Current Topics

New Zealand Tablet, 31 March 1921, Page 14

Current Topics

Irish History j We - have been asked why we are not inviting essays as a practical proof that Irish History is being taught in the schools. Our last competition was in some senses a success ; in others a failure. As far as the number are concerned it was a success; it was a failure if we consider the marked similarity of napers that came in from many districts, some of them proving beyond possibility of doubt that not only were the pupils helped by the teacher but that the teacher must have prepared an outlinemore or less —-and got the whole class to work on it. To say the least of it, that was not honest, and we were frankly disappointed. Now, we shall have . a competition again before very long, and there must be none of that sort of work. What we want is evidence that the children know Irish History: we take it for granted that the teachers do; and they will . please stand out next time. We venture to make a final remark here: we invite any priest who takes an interest in this important matter to offer a prize (which ought to be a book-prize) and to adjudicate on the papers sent in for the prize he offers. Religious Instruction It is important to know our Irish History, but it is even more important to know our religion. Remember that it is one of our ends on earth to know God. Now, how can we know God unless we study what writers deeply versed in theology tell us about God We certainly will not get the knowledge that leads to Idle Everlasting from reading the New Zealand daylies nor from talking to the man-in-the-street. We axe here to work out our salvation in fear and trembling to work it cut, mind, not to loaf about it. Therefore it is incumbent on all of us to address ourselves seriously to the study of religious doctrine. It is desirable that senior pupils in our schools should have a knowledge deeper than that of the catechism, and it is in order to provide teachers and parents with the outlines of a course fox- higher pupils that we are publishing week after week a page of religious instruction. What we want to know is whether teachers axe making use of it or not. There is only one v ay to find out, and that is by holding an examination, as we did before and will do again in the case of the Irish History. Therefore we urge the Catholic teachers to read and explain for the pupils the weekly page they will find in the Tablet; and at a later date we will propose questions to be answered by pupils in the higher standards of primary schools and in secondary schools. As in connection with Irish History, so ere, too, we shall be pleased if any of the priests will volunteer to give prizes and to adjudicate. It has been remarked to us that the lessons published up to the present are rather difficult. We know they are not easy but as they deal with the very foundations ley are very important and well- deserving of hard s u \. It is precisely the groundwork that needs attention in a pagan land like this, and any extra time and care given to the subject by teachers will be well repaid by results. Indeed we venture to say that there are not a lew teachers who might study with profit to tnemselves the lessons already printed in the Tablet. In conclusion, remember that two competitions are approaching now: the Irish History competition and the Religious Instruction competition. The former will be open to all, and the latter only to more advanced pupils. ' * - Home Cardinal Manning says: “Homeless men are reckess ; there would be but little patriotism in a country where no man cares to stand pro an* et fods.” Home life is a great fosterer of manly chastity, of forbearance, of unselfishness men who have no homes are, not

rarely, apt to be sensual, unrestrained, and selfish. Home-life moulds the children of a nation more than any school they will attend. Of course there are some children born with certain predispositions that home can neither make nor mar entirely but in average cases the home stamps the child with a character that is almost ineffaceable. Go into a school and get to know the children well and you will be able to tell infallibly what sort of homes they came from. ' Watch their conduct in the street and in the cars and trains and you will see what child had good, thoughtful, gentle parents, and what one had the other sort. If the child is in one sense father to the man, in another the man is fatner to the child, and as the elders are the children will be. Hence it is of incalculable importance that a nation should have right home-life in which right children are trained : and hence again it is 111018 than rubies to the nation that has in its homes mothers who Know what their duty is and do it. No, there is no place like home. The happiest homes are usually the homes of the poor-—or rather of God’s poor ; for there is a difference between poor and poor, there are the poor who in their lowliness are closer than any on earth to the Home of Nazareth: and there are the poor whose poverty is but an additional incentive to vice and crime. We speak of the fonper. Among the peasants of Irish counties you will find families of a dozen or even more, living on wages that a laborer could easily earn here in a day. The. children will be healthy and happy, the father patient and God-fearing, the mother cheerful and pure. The walls may be bare, if they are not covered here and there with cartoons from a. weekly paper, representing perhaps a Mass among the mountains, an eviction scene in the eighties, a wailing throng watching the sails of a “coffin-ship” fading away on the horizon. There will, be a cheap colored picture of Mary the Mother of God, and a cheap crucifix and a little delf holy-water font in the sleeping rooms. There will be no carpet, no easy chair, no article of furniture worth a pound note in the whole house. But the grace of God will be there, and under the smokestained rafters will grow up boys and girls who will do apostolic work some day in bringing in their exiled hearts to far lands like ours the saving faith of Brigid and Patrick. All, these are the homes that count in a nation's history! In such homes were bred the men who rose and broke the bayonet-bristling ranks of those who insulted the women of Ireland ; in such homes grew up in purity the girls who carried across the seas the traditional purity of the Gael ; in such homes grew up the children whose lives, wherever they went, were illumined by the Faith which is the only source of safety in a material world to-day. God’s poor never seek to find arguments to justify murder of the innocents. Le Men ape. a train has no charm for them. Somehow they always find enough for all the healthy, hungry young mouths : somehow they always find time to be happy, time to play and time to pray. They do not forget when Friday comes; they are not too lazy to get up and walk— in hail, rani, or snowthree miles to Mass on Sunday. They know that they have souls as well as bodies and they- are not prepared to sell their chances of seeing God for anything in the world. ' They see what is right and they go straight -towards it, guided by the Ten Commandments at every step they take, until their weary bones rest in a grave that for them is only the place of their resurrection. The old homes of Ireland r have given the world Faith and hope and love and courage, and the more like those homes we make ours here the better we shall build this new nation and the happier we will be now and forever. Modern Politics Chesterton is right in making up his mind to classify politicians as the higher criminals. ■ A burglar is comparatively harmless, and you can get the police to attend to him if you catch him ; but a politician—if secure in the Cabinet, the modern sanctuary to which high-class criminals flee for protection, —is policeproof and he can “Dope” and “Marconi” to his heart’s content and no man dare take the law of him. Indeed

to make assurance doubly sure.he selects other criminals as interpreters of the law; and as all are in the same boat, the law will never be successfully invoked against one of the gang. Take, for instance the group selected by Marconi-George lately to draw up a Bill for Ireland. Would any sane man trust one of them in his fowl-yard at night? If' you gave one of them a letter to post you would have serious doubts as to whether he left the stamp on or not. But although they are known to the public, as rebels and liars and swindlers, there is no present redress, for they have made a man of their own kidney chief interpreter of the law and he has gone so far as to punish other decent people for repeating treasonable words uttered by himself. This is so astounding that it is difficult to believe. But any man can read for himself speeches made by the Galloper, afterwards collected in a little book known as the Grammar of Anarchy, for the circulation of which Irishmen were gaoled. Here, in New Zealand, we have the sorry sight of a known incompetent, elected by the foulness of the Pitiful Protestant Asses, and we know that nothing but a dirty campaign to stir up sectarian hatred could have produced sijph a result. ■ Everybody except the P.P. Asses knows that the only fair democratic government is that elected by Proportional Representation. We also know that the political gang in power would not give the people the chance of an election on the basis of Proportional Representation because it would mean the end of their domination. In other words, the public knows very well that a gang of politicians can —and did -with impunity flout the wishes and the interests of the people for the sake of their own selfish ends. And incredible as it seems, the people stand it just as patiently as they stood the methods by which men were driven by despotism to fight—not for Belgium, Lord Loreburn tells us, but because we wanted to support England which was bound by a secret treaty to go to war in support of the most corrupt military power in the world. We stand an undemocratic election jusP as we stand the manslaughtering of people at railway crossings, just as we stand unequal taxation by a gang that drained the workers of their blood but would not dram the profiteers of their gold. And, considering our supine acquiescence in the truth that in New Zealand there is no government either for the people or by the people, we may be said to have got exactly the sort of government we deserve. It is a bad one; it was elected by foulness ; it has no claim to represent the people. But it is just what we merit, in tact, we hope it will become worse as time goes on. it it becomes very bad there is some hope that the people may awake to the fact that they—and not a gang of capitalists and bigots, elected by profiteers and wowsers and calumniators of, the dead,—are the Nation, and that it is. time the tail stopped wagging the dog. To our mind no greater indictment of the present Government could be framed than simply t& say that they know by what tactics they were elected, and they remain on such a title. Oh, yes! the tail wags the dog m New Zealand all right ; but we have seen dogs that could bite their tails. A Meditation for Seonini _ Catholic soldiers of Catholic France, led by the Catholic general, Foch, saved Protestant England from Protestant Germany. Catholics of New Zealand sent their full quota of soldiers to fight as volunteers. What is our reward? Catholic Ireland is now plundered oppressed, and harried by Protestant England and Protestant parsons, of Churches that were conspicuous for the small number of their volunteers, insult us and move a Government by pot-hunters to persecute us here. , 1 • u? Uri x? tlle epidemic, our Priests were day and night in the hospitals and in the homes of the sick. Our nuns labored heroically, nursing and feeding ™ en sufferers, no matter what their’religion was At the present time, the hirelings who did. not visit the hospitals, who did not tend the sick, who did not send their lady-assistants and their Sunday-school teachers to vyash and feed the afflicted, now sound

the Orange drum in their tin temples and call on the Massey Government to persecute the nuns and priests who know, as they always knew, what real charity is. And the very people whom our nuns helped are often only too willing to join hands with the hireling bigots in the work of persecution. What thanks have we had from the Massey Government for what we did during the war ? What thanks have we had for what we did during the epidemic ? What can we ever expect from a public so ungrateful, so debased, so uncharitable? And what lesson are we to learn from it all but that we must depend on ourselves, that we must be united, that we are surrounded on all sides bv enemies who hate our race and our religion ? The enemies of Catholic Ireland are against Catholics everywhere. The Government of New Zealand, with its Past Orange Master at its head, is the tool of the rabid bigots who hate us, will do as little for us as it does for a small Catholic nation unless we are united as one man and prepared to fight to the last ditch for our rights. A are plundered to maintain godless schools, & our teachers are persecuted, our religion is attacked, and we have ample evidence that there is no wrong that will not be done to us if only the noisy bigots make sufficient demonstration. We know what has been done by Orange savages in Belfast. The recent Marriage legislation is a sign of what may any day be done in New Zealand at the bidding of a horsewhipped cad and his fellows, whether in Parliament or out of it. Therefore wo want union, and we want grit and determination Only slaves who are not fit for freedom would submit to persecution without a fight to a finish. And senium and slaves are synonymous. Our teachers have been refused free passes when they go to teach children who love religion. A subservient Minister of Education has been brought to heel bv the bigots and our scholarships, won in fair fight, are taken from us. W e have evidence that these attacks are prepared by the . of the horsewhipped cad : we have evidence that those who are kith and kin with the assassms of Belfast hold the Government in the hollow of their hands. They tell us that they contemplate furier attacks upon us, and they feel reasonably sure that the Government is too dastardly and too vile to resist them. Let them do their worst. All that they can do will only strengthen our cause and make the Catholic Church in New Zealand as vital and as glorious as it is in persecuted Ireland where Orangedom, hacked by the armed assassins of England, is unable to break the spirit of our people, even though churches are plundered, priests shot, convents raided, and women and children murdered—all with the connivance or approval of Lloyd George and Sir Edward Carson. We know what foes we have to face; we know how barbarous, how savage, how false they. are. But if we are duly united we need not care what they do just as nothing they can do can make us fear them They aild P itiful ’ P lace ‘hunting politicians may cry lo Hell with the Pope,” but we will rally like one man to the defence of the Faith of our Fathers. How Empires Decay In A Guilds man’s Interpretation, of History, A. ~ eiitv writes Reading Greek history reminds us that the Class War is not a doctrine peculiar to the % present age. . . Unregulated currency having given rise to economic individualism and destroyed the common ownership of property, the solidarity of society ell to pieces. It had undermined alike the independence of the peasantry and the old religious aristocracy which had hitherto governed Greece, and had concentrated power entirely in the hands of a plutocracy which* like all plutocracies, was blind to everything except its own immediate interests. It was thus that Greek society, from being united, became divided into two distinct and hostile classes in which the possibility of revolution became an ever-present contin“Uncontrolled currency brought the same evils into existence in Rome, where the concentration of capital in the hands of a few and its accompanying abuses developed to a greater extent and far more

rapidly than in Greece, once they got under way. . . [ b “It was thus in Rome, as in Greece, that uncontrolled currency replaced the class divisions based upon differences of function by class divisions based upon differences of wealth. Financial companies invaded all the conquered nations. . . They had their headquarters at Rome, and the Forum became a soit of Stock Exchange in which the buying and selling of shares was always going on and where every man was trying to outwit his neighbor. “Now that successful warfare had proved itself so profitable to the Senatorial families and the people had entirely lost control over them, the lust for conquest became general. Wars were no longer defensive even in pretence. . . The Senate resorted to the most detestable practices in order to create internal dissensions in other countries.” Upon this corruption and despotism followed as a natural sequence the Slave Wars that shook Rome to its foundations. They were followed by a Dictatorship. “The Senate, like our own Government, being entirely under the control of capitalist influences, developed that same total incapacity to act except when pressure was brought to bear upon it. And so it happened that a time came when unscrupulous adventurers rose to power who understood the art of exploiting their stupidity.” This, in a short time, “led eventually to the civil wars which in the last century before Christ brought the whole Roman system to the very brink of ruin.” The reason was put plainly by Tiberius Gracchus when he said: “The wild animals of Italy have their dens and lairs; the men who fought for Italy have light and air and nothing more. They are styled the masters of the world, though they have not a clod of earth that they can call their own.” The people realised that they were to do the fighting and the dying, but the profiteers were to reap the harvest. And nobody felt any sentiment of loyalty to the government. Augustus tried reforms but they were very much in the nature of what we know now as the Servile State. Under a too paternal government initiative and energy were lost for ever. The old virtues of courage and sacrifice vanished in lust and sensuality, and internal decay brought the crash of the Empire. Is there need to point the moral Have we not gone too far for recovery along the same road to ruin? We have our inflated currency ; we have our profiteer and capitalist Government ; we have our dictatorship ; we have the class war between the rich and their victims; we have our soldiers who fought for the profit of international financiers; Ave have the canker of lust eating the heart out of the people; we have sensuality ruining homes and indivduals. What shall we have next? Read the story of Greece and Rome and learn from them what to expect. Ponder deeply on them. Do not forget them. Tlaec olim memimsse juvahit: for Mr. Massey’s benefit we may say that phrase tells him to look out for squalls; for squalls will come.