SPURIOUS PATRIOTS.

Taranaki Daily News, 27 July 1917, Page 7

SPURIOUS PATRIOTS.

"A DAMNING STATEMENT." (Wellington Times Correspondent). At St. Joseph's, Hawera, on Sunday, Dean Power referred to the question put by Mr. Nosworthy in the House of Representatives, and to the reply of Sir James Allen, There were spurious patriots who thought that patriotism consisted in abuse of the Kaiser and in the free dissemination of every wild rumor against the people over whom the Kaiser ruled. Such patriots, according to the illustrious General Butler, the Bishop of limerick, the honest editor of the "New Zealand Tablet," and Catholic sentiment and teaching, wcro in reality the greatest enemies of their country, for they most surely brought down upon it the swift anger of God. The might of Germany was not the gravest danger with which they were threatened. Their most terrible danger was from within, as 'Lincoln had advised his countrymen in a notable address; it was to be found in injustice, in uncharitableness, in vain boasting and the propagation of racial hate. Let them remember the shame that came upon them with the memory of the foul litany of epithets hurled by their forefathers agains* the greatest soldier who ever lived, and let them put up such a clean fight themselves that posterity might not blush for them; defeat would not degrade them so surely as racial hatred and abuse, and it was surely possible to engage in lawful warfare without the meretricious aid of these. The brave Bishop of Limerick, whose lofty patriotism was a thorn in .th" side of Mr. Nosworthy, will have conferred a great benefit upon the Empire when he had cast the blinding beam from its rulers' eyes.

Referring to the Minister'-, reply to the member's remarks on the Marist Brothers, the Dean said that no more damning statement *had| ever been made by a Minister of the State to a body of legislators. The Marist Brothers, the Minister said, were doing an indispensable work, and were receiving no pay. Such a damning statement could have been made a quarter of a century ago by the Minister for Public Instruction in the German 'Parliament, but in its evolution from barbarism to civilisation the Prussian branch of the Teuton family had grown ashamed of that vilest form of highway robbery. Not so the Teutons who lorded it over Australasia; they thought themselves dignified, but were in reality contemptible, when forgetting their own injustice to the Marist Brothers, they sniffed the air at German rottenness. So rank was this injustice, and so loudly did it cry to Heaven, that even the Orange organiser of the Protestant Political League was having a strongly-wordediresolution passed at his meetings that the Marist Brothers be put on an equality with the other teachers in New Zealand. The Dean wished the organiser success, but he feared his efforts were doomed to failure, since the legislators and public opinion in New Zealand had wrapped themselves in what had been, bnt no longer was, the foul garment of Prussianisin.