn men into wolves until the day comes when the Master demands the life of the last of the fools. How the Empire is Governed When we remember that the cables sent out to us are controlled by the British Government, and that, as a consequence, they represent the principles and intelligence of our rulers, we necessarily think furiously. Are we now governed by a gang of men who not only have not the courage to tell the truth but who openly admit that they must have a controlled press which shall publish not the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, but only what

suits. the Government f From. what we know of the press campaign and of the methods which Mr: Asquith in the name of honor and truth condemned we must conclude that such indeed is the Lloyd George Govern-", ment. It is a sad state of things when we must recognise that the Northcliffe "corner," which controls not only the press but also the politicians, is so unreliable and so prone to lies about Ireland and about Catholics that we cannot attach the slightest importance to what we now read as news. Mr. Chesterton says we are governed by Guy Fawkes, and his words are worth reproducing here. This is how he analyses present day Governments in England:—"A curious confused attempt to combine the immunity and even anonymity of private life with the fame and applause of public life ; a touchy self-importance which screams like a cockatoo when criticised ; a sheer mental breakdown in the presence of any general principle; and ignorance of history; and ignorance of humanity; a congested combination of the two stupidities of thinking everybody like oneself and thinking oneself better than everybody; and finally a complete failure of moral courage and an inability to face the music. These are Business Governments: and there will be a great many more of them. But of all the examples of such futility the most striking of. all and most symbolic has been the last feature of the Northcliffe press. They and other journalists have actually begun to make the solidarity of the Irish bishops in the Irish unity an excuse for the old nonsense of NoPopery. They have actually begun to burn poor old Guy Fawkes in effigy : simply because they want some guy on which to get rid of their irritation at having made a very bad blunder: the blunder about conscription for Ireland. . . The main mark of this sort of thing is weakness, both moral and mental; the moral weakness of making a mistake and blaming somebody else for it: and the mental weakness of an ignorant and idiotic choice in the matter of the party to be blamed. Nothing is more certain or more'selfevident than that the Irish people were against con-, scription before there was even any question of the Irish priests. The common-sense way of stating the case is not to say that the bishops are leading everybody, or leading anybody, in the matter; it is to say that everybody has moved in the same direction in this matter, even the bishops. It is a plain question of dates, facts ; chronology and concrete history. Nobody moved more early or more eagerly in the matter than the anticlericals. The clerical element moved if anything rather late ; and its only effect on the movement would be to moderate it. It moved hardly so much because it was national as because it could not be expected to be violently anti-national. If the Roman- Catholic bishops in Ireland had really blessed conscription it would have .been exactly as if the whole bench- of Anglican bishops in the House of Lords had risen- .and- pronounced a public benediction on Germany, the day after the. invasion of Belgium." '■ In his usual brilliant way Mr. Chesterton puts the whole truth of the matter in a nutshell. He knows, as every honest Englishman knows, that Ireland stands exactly in the same relation to England as Belgium does to Germany at the present day ; and he is not afraid to tell the truth about it. If any confirmation were needed to assure Catholics that the bishops are right the inane criticism of our own. press would be enough. Mr. Chesterton's words not only throw light on the wonderful ways of them that govern, but they also get at the root of the ignorance and bigotry and savagery from which the present NoPopery movement springs. No-Popery is rampant everywhere—although such a good judge as "Civis" has paid us the compliment of attributing it to the Tablet in New Zealand. But there is no need to worry. The opposition of the gang is the surest sign that Catholics have at present a healthy sense of their duty.