Current Topics

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXVII, Issue 49, 7 December 1899, Page 1

Current Topics

AT HOME AND ABROAD.

When Bishop Wilberforce was suddenly not A ' glad killed by a fall from his horse, Carlyle's surprise. 1 savage comment was : ' What a glad surprise ! ' The South African campaign has sprung upon the British War Office many a surprise of the kind that only the Boers and their friends would regard as ' glad.' But to the average Briton in the crowd the least gladsome and most exasperating surprise of all will probably be the fact that many Englishmen in South Africa have turned their rifles against their own countrymen. One of last week's cable messages stated that among the prisoners captured by the British troops in one of the encounters were a number of Englishmen, and it is known that numbers of others are scattered here and there among the ranks of the Boer army. The man in the crowd may rub his eyes at the news. But such an event was foreseen long before the opening of the conflict by those who knew best every ripple on the current of Uitlander feeling in the Transvaal. In his book, Through South Africa, published in London last year, Mr. H. M. Stanley tells how, when a leading Johannesburg Englishman had been a short time previously on a visit to London, a British statesman said to him : ' What would be the effect of sending 30,000 British troops to the Transvaal V ' Whereupon,'says Stanley, ' he answered that he would be the first man who would take up his rifle against them. 1 On page 115 of the same book Stanley declares that ' English Uitlanders themselves have threatened to lift their rifles against us if we move to exert pressure against the Boers.' Like Selous, Bryden, and others who know the Boer well, Stanley was strongly opposed to armed intervention in the affairs of the Transvaal, and held that the Uitlander grievance could and ought to have been removed by the peaceful leverage of the stump-extractor of constitutional agitation.

After all, it does make some matter whose some ox is goaded. When there was a question protestant of war between the United States and Spain, clergy the non-Catholic pulpit, both in and out of on the war. America, was as bellicose as the mythical

Irishman who is supposed to have trailed his coat-tails at the Donnybrook fair. Some of the pulpiteers in the United States — and even here in New Zealand — made no secret of their desire to see the Spanish-American conflict turned into a Jehad or Holy War upon the unspeakable Don. Now, however, it is a question of a campaign against an unprogressive people who are Protestant of Protestants, and who dwell in what Stanley cally 'the China of South Africa.' There is consequently no room for religious, and little for racial, passion, and calm reason, therefore sits in cool majesty in the pulpits that last year rang with the cry of war and with fervent denunciations of the courtly Spaniard and his ways. "With one conspicuous exception, the English Protestant pulpit has deplored the war. Many non-Catholic clergymen in these colonies have raised voice or pen against it. The Presbyterian organ of New Zealand, the Outlook, some time ago lashed in refreshing style 'the insatiable greed of gain and lust of power of the South African Chartered Co., as represented «iblicly by Mr. Cecil Rhodes and privately by Mr. Joseph jamberlain, to whose machinations the mischief is largely \ceable.' Another prominent Presbyterian, the Rev. Dr. Rentoul, of Melbourne, referred to the war as ' another crime as black and baneful as the crime by which Disraeli delivered the Bulgarians and the Armenians to the clutch of Satan.' Yet another, the Rev. J. H. Mackay, of Bendigo (Victoria), moved the following resolution in the General Assembly at Melbourne : ' That the Assembly set aside a day of humiliation and prayer, on account of the unnecessary and unrighteous war in which the Empire is at present engaged.' The resolution was not carried. Another of a different kind met with a better fate : it was passed. According to the Melbourne Argus Dr. Rentoul thus referred to it in a lecture at the

Baptist Church, Collins street, on November 17: 'In my absence to-day they (the General Assembly) passed a resolution, asking all ministers to offer up prayers for the people who are trying to blow up the Boers with Lyddite shells and other infernal machines. I shall never do that, nor will other ministers We should rather pray for the helpless widows and homeless ones.'

In Ireland some unstated words of protest lord emly. against the war have ended in Lord Emly being deprived of the Commission of the Peace. Lord Emly is a devoted Catholic, a staunch Nationalist and a warm and practical friend of the labouring man. He is just past what Dante terms ' the midway of this our mortal life ' — just 41 years old, and was educated at Cardinal Newman's School (Edgbaston), and subsequently at the Jesuit Colleges of Beaumont and Stonyhurst. When he came of age he was appointed State Steward to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. During the vice-royalty of Earl Spencer an incident occurred which exhibited the personal grit as well as the practical faith of the young Irish Catholic nobleman. It was in 1885. He was at the time resident in Dublin Castle. ' Lord Spencer,' says the Edinburgh Catholic Herald, wanted to give a ball on the day that Cardinal McCabe [Archbishop Walsh's immediate predecessor in the See of Dublin] was lying dead in his house in Dublin. Lord Emly absolutely refused to go the ball. He was pressed to do so, but he threatened that if it were insisted that he should go, he would resign his appointment. It was not insisted upon, and so the matter ended.'

Our Scottish contemporary records an incident of one of Lord Emly's ancestors that is well worth setting before our readers. It refers to the dark days of the penal laws, when the priest-hunter received £50 for the 'discovery* of an' archbishop, bishop, or vicar-general, and £20 for each friar or unregistered priest. These rewards, says Lecky, 'called a regular race of priest-hunters into existence.' So much by way of introduction. The Herald story runneth thus : ' An informer, one of the many in the country at that time, came to him and said : " A priest is lying hid in your boathouse" (on the banks of the Shannon). This ancestor of Lord Emly, pretending to be delighted at the information, addressed his informant in these terms : " Now, my good man, go immediately, summon the Militia, gather the magistrates together, and give them the information that you have given me." The man hurried at once to carry out the instructions given him, whilst the other sent a private message to the priest, telling him that in three-quarters of an hour the Sheriff and a' large force or Militia would be at the boathouse, and that should anybody be found there after that time it were very likely that he would be apprehended. He also despatched another message couched in these terms : " There is a vacant room in Tervoe." In twenty minutes afterwards the priest was at Tervoe, and in three-quarters of an hour the Militia were at the boathouse, every corner of which they searched. There was the greatest possible excitement, of course. The military put their swords through the boats in order to be certain that nobody was in them. Their search, it is needless to say, was vain. It was then that Lord Emly's ancestor had his revenge. Calling up the informer, he said to him : " Now, look here, my man. See the expense you have put us to. You have been the means of casting ridicule on the magistracy of this county. I personally look upon you as a most contemptible scoundrel, and I sentence you to be tied to the shafts of a cart, and the cart to be dragged by a donkey, and you to be whipped from one gate of Tervoe to the other gat e of Tervoe." The extent of the flagellation can be very well realised when it is mentioned that the distance was exactly a couple of miles.'

Myths and superstitions usually live long two race and die hard — sometimes because they are myths. kept alive by mere repetition, sometimes because they minister to national pridtmr religious prejudice. Two curious people-myths still cling to life down to our time — the one because the good-natured

people whom it affects do not care to put themselves to the trouble of killing it ; the other chiefly because of its present value as a factor in political life or international relations. The one is the myth of the Latin, the other of the Anglo-Saxon, ' race.' Like the figures of the winged Mercury which are poised upon the point of one great toe, these myths are both set standing upon one small pin-head of fact — affinity or identity of language. In the case of the ' Latin race' legend such affinity is easily traced to a few centuries of Roman administration. In the British Isles Celtic dialects have been lost within historic times — and, indeed, almost within living memory —by exactly the same process. In New Zealand it has, after a mere half century or so, taught the Southern Maori to lisp with ungrammatical lips the language of their conquerors. A Spaniard may call himself in the same, breath a Latin and an Iberian ; a Frenchman who refers to himself as a Latin now will designate himself a Gaul within five minutes — so little practical faith has either in the fiction of the ' Latin race.' Traces of the Latin people — chips of the old block — may probably still be met, here and there, as in the Trastevere in Rome, in Provence and the Lower Languedoc in France, and in a few other isolated places which escaped the wild onset of the hordes that swept down upon and almost blotted out the old Roman civilisation in the long ago. The shaggy barbarians from the northern forests were — what Attila, one of their leaders, styled himself — 'the Scourge of God.' In their early days of nation-building, the sturdy pagan Romans cultivated the natural virtues to a high degree. But with wealth and luxury came — among others — the vice that offers so dread a menace to the future of these colonies — systematic sterility and limitation of family. Then the stronger stock swept down like another deluge and washed away the sinsodden landmarks of what had once been — but even then with a very strained propriety— called the Latin race. The very school-boy who is ever so slightly acquainted with the ethnology of modern Europe knows full well that no man can to-day point to either a race or a nation that can be properly designated as Latin.

For even a stronger reason the title ' Anglo-Saxon race ' or ' Anglo-Saxon people ' is an abuse of terms. We read the term in all the moods and tenses nowadays in leading articles written by enthusiastic pressmen whose patriotism is greater than their knowledge of history. Thus the Auckland Herald of November 25 devotes a well-meant, if not convincing, leading article to the entente between Great Britain and the ' Anglo-Saxon race ' in the United States. We have already broadly hinted that similarity or identity of language is a flimsy foundation for an argument as to identity of race. This would, for instance, afford us such curiously diversified racetypes as Anglo-Saxon ' Milesians in Connemara, ' Anglo-Saxon Frenchmen in Canada, • Anglo-Saxon ' Brahmins at Culcutta, 'Anglo-Saxon ' Chinamen in Hong Kong, and 'Anglo-Saxon' negroes in (say) the United States and Jamaica. The people of the British Isles are tolerably cosmopolitan in sentiment, but they draw the colour-line rigidly and erect thereon a skyhigh social and racial iron fence between themselves and the yellow man and the brown man and the red man and the black man. Moreover, the Saxon — or Anglo-Saxon — tongue is, and for long ages has been, ' a Hebrew speech ' to English people. Professor March says that 'the Anglo-Saxon language is so different from modern English as to deserve a separate name' ; that it ' differs from our English in phonology, in vocabulary, in inflections, in the derivation of words, in syntax, in versification, and in modes of thought'; that English is 'an analytic mixed speech of Roman cultivation, with other periods of growth and classic regularity and progress '; and that • a chaos separates the two languages.*

Historically and ethnically there is no such thing as an ' Anglo-Saxon race.' The name was, lor want of better, used as the official designation of the subjects of King Alfred after he had subdued the Angles. But the people of the British Isles were, racially speaking, more Celtic than Teutonic. As for their institutions, most of them came, not from Germany, but from Rome. Their civilisation came from Rome ; their religion came from Rome ; their system of jurisprudence came from Rome ; much of their modern language came from Rome; the Magna Charta itself was written in Latin; and the records of English courts of justice were kept in Latin down to the reign of George 11. All this in passing, just to point to the stone out of which English institutions were hewn. But the term ' Anglo Saxon ' is a strange misnomer to apply to the people of the United States. The Anglo-Saxon element in the blood and bone and muscle of its population — if it can be shown to be there at all— is insignificantly small. The great bulk of it is made up of the Celtic element, and of the Teutonic element which has but little of the Saxon and none of the Anglo-Saxon in its composition. That eccentric genius George Francis Train thus ding-dongs the Anglo-Saxon theory between the hammer of argument and the anvil of history : • Who settled New York ? The Dutch. Who settled South Carolina? The Huguenots. Who settled Louisiana? The

French. Who settled Florida? The Spanish Who settled Californiaand the South-west? The Mexicans. Talk about England be '"g °u r motherland ! She's not even our grandmother land. As the German -Americans declared last year at Chicago, not England, but the whole of Europe, is the mother-country of the white inhabitants of the United States.' But the biggest quota came from Ireland and Germany. Half of Washington's army in the War of Independence was compbsed of Irishmen. His fleet was probably more Irish still, and its first Commodore was is?u famous fi g h ting Wexfordman, 'Saucy Jack Barry.' Mr. Wharton Baker showed in the American last year that since the days of the Revolution ' not more than ten per cent, ot those who have come to settle amongst us throw in their fortunes with our fortunes, develop a continent, have been fcnghsh born.' He then proceeds :—: —

Farther bank than two generations we cannot trace the lineage of our people, the country from which they have sprung, nor is it necessary. But of our population, foreign-born and born of foreign parentage, the last census (and there is no later data) shjws that in in «°V°L? Ur tota l w , hite P°P ulati °n of 54,983,980, 37* per cent., or t't! a ' - Were fore te n parentage ; and of these 4,913,238 were Irish-Americans, 6,851 564 German-Americans, 1,922,638 BritishAmencina, with the men of Scandinavian descent coming next. Pub m percentages : Of oar white population, foreign-born or bora of foreign parents, 23 94 per cent, were Irish, 3339 per cent. German, only 937 per cent. English. Since 1890 there has been a large proportionate gain in our population of Latin and Slavish origin, ao that the percentages of Irish and Germans and English to our foreign population, though still holding their ranking position, are undoubtedly somewhat smaller than eight years ago. Of this population of foreign parentage and in excess of twenty millions, or three-eighths of our entire white population in 1890, 9,249,547 were actually foreign-born, the other eleven millions born of foreign parents. Of the foreign-born 2,784,894 were Germans, 1,871,509 Irish, 933,249 Scandinavians, 908,141 English, 510,625 Slavish peoples, 319,822 Latins [sic], and 242,231 Scotch. America is, in very deed, not an Anglo-Saxon, but a cosmopolitan nation, with, however, Celts and Germans as its chief racial elements.

SOME WAR NURSES.

English historians passed by, as scarcely worthy of mention, the magnificent services rendered to the sick, wounded, and dying soldiers of the British army by the Sisters of Mercy in the blundering campaign of the Crimea, and it is merely incidentally that we learn of the heroic work which the members of another Catholic Sisterhood are doing for Thomas Atkins on his bed of pain and sickness within the beleaguered lines of Ladysmith. The nuns who have elected to take the chances of war are the Sisters of the Holy Family— mostly French, we believe— and they are the tender and skilled and thoughtful nurses that tend the wounded and soothe the victims of the camp-fever at Ladysmith. In the VicariateApostolic of Natal there were in 1897 33 of those ministering angels. They were distributed among the hospitals of their Order at Ladysmith, Pietermaritzburg, and Durban. All three hospitals are probably at this moment working to their last ounce of pressure for the sick and wounded soldiers of 1 the great white queen.'

Somewhere in the twenties a leaden -witted 'civis': English rustic, Hodge Swingdon, say of His charges, Whinthorpe, was « brought up 'on a capital and charge. The evidence was direct, the witHis 'bulls.' nesses unexceptionable. There was no possible defence, and the jury promptly brought in a verdict of guilty. The judge put the usual question : Had the prisoner at the bar anything to say why sentence of death should not be pronounced against him ? And Hodge made answer and said : "Es. I have zummat to zay. That 'air on your 'ead bean't yourn— it be a 'oss's tail ; an' there be a pimple on your nose an' a boo-bottle fly on your beard. Leastways, I think it. An' that be wot / zay.' Such was the rustic's fat-witted reply. And such, in principle, is the sole ' defence ' made by ' Civis ' of the Otago Daily Times against the journalistic capital count on which he has been found guilty— that of attempting to evoke the demon of sectarian rancour to aid his friends in a political campaign. He has made no defence against the charge. He has no possible defence to make; for, as we twice pointed out, the evidence against him lies scattered thick over the whole surface of his offending • Note '— undenied because undeniable. His ' reply ' of last Saturday is as inatjflf and inept and pointless as that of Hodge of Whinthorpe— it iW to the effect that, in pointing out the nature of his guilt, we/^ forsooth, used a mixed metaphor! Only that and nothing more. There were persons who expected — and a priori not unreasonably— that even the bell-jingling • Civis ' would offer some word of explanation or some expression of regret for his cruel and unprovoked attack on the Catholic bishops and electors. We were of the number who looked for this. We know better now.

' 9 VIS is not exactl y a George Washington. In his first 'Note 'on us he made a peculiarly gross and evident misstatement of fact— evident, at least, to anybody who read our

original comment on him. Bya piece of deliberate garbling he put into our mouth a direct personal charge against the editor of the Otago Daily Times, We promptly denounced the petty trick. And now he calls our exposure of his little ruse an ' unconditional back-down.' He applies the same term to our expression of willingness to accept his word that he knew nothing of certain very curious 'coincidences' with 'Oriel' — amounting-, as we then believed, to verbal transcription. He made one serious misstatement in a question of fact in his first ' Note 'on us. Last Saturday he made two. Next Saturday ? Well, there are big possibilities before the man who could, without a shred of evidence fling what is tantamount to a wholesale charge of political corruption against the Catholic bishops of New Zealand. His talents are going to waste blowing soap-bubbles for an unappreciative public in Dunedin. He ought to be in Parliament — or on the staff of the Victorian Standard.

When Saul went to seek his father's asses he found them and something else besides. But when ' Civis' set forth with a pair of ' double-magnifying--electroscopic spectacles of hextra power' to find 'bulls' (and Irish 'bulls' at that) in our pastures, he finds a mare's nest — only that and nothing more. Now a mare's nest may be a very valuable asset, but we doubt whether it is worth the amount of whooping ' Civis ' makes over it. We rather think it is not. One would think that he had found a new Hartley and Riley — all his very own. A hypercritical ' Civis ' of 1859 argued that Lord John Russell's saying, ' Conspicuous by its absence,' was a ' bull.' But he convinced nobody — perhaps not even himself. 'Civis' may, however, take out a patent for his new method of discovering ' bulls ' — where they are not. With the aid of his new method — ignoring and blundering about the plain meaning of words and setting together as contexts texts that are wide apart — we have succeeded in a brief space in finding seven ' bulls ' in Tennyson, three in Kipling, a whole herd in Shakespeare — and two fat, sleek, full-grown, long-horned fellows, on last Saturday, in one tiny section of ' Civis's ' own imperishable prose. Henceforth, thanks to * Civis,' the fields of literature will be swarming with vast herds of those skittish animals. His own pet pair may be easily seen without straining his infallible ' system ' in the least. Thus, he tells us that the Dunedin election contest is a ' battle,' in which one contestant gets 'leagues abead' of all his competitors, while the losers will be 'kicked up-stairs ' — a rather mixed sort of a battle, by the way. But the fault is not ours. Again, the Socialistic campaign is also a ' war '(' Civis ' is very bellicose just now), with 'pippins and cheese' for dessert, and a ' goal ' at the off-side of it, into which ' the thin end of the wedge ' is already inserted by Messrs. Barclay and Co. Really, with such a wealth of ' bulls 'in his own pastures, it rfo«s seem a work of supererogation for 'Civis' to scramble over his neighbours' fence in search of the ' beasties.' But, as we have said, he did not find them, after all. Thus, he cannot understand how anything that is round can have, like a Mauser bullet, a steel tip. He is enthusiastically certain that this is a 'bull.' But that is because ' Civis' has not gone to school long enough to learn the meaning of the word 'round.' He fancies there is only one kind of roundness — the spherical. Any schoolboy in Dunedin could tell him that a cylinder (a water-pipe, for instance) is round, that an oval figure may be round in one dimension, that a cone may be round, and that a Lebel or a Mauser rifle bullet, though not spherical, is necessarily round so as to fit the round barrel of the weapon, and that its tapering cone-shaped point is also round and tipped with steel. ' Civis ' would evidently fit square bullets to the round barrel and use them to shoot oysters on the wing. Moreover, the term ' round,' as applied by us to words, has the meaning of ' candid, fair, frank,' as reference to any dictionary would show. The other ' bull ' attributed to us by ' Civis ' is the creature of his unacquaintance with the meaning and social use of terms. 'Civis' will not permit us to have a high idea of his mental attainments. But till now we were under the erroneous impression that he was 'up to ' the Fourth Standard pass in the matter of wordmeanings.