Current Topics

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXVII, Issue 51, 21 December 1899, Page 1

Current Topics

AT HOME AND ABROAD.

The Yorubas of West Africa are described the gospel of as an intelligent race. At any rate, their political language contains some rare gems of practical billingsgate, wisdom. Archbishop Trench gives one

which runs as follows : ' Ashes always fly back in the face of him that throws them.' It is an African variant of the Turkish proverb : ' Curses, like chickens, always come home to roost.' In our issue of last week we gave what was tantamount to a local application to these wise old saws when we pointed out that the violent and rampant political dust-throwing bouts of the Opposition organs injured nobody but the party whom they were intended to benefit. We are all the more strongly convinced of this now, since we find our opinion confirmed on independent grounds by the scholarly and judicious editor of the Outlook, the Presbyterian organ of New Zealand. In the last issue of his admirably conducted weekly — which, by the way, is attached to no political party — the editor passes judgment as follows on* the gospel of political billingsgate : — ' In our judgment not a little of their (the Government) success is due to the virulence of the Opposition Press. Day after day a relentless, and, in many cases, an unscrupulous warfare was waged against the members of the Ministry. There might have been some force in it if it had shown any sense of proportion. But it did not. The Opposition, with scarcely one exception, transformed its editorial pens into tarbrushes and painted the Government absolutely and unreservedly blick. This was neither art nor ethics, and in not a few quarters it produced an effect the exact opposite of what was desired. We do not say that the Opposition were the only sinners in this respect. It is quite possible the Government organs, had they been in the same position, would have done the same thing. But it is bad policy, to put it on the lowest ground. The great bulk of the citizens simply refuse to believe that men who give themselves to serve the country — be they Liberal or Conservative — are hopelessly and irredeemably base, and if they are constantly told so day after day in their newspapers they resent it, and take the first opportunity of showing that they do. Mr. Seddon's Government, no doubt, has its faults ; but to say that it is evil and only evil, and to keep on saying this continually, surely betrays a distorted vision. It is much to be desired that the malignant bitterness which characterises a great deal of the Press of this Colony on both sides might be sottened and abated. We are convinced that a good deal of Mr. Seddon's success is due to the sympathy excited for him because of the acerbity with which the Opposition newspapers assailed him. And the lesson is one which both sides of the Press should take to heart. In this, as in everything else, it should be remembered that the wrath of man, even of editors, worketh not the righteousness of God.'

The opinion expressed by us finds fresh support in a letter addressed to the Christchurch Press by a strong supporter of the Opposition, the Hon. Lancelot Walker, M.L.C. He has the following warning words on the defeat of his party at the recent elections : —

' And how to account for this disaster ? Mismanagement *d over-confidence. And of all the agencies that nave worked against us, none, in my estimation, has been more potent than the Press newspaper of Chnstchurch. For months and months your columns have been choked with vituperations against the other side, and vainglorious boastings as to what we are going to do ; prophecies of certain success on our part — not one of which came off — and contemptuous reckonings as to faraway chances on the other side. Can you not understand that this sort of continual abuse must stimulate the enemy to their utmost exertions, arid that they will give back a Roland for our every Oliver ? In every altercation between two

washerwomen, the one who keeps her temper always wins. But can you not also understand that this tirade of abuse of the other side may, after a time, pall on even our own supporters ? Only about ten days ago I met a neighbouring farmer, staunchly on the right side so far, and I said to him : " Well, I suppose you are going to vote for ?" " No," he said, *• I think not ; Seddon has had enough bully-ragging from the Press, and I'm something if I don't go for the Government man." And if he, why not scores of others ? I am sure that in all election work it is better to go silently than blatantly/

The lesson is soon and easily read. The old Latin proverb runs : Discipulus est prioris posterior dies. This being interpreted means: 'To-day is the scholar of yesterday/ The Opposition organs of ' to-day ' have, we trust, learned a lesson from their blunders of yesterday, and the lesson, which we trust they will take to heart, was set forth in our leading article of last week, where we said that * political abuse is, like the boomerang, a dangerous weapon that may come whirling back and wound its thrower.' If so much is learned, the experience has not been altogether in vain ; it may make for cleaner and more temperate political campaigning in the future — a consummation devoutly to be wished for.

Religious prejudice, like any other form of the cross lunacy, breaks out into a thousand strange in ' and wondrous freaks and pranks. But not peace and the least strange of them is that of positive war. hatred of the cross, the sign of man's redemption. St. Paul said: 'God forbid that I should glory, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ.' The passion and death of his Saviour was more than all the world to him. From the earliest days of the Church the mere emblem of the cross was dear to Christians for the sake of all that it spoke to them. To this day it stands aloft on the summit of the churches of nearly every Christian creed. But in Ireland, especially in Ulster, there are many who hate the sign of redemption for the chief reason that their Catholic neighbours love it. Hence the cross-smashing that takes place from time to time in Catholic cemeteries and churchyards in the north-east corner of Ireland. It is not quite unknown even in the south, for the writer of these lines knows of an old churchyard where — happily many years ago — every headstone that bore the sacred sign was ruthlessly defaced or broken. This curious — and to Catholics inexplicable — hostility of feeling found voice in an unexpected way and quarter in Dublin recently. The occasion was the annual Diocesan Synod of the Anglican Church. The Synod was much exercised over the discovery that a cross was cut upon the marble representation of a stole upon the monument erected in Christ Church Cathedral to the memory of the late Protestant primate, Dr. Plunkett. The Dean and Chapter had examined and approved of the design for the monument. Their eyes, however, were not keen enough to discover the little cross upon the stole. One Rev. Mr. Hunt had a pair of optics keener than them all. He was the Columbus of the little emblem. And the Dean and Chapter expressed their profound regret at its presence and promised the removal of the 'offensive representation.' There were some, even in St. Paul's day, to whom ' the word of the cross' was 'foolishness.' But in the goodly company that assembled at the Anglican Synod in Dublin one hardly expected the cross to be referred to as an ' offensive representation.'

One of Dickens's characters contrived to veer conversation on every topic under the sun around to the severed head of Charles I. Just now every interchange of ideas gets sooner or later — generally sooner — to war. Even the emblem of the cross may be easily associated with the din of arms and the noise of martial strife. Dr. Talmage, for instance, tells us that ' when the old Scottish chieftains wanted to raise an army, they would make a wooden cross, and then set it on fire and carry it with other crosses they had through the mountains, through the highlands, and among the people, and as they

waved the cross the people would gather to the standard and fight for Scotland.' There the emblem of the flaming cross aroused the patriotism of the people and nerved them to strike a vigorous blow for their native land. The sign of the cross has in the same way nerved the Catholic soldier to deeds of daring on a thousand hard-fought fields. Take, for instance, Meagher's gallant Irish Brigade at St. Mary's Heights on the deadly day of Fredericksburg. They knelt, received their chaplain's blessing, made the sign of the cross, and then charged up the lead-lashed hill straight to certain doom. Six times in succession they faced that hell-storm. It was not war. It was sheer massacre. But no man flinched. That morning 1200 rations were served out to the gallant Brigade. In the evening just a little over 200 sufficed for the bleeding remnant of that band of heroes. In General Longstreet's words, 'it was the handsomest thing of the whole war.' In denouncing a display of anti-Catholic bigotry at an election contest last year a correspondent of the Brooklyn Eagle said : c It did not weaken the blows that Phil Sheridan inflicted on the enemy at Five Forks because in the morning he was observed to make the sign of the cross with his good right hand before he mounted his charger — just what Rosecrans told his men to do at Corinth. " Make the sign of the cross and go at them, boys ! " said old Rosey. They did, and were invincible.' In all human probability many a gallant Dubliner did the same at Elandslaagte. They were none the worse of that. For did not a gallant American officer say of his Irish Catholic soldiers in the great Civil War that he ' found the most pious of them the very bravest,' and that they were the men he would pick if he ' wanted to storm the gates of hell ' ? The soldier who begins by making the gates of heaven ' suffer violence ' need not have much fear of the gates of hell.

LEGISLATORS AND THEIR USES.

people who send them to do their talking in Parliament. Disillusion, such as is said to sometimes follow the peal of wedding bells, will probably come in due course to many of the fresh New Zealand legislators who were returned triumphantly on the 6th, when they find that part of their function as parliamentarians will be to act, not merely as lawmakers, but also as factotums and agents-general in miniature to all and sundry in their constituencies. A fair average sample of the ' odd jobs ' expected of the parliamentary •generally useful' is furnished by the following letter recently received by a New South Wales legislator. We quote from a Sydney contemporary :—: —

As I can't come to town in time for registration, haven to cv* eorgum for milken cows, and boys being away shearen. i would like you to see the con6tible and repisser my dog. he is 8 moots old 15th of next mont. his name is Bismark, and i don't saetly know what bread you would call him, but he is by Brown's old coolie, that you remember, him that bit the baliff, and a fox-terrier that onct belonged to old Mrs. Tomson, up the river, there is a bridge out hear that wants doen up about 8 pound, and it will help you hear if you get it looked to for us, as some thing Nash could do, more for us than you. You will get a petishion about it signed by me and other leaden residence. Dooley's draft mare, the one with the two foals, got her leg down it referendum day, and there was nearly a smash up.

The spelling of this interesting document reminds one of Artemus Ward's criticism of Chaucer : ' Some kind person has s tme Chawcer's poems. Mr. C. had talent, but he couldn't spel. No man has a right to be a litrary man onless he knows how to spel. It is a pity that Chawcer, who had geneyus, was so unedicated. He's the wuss speller I know of.' The writer of that missive had ' geneyus,' even though he ' couldn't spel.' And neither Chaucer nor Ward could give clearer or more diplomatic expression to their sense of the utility of parliamentary representatives.

THE CHARGE OF RITUAL MURDER.

In his Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar Mark Twain inserted the following bit of wisdom : ' The difference between a cat and a lie is this, that a cat has only nine lives.' The statement is true in an altogether especial manner of those screaming hair-raisers which are produced in periods of sectarian fury for the purpose of blackening the character of a rival creed. The Reformation produced a plentiful supply of gruesome, monstrous, and impossible charges of idolatry, phenomenal immorality, and diabolical chuckle- headed ness against the Catholic body. Many of these survive to our day. At this hour they are the stock-in-trade of cheap and nasty controversialists and of those strange couples with damaged reputations and police-court records who wander over the surface of our planet earning a dishonest and dishonourable livelihood by pandering to a certain taste for the prurient and the obscene. Catholics can and ought to sympathise with people of any creed who are made the butt of foul and monstrous calumnies. In the days when the Church was in the Catacombs, pagans accused the early Christians of blood-guiltiness in connection with their

Carlyle wrote in his Journal in 1831 that it is a ' vain hope to make people happy by politics.' The saying is, we fancy, even truer of the politicians themselves than of the

worship. It is a discredit, not to Christianity, but to many who bear the Christian name, that for several centuries past a blood accusation or charge of ritual murder has been laid against the J#wish people. The charge never for a momAt stood the test of investigation. It died and was buried in dishonour. But in periods of social and political ferment it was exhumed and hawked about to poison the wholesome atmosphere with its foetid smell. And thus it happens that a mysterious murder at Polna, in Bohemia, was made the occasion of resurrecting the old calumny. There was an antiSemite fury abroad. The leaders of the foolish crusade would not let so fair an opportunity pass. And hence the killing of a youth in Polna was turned into a charge of ritual murder against the authorities of the Jewish Church.

Some time ago we dealt editorially with the squalid story of this strange and long-lived calumny against a people who, whatever their shortcomings, do not lie open to the charge of having persecuted Christian people nor imbrued their hands in their blood. By a strange error, there are some who fancy that the Catholic Church has given a sort of sanction to the ' blood accusation ' by authorising the cult of Simon of Trient, who is alleged to have been ritually murdered by Jews. The story was carefully investigated by Pope Sixtus IV. As a result, this Pontiff emphatically forbade the cult of the boy, in a rescript to the Bishop of Ventimiglia. Many other Popes have likewise marked their strong disapprobation of this calumny against our Jewish forefathers in the true faith. Papal rescripts against it were issued by Pope Gregory IX., who declared that in doing so he was following the example of his predecessors in the Holy See. Other Papal documents condemning the charge of ritual murder were published to the world by one each of those Popes who bore the names of Eugenius, Alexander, Clement, Celestine, and Innocent. Another Pope, besides denouncing the stoi a calumny, ordered all who were in prison on such a charge to be at once set free.

The calumny arising out of the Polna tragedy has been publicly denounced by Father Andreas Csori in Buda-Pesth ; by the Jnristischen Blatter, an Austrian law-journal which is contributed to by many leading barristers of the Empire ; by the Congress of Orientalists at Rome, in their session of October 10 ; and by many others. All through Austria great meetings of Jews have been held to protest against the story of the ritual murder. The most notable and impressive utterance on the subject was, undoubtedly, that of Chief Rabbi Dr. Giidemann ata massmeetingof his co-religionists in Vienna. The Jewish Chronicle of October 13 thus reports a portion of his great speech on the occasion : ' A thrill passed through the audience when, with uplifted hand, the Chief Rabbi impressively exclaimed : " Shall I swear that there is not the slightest grain of truth in the blood accusation ? Well, then ! I can affirm by the mobt sacred of oaths, befoce God and all the world, that in our religious writings I cannot find the least justification for the charge that the Jews, or any Jewish sect, or any individual Jews have ever used or still use Christian blood, human blood, for ritual purposes, and that I have never heard of any Jew, either in the past or in the present, who, by any act of his, gave just ground for this accusation.'"