Current Topics

New Zealand Tablet, 24 July 1919, Page 14

Current Topics

Sheep and Shearers - _ The mafficking has been duly done. We celebrated to order like the humble, dutiful creatures we have become under our coalless coalition. But why on earth did we maffick ? What was there to be spontaneously exuberant about? Even the ponderous Mr. Massey has realised—if we believe a fablegram from Canada—that the Peace Conference is a failure—or a farce, as is our opinion of it. The London Tory Observer says the Big Four have sowed dragon’s teeth all over Europe, The Paris Temps said it dawned on them about May that there was no Germany , with which to treat, and that a treaty signed by whatever Germans were found ready to write their names on it would be no more than a scrap of paper. “Prepare for war,” says Lord Jellicoe. “Get your guns and learn to shoot, boys,” says Haig. “American soldiers won the war and Wilson lost it,” says an American bishop. Second Point What did Japan do at the Peace Conference? We were told some time ago by an imprudent correspondent that the Japanese delegates were a mystery; that they sat at the table, silent, enigmatic, and a puzzle to the Europeans. One day apparently Japan woke up, and we are told that Japan’s first remarks were decidedly disconcerting to the “statesmen” of Europe. The London Express makes one remark which lets in a little light on the subject, when it says that Japan is in a position, which from a military and a naval standpoint renders her unassailable by the Great Powers, which face domestic crises and want to deal with them in peace and quiet. The London News has a very strong impression that Japan must have taken some advantage. And, whatever is doing, China is in a rage. The Humanity bluntly says that Japan blackmailed the Allies. If it were in the good old summer time, we would advise you to take a loaf of bread and get beneath a bough to ponder over the foregoing signs of peace. As the result of your meditations we guarantee that there would be no singing in the wilderness. ’‘King-” Carson Again The Tory Party in England may be compared to a pack of hounds of which the whipper-in is Carson. He says to them, go there ! and they go; come here! and they come. Like beaten curs they run to heel when Carson cracks his whip. Lloyd George generally leads the pack when the whip cracks. According to the cables, there as been no small stir in England about a recent seditious, utterance made by “King” Carson. In Parliament questions have been asked, and simple, honest people who believe that the British law is equal for all want to know why Carson has not been hanged. God help them ! Rather ought they ask, after a treasonable utterance on his part, what new mark of royal favor has he received, for it is the way of the King to honor Protestants and Orangemen who talk about kicking his crown into the Boyne. And needless to say those champions of Prussianism, who used to boast of what they were going to do to England with the Kaiser’s aid and the Kaiser’s guns refused to prosecute Carson. Why should they? Are they not in the same boat ? Did they not organise mutiny in the army or in that part of it which, under Gough, ran away when there was fighting to be done in France? Once upon a time Carson described Lloyd George as “a Cabinet Minister, paid .£SOOO a year to spit out dirt by the yard.” He'said he had seen Lloyd George in a Privy Council uniform and “nearly mistook him for a gentleman.” As a reward for such compliments Lloyd George and King George made Carson a Cabinet Minister and paid him “to spit out dirt,” though it is not on record that anybody ever .mistook Carson for a gentleman. Moreover, although Carson has never been prosecuted for sedition Catholics' have been prosecuted

for : quoting what Carson : said. Apparently the. road to position . in England now is to organise mutiny, to import German guns, and to trade with the enemy in war-time — you are an Orangeman.' Mr. Asquith, commenting on the. treason of the Orangemen, once asked, “What ..answer . are you going to make to the vast majority of the Irish people when they resist the ■ considered determination of Parliament and appeal to the language of the right honorable gentleman to justify their action?” The answer was characteristic of British fair play! It came to this: there is one law for Orangemen and another for Catholics: we will make the Orange rebels Cabinet Ministers and we will send lunatics like Colthurst to assassinate Catholics. How long, we wonder,, will it be before the English Labor Party is able to save England from the Germans and Jews and Orange jobbers who at present have the making of war and peace for the Empire ? At present, more than ever, Swift Mac Neill’s words are true that no foreign statesman could with safety to himself or his country trust the word of a British Minister. Think of who the “bosses” are: the Prussian-born Milner; the Kaiser’s colleagues, Carson and Galloper Smith; the Marconi jobber, George; the German trader, Mond; and, last but not least in the galley, “Moralist” MacPherson, the leading liar of the gang ! And there are also the Isaacs, the Ecksteins and the Speyers, all of whom won the war! It may be no longer Deutschland ueber Alles, but what is it now? For the Wearin’ o’ the Green The Habeas Corpus Act was, as we saw, suspended in Ireland in order to enable the British Government to kidnap children. MacPherson dispensed himself from the Ten Commandments in order to enable himself to lie boldly before the House of Commons when called on to defend his Hunnism. The latest news is that not only Habeas Corpus and the Decalogue but the natural law and every pretence of right and justice have been discarded by the champions of small nations who are trampling on the people of Ireland. The following appeal from Dungarvan has reached us; “We, the undersigned, most earnestly appeal to all the friends and sympathisers of Michael Walsh, who was shot without cause by an R.I.C. constable at Ballixxagoul, Ring, on Friday evening, 25th April, 1919, to render immediate financial assistance, so as to enable the committee on whose behalf we are acting to provide relief and comfort for the victim, as well as to relieve his dependents. He lies in a most precarious condition at present, and only the greatest care can nurse him through ; so that we desire that nothing should be left undone to help him. He has a widowed mother and delicate sister, whose only support Michael was, and who will now be left in very distressing circumstances. He was a fisherman and native Irish speaker, a most inoffensive and quiet boy, who was admired and loved by his friends, comrades, and all with whom he came in contact, and he took a deep interest in the affairs of his country and worked with pride in the Irish-Ireland movements. All subscriptions will be gratefully received and acknowledged through the press by us. Laurence Ormond, P.P., Old Parish, Dungarvan, John Cullinane, C.C., Ring, Dungarvaxx, Michael Curran, Ballinagoul, Ring, Dungarvan, Maurice Walsh, Ballinagoul, Ring, Dungarvan, Hon. Treasurers.” During the month of April four men were shot by the police in Ireland. One was a sick prisoner, and a coroner’s jury brought in a verdict that he was wilfully shot. Another was a youth who called at a barracks to inform the police that a serious row was taking place near by. The reply to his warning was a bullet. Two others were shot returning from an aeridheacht. Altogether 10 civilians have been shot by the Royal Irish Constabulary, and although juries brought in verdicts of wilful - murder against members of that force in no case have the murderers been tried or punished. Apparently the old law which declared that the killing

- of an. Irishman was no. crime , has. been revived by MacPherson. It was for. long illegal to be a Catholic, now r apparently it is criminal for 'an Irishman to love his country. These things were not done by the Kaiser in Belgium. They were done by the English Huns in Ireland. A The Rebellion of Ninety-Eight According to “Civis”—or his one and only paper the Catholics were responsible for the terrible Irish rebellion of ’9B. Even “Civis” and the editor of the Spectator might be supposed to know that the rebellion of ’9B started among the Presbyterians of Ulster. And even a forger’s ingenuity would be taxed to explain how Catholics are to blame for that fact., The ’9B rebellion was a rising against the worst government ever known in history, against a government that surpassed in ferocious cruelty the most terrible annals of Russia under the Czars. It was primarily the outburst of a people goaded beyond human patience by atrocities and by laws that were devised in Bedlam and executed by demons from hell. It was a desperate attempt made by a, weak, oppressed people to rid themselves of intolerable tyranny. During the rebellion England hired mercenaries from Germany to aid her own picked scoundrels in the dirty work to which she set her hand. Churches were burned. Women were raped. Children were killed. Men were tortured in awful and unspeakable ways that only diabolical cruelty could invent. Caps made of pitch were placed on their skulls and burned. They were hung up by sharp cords tied about their thumbs while a pointed stake was placed under their bare feet as a resting-place. The heart was cut out of a priest’s body and the brutal English soldiers greased their boots with it after roasting it on a fire. It was a terrible rebellion indeed. It was begun by Presbyterians and put down with fury by Protestant England. But what about the Wexford rising? Surely that was not a Presbyterian rising. No, as Hilaire Belloc tells us, that was the rising of a Catholic people who were maddened by the sexual filth of the English and Orange soldiers. In Wexford in our own boyhood the memory of the atrocities committed by the yeomen’ and the Hessians was still green. It is still bearing fruit in a hatred of English rule that will never die as long as tyranny is maintained among the people. The traditions that came down from father to son will live on. The crimes of England in Catholic Wexford will be remembered as long as foreign misrule remains in Ireland. And, if “Civis” and his Spectator do not know it, all impartial historians, even Lecky whose testimony the forger corrupts at need, know that the entire rebellion was engineered by English Tories as an excuse for supporting the nefarious Act of Union which, as Gladstone could tell “Civis,” was one of the most shameful pages in human history. For our readers there is no necessity to dwell at length on that page of English crime. There is no need to go into detail concerning the rebellion. We know the facts, and we know the motives that inspired the rebellion ; and the whole story is as strong an arraignment of England, of English Tories, of English spies and forgers, as any that in our day could be presented against Germany for her crimes in Belgium. Liars at home have done their part in trying to bolster up England’s case. Sergeant Sheridans have been paid by the British Government to manufacture crimes to blacken the Irish. Piggotts have been payed by Tory papers to forge letters to calumniate them. And in the colonies, by such contemptible tools as the forger “Civis” the same dirty work is done to-day. Of the audacity, of the recklessness, of the disregard for honesty and truth of such scoundrels, there is no end. But surely the lie that Catholics are in any way responsible for the crimes of Protestant England, and for her sexual filth in ,’9B, is easily the most glaring and the most brazen that any vile bigot yet invented. France , “Clearly,” said Bishop Shahan, “if figures speak the truth, France remains the ‘heart of oak’ of Cath-

olicisma land of Catholic: conviction, good-will, and generosity.” We have never ceased to admire the heroic gesture of France in the Great War; our enthusiastic admiration for her achievement was tenfold increased by the knowledge that at the root of all her prodigal valor and her splendid constancy the ancient religion of the eldest daughter of the Church was quick and powerful, and that the triumphs of to-day are but the fine flower of her ancient faith. In no better way can we pay to France the tribute her faith merits than ■ by repeating those words of Bishop Shahan, who himself a child of our *own great missionary race which carried the faith of Patrick to the ends of the earth, is proud to bestow on France the palm she deserves. “In spit© of malevolence,” says Kannengieser, “Franc© remains one of the essential elements of Catholicism —not because of her numbers (for Austria-Hungary has almost as large a Catholic population, and Germany and Austria combined have a larger one), but because France is first in all that pertains to the expansion of Catholicism, because all great Catholic works of the century are the fruit of her heart and her brain, and because if she disappeared from the scene there would be made at once a void in the Christian . world ’ the mere imagination of which makes one shudder.” By its fruits a tree is known; an evil tree cannot produce good fruit. And once more, the best proof of the Catholic spirit of France is the fruit she has produced and produces still. We have already had to speak of the fruit produced at home, of the sublime and simple faith, shining like a star on the brow of the Generalissimo himself, animating the thousands of priests and the numbers of devoted nuns who did their part in the defence of their country, strengthening and solacing the millions of soldiers who responded to France’s call with the bravery of the Christian knights of the ages of chivalry ; and in that magnificent spectacle we found enough to convince any doubter that the land that gave birth to such children was sound to her heart’s core. But there is another spectacle to contemplate, and another army to marvel at one that even more strikingly proves that the old faith, in all its beauty and power, must be ablaze on the hearths of the homes of France to-day as it was in the proudest days of her Catholic greatness. The army we speak of now is that of France’s missionaries who left behind them, perhaps for ever, their homes by the Loire or the Seine, to go forth to preach Christ Crucified in the remotest parts of the world those missionaries of Franc© whose labors won from Monsignor Shahan so splendid a tribute, those devoted men and women, some of whom blazed the trail of the Church in the early and the difficult days among the people of this Dominion. When the complete history of the Church in New Zealand is written we will come to realise what the Church owes her© to the devotion of the French missionaries ; Australia too will joyfully recognise her indebtedness to them ; China and Japan will one day testify to them as we are proud to do now: in Asia, in Africa, in America they are to be found, restless’pilgrims, straitened in their desire to carry the banner of the Cross to victory against fanaticism and ignorance in every land, old and new, under the sun. Nearly 8000 priests of France are scattered thus across the world to-day; and these thousands have but caught up the torch laid down by the thousands who fell exhausted before them, as thousands will arise again to cany it when needed. . The Society for Foreign Missions has sent more than 2000 priests to the East since 1840. Of these, 77 have their names written on its roll of martyrs, and 26 were actually executed formally for being Christians. In La Rue du Bac in Paris before the war 340 young men were preparing themselves in the Seminary to follow in the footsteps of those who had already-gone forth. In China the society has 28 provinces and 33 archbishops and bishops, leaders of that great army whose inspiration' is, as was that of our own ancient pilgrims, to go forth to preach the Gospel to every creature—peref/rmari pro Christo. The Jesuits, the French Lazarists, and many other Orders are all animated by the same zeal, and all doing glorious missionary .work on

the same lines, throughout the world to-day. And in the 'wake of the clergy a vast number of Brothers and nuns have followed, whose chief task is to provide Catholic schools for the children of the poor. This work is done by the children of France— as a rule by the sons and daughters of the simple people who make no stir* in the world and are content to follow the even tenor of their lives, glorifying God quietly and handing on to their children the priceless pearl of that faith which .is the inspiration of all France’s glory and greatness. That is the heart of France that is the fruit by which we must judge her now.