The New Zealand Tablet THURSDAY, MAY 26, 1921. LOYALTY

New Zealand Tablet, 26 May 1921, Page 25

The New Zealand Tablet THURSDAY, MAY 26, 1921. LOYALTY

§N the evening of May 24 there was much flag-waving and much talk about loyalty. The usual sort of thing was said by the nsiTal sort of speaker at such gatherings. Men made speeches in the same fashion as they had heard other men make them. There was the sincerity, the reality, the soundness of the ordinary politician’s hustings patter. There was the intelligence one finds in the average editorial of a colonial day-lie. There were the sort of people who delight in being duped by politicians and misled by day-liars.- Everybody, no doubt, was happy, and it is probable that the pity of it all was hidden from everybody present. What, we wonder, would have happened if a speaker had arisen and told the truth ? While it is possible that he might escape alive, it is almost certain that many of the ladies would not survive the shock. If a man did tell them the truth he would proaably begin by asking them if they intended to be. loyal to things that boys left New Zealand to crush for ever, and. if they meant to honor things that were dishonorable and disgraceful. Such a man would have to consider that his hearers had all been gassed by the editorials in our day-lies : and shell-shocked by the same cable service that used to tell us lies about mutilated children and corpse-factories, and it would be necessary for him to consider that he was addressing people who were honest in their determination to shut their eyea against the-light and to close their ears to the truth. They would object to be reminded that it was not true loyalty for a man or a woman to cover with a large Union Jack the fact that the Government had broken their pledges to the dead; that the Governments which had asked men to die. for small nations were to-day killing a small nation And ; making war : on women and children that the ■ men who wept over Nurse Caveil killed Mrs. Quinn and her unborn babe; that while there. Were tears in their eyes for Louvain and •Ypres there was blood on their hands for Cork arid Balbriggan. The man who would say to our patriots: "True loyalty cannot condbfie •: crimes; true loyalty cannot lift

■ V a up for public honor a flag that/is a -word for tyranny, for broken faith, and for hypocrisy; true loyalty must begin by making that flag clean, and by putting an end to the crimes against a small nation with which the flag is associated all over the world at the present time. It is what we used to call Prussianism to say that we must defend our country right or wrong; England ueher alles is just as hateful a motto as was Deutschland ueber alles; crimes against Ireland are as bad in the sight of God as crimes against Belgium, and they are a thousand times more numerous. Give us a clean flag; give us a Government that understands what honor and justice mean ; give us politicians that do not prostitute their office to Orangemen or PiP.A. men ; give us something honorable if you want honor from us; give us something noble and inspiring if you ask us to be loyal to it; and do , not talk of loyalty until you are capable of understanding that it is Prussian and unchristian to honor what is neither clean nor noble nor in any sense worthy of honor.” There is little doubt that if a man made such a speech to the audience in the Overseas Club he would be denounced exactly as Christ was denounced by the Pharisees, and for analogical reasons. The day-lies that suppress true news about Ireland and give two columns to the attacks of a horsewhipped parson on the Catholic Church would repeat the old cry; “Crucify him!” The men in the tin’ tabernacles would make the roofs ring with their calls on.JJie Government to imprison the traitor who dared tell the truth. Protestants would be reminded of how Oliver Cromwell would treat such a person, and the man whom a magistrate described as a cad would suggest reprisals safe in the knowledge that ,he had paid to the politicians their thirty pieces of silver, and that although they might prosecute a Glover or a Hickey they would not interfere with the purveyors of pornographic Protestant literature that only a blackguard would have in his home.

It is the old story over again. Make the outside of the cup clean and whiten the sepulchre; forget the beam in your own eye but keep reminding the public of the mote in your brother’s; imitate the Pharisees and call every man who stands for honor and truth a seditious person and an enemy of the people. But will the folds of the Union Jack keep the rottenness beneath from eating down to the heart of the Empire, and will the lies of the politicians and the press succeed in fooling all the people all the time? Will pandering to P.P.A. bigots be always a substitute for right government ? Will itinerant defamers of Catholics, living and dead, escape the inevitable'penalty that sooner or later must come to all who try to set the people against Christ? Had Mr. Massey the intelligence of an ordinary man he .would see during his tour across America that broken pledges to Ireland have prepared in the United States a pitfall for the Empire; he would see in England that what our press describes as Sinn Fein outrage is due to the misgovernment, of England itself, and he would ask himself, as he passed through the barb-wire entanglements behind which the Government hides, if there is not something very wrong in'* a Government that is haunted by fear of the people for whom it is supposed to govern. And he would stand up at the conference of the Imperial Premiers and tell them that if they wanted to save the Empire they must begin at the beginning and stop their Prussianism and keep the pledges they made to the dead soldiers. Mr. Mas-’ sey will not do that. What he will say will be as true and as sincere as his repeated assurances that the Dominion which he, plunged into financial chaos was sound and prosperous. None of the others will say anything of the kind either, and if they did they would not be listened to, just as a man who would talk of true loyalty to the Overseas Club, meeting would not be heard. And the reason of ,it all is very old: Whom the gods wish to destroy they first make mad.

, To know the - strength of our Father’s strength should be to find further strength. V , '