Current Topics

New Zealand Tablet, 19 September 1918, Page 14

Current Topics

Religious Training In a letter to the Dominion the Rev. Mr. Stent, Vicar of Taihape, puts his finger on the evil in our much-lauded system of State education. In the following words he states the conclusion to which all rightminded men have long come: "Two principles are needed to convert our State system into a satisfactory educative factor—the principle of parental control and the principle that the soul of the child needs educating and developing stage by stage with body and mind. Of course those who take up the attitude that the child has no soul, or that there is no such thing as a soul, will not be able to follow me—nor does it matter." The principle of parental control is founded on the Natural Law, against which our legislators are fighting more strenuously than they fight for the welfare of the Dominion ; the principle that the soul must not be neglected is one of the elementary things that every professing Christian ought to stand for. Support of the harmful national system is logical only for those who stand for the Servile State and the tyranny over family and individual rights which it connotes, and for those who are either indifferent or hostile to the importance of the Christian religion. When we have a set of politicians who are for the greater part utterly incapable of understanding what it is to be guided by principles %t all it is no wonder that the principles of the Natural Law or the Divine Law matter little to them in comparison of the votes of the wowsers. The Government and the Gaelic League The British Government has condemned the Gaelic League and banned its meetings and activities generally. The same benighted body of statesmen did many a stupid thing, but we honestly think they have eclipsed themselves. The Gaelic League was a body formed for the preservation of Irish language and Irish customs. It was non-sectarian and non-political. It numbered many Protestants and Unionists among its members. It owed much of its force and vitality to a few Protestant scholars who lived laborious days in the furtherance of its aims while it was yet unknown to the vast majority of the people. Its literary and historical achievements have been marvellous. To it is due the immense revival of the study of Gaelic and the training of many students who have done no little research work among the old manuscripts. It has made its influence felt even among French and German scholars, and many sympathetic articles have been written about it in foreign Reviews. But now the Lloyd George Government in its superior wisdom has laid down the law that such a body as the Gaelic League is dangerous and seditious ! Lord Cuizon had better look to his laurels for stupidity and idiocy. Other English statesmen are pressing him hard. Is the move a step towards the revival of the ancient efforts to exterminate the Irish people, root and branch? Shall we have £5 offered one of these days for the head of a priest? It looks as if the Government is already on the road to prohibit education of the only sort that the Irish people will tolerate. One of these days the school-books may again contain Whately's dear old doggerel making the Irish children sing that they are happy English children. Indeed it would surprise nobody who°has followed the trend of English legislation in that small nation in the western seas to find that one of these days it had been enacted that it would be regarded as felony to maintain the use of reason for the mere Irish. Such a step would be quite in keeping with the policy of putting insane officers-in control and leaving them until they had committed a certain amount of murders. There is this much to be said for a departure of that sort: It is only when the use of reason has been abandoned completely that the Irish will ever again trust the Lloyd George Government and the pledgebreakers it sends to govern in Dublin Castle °

The Plunder of Ireland Owing to gross misstatements in the prejudiced press it is well for us to have in a handy form the statistics showing how Ireland is plundered through her Union with England in virtue of the disgraceful bribery and fraud of the Act which destroyed her native Parliament. Let us remember (1) that it was found by the Financial Relations Commission that in comparison of the relative. - resources of two countries Ireland could only bear taxation in proportion to that borne by Great Britain in the ratio of 1 to 20. (2) In their report, Mr. Sexton, and his colleagues on the Commission showed that up to the date of that Commission (1896) the true proportion was not 1 to 20, but 1 to 37, while in matter of fact Ireland was compelled to pay in the proportion of 1 to 13, or nearly three times as much as was deemed right and just. For this year Ireland's contribution is readily found from the figures given in the Chancellor's statement in his Budget speech. According to the minimum estimate the National Debt at the end of March next will be £798,000,000,000. His principle is that Ireland's share will be one twenty-fifth of the whole, which means that Ireland will have to find the interest on £319,200,000: that is, she will have to find under that heading alone a sum of £17,556,000 annually. To this add what is called the cost of her "civil" administration (£12,686,000), which she pays for the privilege of having innocent men shot by maniacs like Colthurst. Lastly, the little item of £7,000,000 (which will be increased this year) raised by Local Taxation must be added to the foregoing figures. So that we have Ireland paying a round £40,000,000 in reward for the privilege of Coercion Acts, and Martial Laws and the rule of Orangeism. The following table will be useful for reference, and we advise our readers to keep it:

IRISH TAXATION, years ending March 31 (in Thousands). Rates of increases, 1918-19 Taxes. 1915 1916 1917 1918 1919 £ £ £ £ £ Income ... 2182 3999 6096 C 250 8000 l-sth Farms doubled Death, etc. 1395 1419 1311 1311 1411 Id on cheques Excess profits 3531 6625 7000 Sugar, etc ... 295 821 1668 1800 3000 5-6th Tea etc. ... 889 1446 1572 1900 2000 Tobacco ... 1954 2631 2795 4000 5000 l-4th Alcohol ... 4113 5815 4716 5000 10000 doubled New ... 52 180 478 600 1250 (Luxury tax) est at £500,000 Postal ... 15091 1618 1599 A 1739 2339 P'taUd Total ... 12389?, 17929 237661 29225 40000 BUDGET ALTERATIONS. 1916.—New duties imposed on matches, cycles, clocks, table waters, patent medicines, entertainments, excess profits, and sugar. Increase on income. 1917.—Increases on entertainments, tobacco, and excess profits. 1918. —Increase on income, sugar, tobacco, beer, spirits, and postages. Luxury tax imposed, and Id extra on cheques. Prohibition : A Heresy and a Fallacy The Prohibition movement is based on unsound foundations: it accepts a heresy as its rule of faith and its sovereign panacea is fallacious. It is a heresy for any man to hold that alcohol, or any other of the creatures of God, is evil in itself; and as we have previously seen the Prohibitionists admit that they hold this Manichaean error. Therefore it is that sincere

and uncompromising Temperance advocates like Cardinal Manning declared publicly that under no circumstances would they be associated with such fanatics. The fallacy is that the Prohibitionists, 60 narrowminded that they lose sight of truth and justice in the pursuit of an aim that is itself questionable, suppose that alcohol will receive its coup de (/race if they succeed in having the public houses closed. In this connection let us recall the words written by Father Lockington, S.J., on the point: "To attempt to remedy the evil by attacking the public-house is to attempt to cleanse a running sore b y applying remedies at the point of issue and striving to close it. Medical experts, on the contrary, hold that the open discharge must be permitted until a remedy is found that will strike at the root of the disease rather than check it, and cause mortification to the patient. The running sore of drink is present— no one would deny that—but whither must we probe to find the seat. of the evil ? It is true that the immense number of public-houses is a factor, and a very strong one, in the spread of intemperance. That we freely admit. But the Prohibitionist goes further still, and, maintaining that the public house is the foundation of it, declares that it must be totally destroyed, and promises that from it's ruins will spring the virtue of sobriety. This is a fallacy. And I have shown that the abolition of the public-house brings about a multiplicity of subtle and dangerous evils."

As far as the heresy of the Prohibitionist is concerned we need not delay any longer. For Catholics there is no choice here. But let us examine the fallacy and see what the writer whom we have just quoted found out for himself in an investigation of the conditions under which Prohibition works in the Dry States of America. Take the State of Maine, in which Prohibition has had a trial for more than half a century —long enough surely to test its value thoroughly. Since the law was passed in 1846 it has time and again been amended and elaborated in order to make it as effective and as drastic as possible. A highly-organised body of State officials saw that it was carried out, and severe penalties were imposed on offenders. A short time ago a visitor to Maine wrote a letter to an Irish paper telling of the great reform that had taken place there— instead of public-houses and drunken men there were prosperity and sobriety all through the State. A little later, Father Lockington happened to be in Maine, whither he had gone expressly to examine the conditions of men and things under the law of Prohibition. "I am sorry," he writes, "to be compelled to state that my experiences were not such as would cause me to agree with the opinions of the writer spoken of. True, to the casual observer the streets seemed orderly and the saloon entirely absent. But when I penetrated beneath this external respectability, as I was enabled to do by the credentials I had obtained, I found that things were not what they seemed. Space will not permit of a detailed account of my investigations, else I might tell of the many scenes of wretched misery, of vice and poverty, all reeking with drink. I found drinking rampant in every direction, and drinking accompanied by all the evils of 'sly-grog' selling." He goes on to tell how in those apparently quiet streets were lurking young women and girls, with small bottles of liquor concealed on their person, ready to supply customers. These bottles are known locally as " sand-peepers," because so many of them are to be seen every morning lying empty, half-hidden in the sand of the roadside. "Father Lockington concludes as follows : "What I saw in Portland convinced me that the action of him who would cure the drink evil by Prohibition is like that of a father who, finding his child mottled with the red rash of fever, places the s boy under a cold shower bath. The red rash disappears, and the father is jubilant, because, in his ignorance, he thinks that he has cured his child. It does not need a medical expert to tell him that he has but driven the disease inwards, where it will strike at the very vitals of the child, and unless prompt measures be taken, that father will soon be arranging matters with the undertaker."

Welsh Rabbits and Red Herrings Let us bear in mind the fact -*hat the President of the United States may be coming over to Europe shortly, and let us remember how a certain Convention was devised to gain time, when the American soldiers were on the threshold of the war. Mindful of these two matters we may approach any new move on the part of Lloyd George with our eyes open. It is also useful to recall that, when broken-hearted and despondent on account of the treachery of British statesmen, John Redmond —who trusted too much ! —told the House of Commons that never again under any circumstances would he enter into any agreement with British Ministers. The bitter words were wrung from his generous heart by the flagrant breach of faith which Lloyd George had committed after the t Easter Rising. Lastly, in the Contemporary Review a couple of months ago Swift Mac Neill, an Ulster Protestant, wrote an article on the betrayal of Ireland, in which he said that no foreign statesman who studied the events of the past few years in Ireland could with safety to himself or his Government trust the men who had betrayed Ireland. When we have weighed these things well let us hear what Lloyd George has now evolved from his fertile imagination for the settlement of all that trouble in Ireland which is mainly due to his own blundering and fickleness. We are told that a scheme of Federal Government all round may be a panacea, and that from all quarters he is assured that the whole' round world is disgusted by the manner in which he and his associates are treating a small nation, while at the same time they are asking that small nation to fight with them against people who are acting similarly towards other small nations. This is what the present rhetoric of the Premier amounts to. He feels that the screw is being put on : he feels that if President Wilson goes over the screw will be tightened : and naturally he is looking around for another device to save his face. He wants time. And here is how he is to find it. Federal Government is a big proposition, he says. It would never do at all to introduce such a sweeping change without looking well ahead. In fact, it not would be the right thing to introduce it at all unless supported by a two-to-one majority. And nobody knows better than he that he will have all the time he wants before he finds a majority of that kind. He thinks it might be difficult in England on account of her immense population—though how that affects the question only he knows. And he is of the opinion that in Ireland there would be no difficulty. For once in his life he has guessed rightly ; and about Ireland too ! No, there will be no difficulty as to a two-to-one, or three-to-one, or even a four-to-one majority in Ireland. But let him make no mistake : that majority will be in favor of rejecting his proposals concerning Federal Government. Ireland has found him out now, and will never be deceived by him again. Ireland will have none of his temporising dodges and none of his devices to gain time. That day has gone for ever. The Irish people have expressed unmistakably their minimum demand : they will have a full measure of Home Rule, they will have autonomy as large as that enjoyed by the colonies, or they will take nothing till they get even more than that. He knows as well as we all do that he has driven Ireland to that stand, and no amount of camouflage will deceive anyone but a person who wants to be deceived. England had a chance four years ago of getting off lightly and foisting a bogus Home Rule Bill on the Irish people. England allowed herself to be led by the nose by the pro-German plotters who have undermined her strength and blackened her good name. During the process the Irish people were awakened and united as they never were before in all their history. And if Lloyd George imagines that he can again get them to take scraps of paper for gold he is poorer in intelligence than even we hold him. The President will come well advised by the millions of Irishmen who have been watching the tactics of the Lloyd George Government for years, who were not deceived by the lies of Harmsworth about their countrymen, whom Galloper Smith and his assistant, T. P. O'Connor, found it unwise to address during their recent gas-attacks in the United States. And

Sinn Fein will remind him very forcibly of his pledge at Mount Vernon, that the affairs of a people must be settled without consulting the exterior interests of any stronger power. If President Wilson is a man who means what he says, Lloyd George has indeed reason to get busy about new schemes. But the worst of his schemes is that now they will be taken in the light of past events. And the history of the past four years in Ireland, and the collaboration with Herr Carson and his pro-German army, do not furnish the Prime Minister with a certificate of character worth much in the eyes of honest people to-day.