Current Topics

New Zealand Tablet, Volume LI, Issue 8, 21 February 1924, Page 18

Current Topics

'V 1 f \ A Muzzle Wanted No human institution is perfect, and consequently it is not strange to find serious faults in connection with that well-known ass, the law. The best thing about English law is probably the jury system, but it must be remembered that even that becomes useless when - godless schools, and Chief Justices who deft»id them, have for generations taught people that God and religion are matters of indifference. Then follows logically moral obliquity, indifference to the sacredness of an oath, and the readiness of twelve good men and true to put a Masonic sign before the value of evidence and their obligation to act thereon. Again, the licence allowed to lawyers in their dealing with witnesses is in itself a good thing. But like other good things it can become a curse and a scandal. Of this we had an example in our Law Courts recently. An eccentric, aged man was charged with annoying a woman whom, not wisely, he reproached and reprimanded for conduct which perhaps unreasonably he found blameworthy. The magistrate and the prosecuting lawyer appeared to think his judgment was unwarranted and his interference an impertinence, which it may have been. But when the lawyer in question went so far as to say that the accused was a person who went to church fivery morning and got drunk every evening, he was uttering what we have heard people who know the old man well characterise as a most scandalous and’ false assertion. Possibly the lawyer only said what he was told by his clients, but surely it is a monstrous thing that such a calumny'* can be uttered with impunity and then caught up and spread far and wide by the press. Protestant Literature Even apart from the Maria Monk type of garbage, beloved by the P.P.A. and the Full Moon Orangemen, Catholics and their religion arc grossly misrepresented in the average novel or article which touches upon the Church. Some short time ago we came on a novel in which we were told that a Jesuit wore a soutane, fringed with white lace! An older book described the celebrant as swinging the thurifer, whereas, as every Catholic, and every Protestant of ordinary culture knows, the thurifer is the altar-boy who swings the thurible. More recently we read of another Jesuit who “took the Sacrament,” and who was transformed from a layman to a fully-fledged S. J. priest in three years. All things considered, the wooden spoon goes to the erudite and scholarly writer who is the subject of the following note from Rev. I). A. Casey, Lift. D., in Truth: A certain David A. Blumenfield, who is writing a series of syndicated articles on “European Personalities,” devoted this particular one to Pope Pius XI. And he sure made some “Blumen” funny blunders. Jhe Pope, he tells us, takes his bath at seven o’clock, after which he says Mass. “Nine sees him at breakfast, which consists of a cup of coffee and a slice of dry toast, after which he celebrates a second Mass.” If you think that is “going some,” just wait. After lunch he takes a stroll in the Vatican Gardens. “After the stroll there is more work for the man who rules Catholicism from Syracuse proper to Syracuse, N.Y. There is a Mass to be said . . . sermons to be criticised, etc.” Three Masses a. day, and two of them without fasting! And a big city daily printed this stuff. The whole article is made up of blunders as egregious and amusing as the above. The writer makes the Pope sit up at night counting the “secret funds of the Vatican.” And he gravely informs us that the Holy Father spends an hour every Friday at Confession, “confessing such sins as a Pope may conceivably have.” Poor, scrupulous Holy Father! Mr.

Blumenfield should have sent his article to Life or Judge. The New Broom V One ' can hardly help feeling amused at seeing how calmly the once fiercely anti-Labor press accepts the present state of affairs in England. So far there has been none of that organised detraction which was employed so strenuously against the Ryan Government in Brisbane, and, for some reason, there are evidences of a square deal for the new Ministry. Indeed, cables reach us that seem to prove that Mr. McDonald is making good in many directions and that those terrible Labor people are filling their positions with even more ability than their predecessors of the old order which has gone where the good niggers go. England treated Russia so shamefully in the past ten years that when an Australian M.P. wrote a book about the matter, our illustrious Prime Minister would not allow us to read it, and now England de trying to make good the past and to establish friendly relations with the Powers that be in the mysterious country between the Baltic and the Caspian Sea. France, too, is well-disposed towards the new administration and impressed by its sincerity, and for the present the signs of trouble have disappeared from the . political horizon. Later, wo shall see whether the Orangeman Government of Belfast will be able to persuade the Labor people to break pledges and tear up scraps of'paper as successfully as they did the Liberals and Tories \vho moved no hand to save the butchered Catholic men and women during the past five years. Supporters of jobbery tremble at seeing how the new brooom sweeps from their sinecures hordes of well-paid and useless Civil Servants who were a heavy charge on the tax-payers. At the worst, the new Government cannot be a greater failure than its predecessors, and as far as present indications go it promises well to learn by the mistakes of the past. It has its hands full of hard problems, and it is far more likely to solve them than the Red Tape-tied and hide-bound administrations which have gone out of office. General Smuts Reading our poor daily papers, one would imagine that there was only one Colonial Prime Minister in the limelight in Britain during the past few months. But in spite of the good money wasted in telling us what happened in Limavaddy, and other equally insignificant things, the serious press of England, which mentioned'Doctor Massey hardly ever or not at all, fully appreciated the fact that South Africa has in her Premier a real man. Smuts would loom large in any gathering, and among the mediocrities who now rank as Britain’s best statesmen, he is a giant. Hence, it is no wonder that even in England voices are calling on him to come and save the country from destruction. We are pleased at such recognition of a brave and good man, for he was almost the only one of the overseas Ministers who had the courage to say a strong word against the brutalities meted out to the Irish patriots by a Government which had hardly ceased ranting about the need of crushing tyranny for ever and ever. Smuts was a friend of Ireland’s, as he is a friend of justice; and because justice means much to him, and because he has the brains and the courage to speak for it, he stands forth among the cowards who follow the crowd and sing the song of the Jingo according to orders. No panic cry from Lloyd George could cause Smuts to lose his head. No Orange whipper-in could muzzle him. The mean, pettifogging, bigoted tricks of other men are beneath him. When he fought to the end for his little country, himself a felon in the eyes of our Imperialist flag-flappers who are not fit to black his boots, he proved he was a man. When other delegates tamely sighed the iniquitous Treaty of Versailles without a protest, Smuts told the world what he thought about it in eloquent words. And so it is that now when the rest of them are of no account in the councils of Europe, the South African statesman is recognised as the man who could most likely save England from the ruin and

confusion her politicians and her profiteers have brought ?-.-v! upon her. As an indication of how he overshadows his colleagues ponder on ,the following words which A. G. G. has to say about him in the Nation and Athenaeum: There is no element of surprise in the fact that '> ■' the proposals put forward at the Imperial Conference to rescue Germany from the deadly grip that threatens - f its existence should emanate from General Smuts. Whether those proposals will infuse into the British Government the necessary courage to act firmly and decisively, remains to be seen. Whether, if the Government do so act, the rescue of Germany is now possible, is open to doubt. But in any case, the action of General Smuts gives him, not for the first time, a j > significance and a prominence in the public mind that claim attention at this moment. It is no disrespect to the other members of the Conference to say that General Smuts is its most remarkable figure. It is no disrespect because the romantic and extraordinary circumstances of his career attach an unprecedented interest to a personality in itself of quite unusual force and originality, and this at a time when the resources of British statesmanship are more impoverished than they have been in living memory. But concerned though he is for the future of Africa, that interest is not the sole preoccupation of General Smuts. He sees it only as a part of the common problem of the world’s peace. He brings to the solution of that problem, not merely an experience in affairs that no other living statesman possesses and „ a record of success that few statesmen in the past can equal, but an instructed passion for the cause of re- •• conciliation, a trained capacity for handling great and complicated questions, and that coolness of judgment without which enthusiasm, however sincere and wellmeaning, may become a peril. The struggle to restore Europe to sanity has only begun, and in that struggle this country must sooner or later play a decisive part. But we need men of vision and men of power for the task before us. Wo need General Smuts. His work for Africa is done. His future belongs to the world. The British Newspaper Trust We have not, it is to be hoped, forgotten the campaign of lies by means of which British pressmen tried to conquer Germany; many of us, it is certain, have not forgotten the lies and the suppressions of the truth by which the same champions of small nations tried to assist Lloyd George in his murder-offensive against Ireland. Such things as have happened ought to open the eyes of the public to the V dangers that lurk ( in a hireling and unprincipled press. These dangers will in future be magnified a hundredfold x j owing to the fact that huge sections of the British press > are now falling into the hands of people for whom principle, character, soul, and conscience are apparently a matter of > pounds, shillings, and pence. In an address before a large ' audience in the Newcastle City Hall, Mr. G. K. Chesterton ■ recently laid stress on the menace of the trust which was - engineered a short time ago in England. •" *7 Everybody knew, Mr. Chesterton declared, that there had just been created one of the largest trusts in the world, a trust in newspapers. Lord Rothermere and Lord Beaverbrook had joined their forces in one , ' of those great commercial combinations which dominated ' f the modern world, for which a man could have been put in the pillory in the Middle Ages. Referring humorously to such a possible combinaZ ■' ' tion as Sidney Webb and Bernard Shaw, or a combinai Hon of Chesterton and Belloc in newspapers, the speaker V,. said that if , such possible combinations were to arise it; -- ' • the people would, at any rate, know what to expect. f ; ■ i But they did not know what they would get from the / Beaverbrook-Rothermere combination. They did not s , ' know what these two men stood for. ■ ; V' TT ■ / ■ : \ v V j : i ■ For the first time a state, of affairs had arisen in which power existed without glory or notoriety such

as w&s usually attached to it. They were in danger of falling under an entirely nameless and obscure domination, and under that .condition there was a danger of a new kind of nonsense which required rather special consideration, apart from that form of nonsense which was the outcome of such colossal ignorance as to be / almost incredible if one had not an inside knowledge of politicians and journalists. Mr. Chesterton, continuing, spoke of the absence of real knowledge of events in Europe, which appeared in the press, in reference to Fascism, Bolshevism, Socialism, and Ku Flux Klanism, and declared that the English people were faced by the broad fact of a money monopoly which was now attacking the world of news and ideas, and he hoped that in the years to come they would be remembered as having been among those? who in that time and at that moment called upon the name of liberty. The Finance of the Trust A remarkable feature of the latest development of the Newspaper Trust is the way in which the big combination can now finance itself with the money of the public, whilst retaining all the control and all the surplus profits. The Associated Newspapers, Ltd., owns the Daily Mail, the Evening News, etc., etc., and the controlling interest in the Anglo-Newfoundland Development Company, which produces over 55,000 tons of paper per annum. -The Daily Mail Trust owns the controlling interest (f.c., 53 per cent, of the Deferred Shares) of the Associated Newspapers. The Daily Mail Trust then buys the Hulton Press for £6,000,000, which, in its turn, buys the Associated Scottish Newspapers for £1,000,000, and floats £8,000,000 seven per cent, debentures on to the public (also guaranteed by the Daily Mirror Newspapers, Ltd., and the Sunday Pictorial Newspapers, Ltd.). The capital of the Daily Mail Trust'consists of these debentures together with £2,000,000 ordinary shares on which, in all, £200,000 is paid up. -Thus the. owner of the ordinary shares, by putting up this comparatively trifling sum, has complete control of all the above properties, whilst the public find at 7 per cent, a great part of the capital to finance the highly -specluative*and (in the end) precarious business of running the Stunt Press. But this is not all. The wheels within wheels are endless. Who owns the ordinary shares of the Daily Mail Trust? Me are not told. But it ’is clear, from some words added in one of their certificates- by the chartered accountants, Messrs. Deloitte, Blender, Griffiths and Co., that they are at least partly owned by the Daily Mirror Newspapers, Ltd., which in its turn owns a controlling interest in the Sunday Pictorial Newspapers, Ltd. Thus the uncalled liability of £1,800,000 on the ordinary shares of the Daily Mail Trust, which is part of the security for the debenture holders, overlaps the guarantee of the above-named companies a fact not alluded to in the prospectus, which leaves the impression that these two guarantees are separate and independent. Tor all the public knows, therefore, the situation may be, and probably is, as follows. The Daily .Mirror Newspapers, Ltd., owns a controlling interest in the Sunday Pictorial Newspapers, Ltd.; these two companies own a controlling interest in the ordinary shares of the Daily Mail Trust the Daily Mail Trust owns the Hulton Press, the Associated Scottish Newspapers, and a controlling interest in the Associated Newspapers; the Associated Newspapers; dwn the Daily.,Mail, the Evening News, the Weekly Newfouhdland Development Company, the aggregate present valiie, being above £20,000,000 altogether, and ; the ..current annual,profits above £2,500,000. - ! ' v Thus, if this is correct, the owner of the controlling interest in the Daily Mirror. Newspapers, Ltd,, controls the whole caboodle. Three hundred and fifty thousand and one £1 shares (which now stand, however, - above ?) represent fcontrol, and the controller’s losses, if things go wrong, may be limited to this. His power is majestic and imperial; his possible profits beyond the dreams of mortals. •