The New Zealand Tablet. Fiat Justitia. THURSDAY, JANUARY 4, 1900. SOME AMERICAN BASHI-BAZOUKS.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXVIII, Issue 1, 4 January 1900, Page 17

The New Zealand Tablet. Fiat Justitia. THURSDAY, JANUARY 4, 1900. SOME AMERICAN BASHI-BAZOUKS.

+. HE pagan Greeks held in respect the temples of their gods. Some of these they kept bo sacred from profane association that even the offloers of the law were forbidden to enter them in pursuit of criminals who had sought refuge . within their portals. A vastly higher sanctity of use and association clings to the temples of the True God. Over twelve hundred years ago, in every Christian land, they became what the oities of refuge were under the Old Dispensation : they protected the unoffending fugitive from the malice of even his most powerful enemies ; they sheltered the hunted criminal until he could compound for his offence, or until that fury had passed which stands in the way of fair trial, and which even in our day so often breaks out in private vengeance or in the

savage scenes of lynch-law. This privilege of sanctuary was part of the common law of England in the Catholic days of old. Even after the Reformation one of its beneficent provisions remained on the statute-books till the twenty-first rear of the reign of James I. — in 1623. With Catholic and Protestant alike the privilege of sanctuary was less the outgrowth of social conditions than of respect, or the tradition of respect, for the sanctity of those sacred precincts which were consecrated to the Prince of Peace, and the use and purpose of which were even more foreign to the din of arms and the noise of litigation than was the trade of the moneychanger to the Temple of Jerusalem. This respect for the house of God among Christian peoples has generally stood the rude test even of war. When it failed here or there, its break-down was due to one or more of three causes : the stern demands of military necessity ; such a lack of proper discipline as turns soldiers into mere armed and uniformed ruffians ; the unchecked play of racial or religious passion such as found vent in the Thirty Years' War, the Huguenot campaigns in Normandy, the Cromwellian wars in Ireland, the great Revolution in France, and the atrocities of the Irish Orange yeomanry in the ' dark and evil days ' of the insurrection of 1798.

When the necessities of war demand the occupation of churches, the tradition of military usage favours turning them into hospitals or devoting them to some other use as little as possible inconsistent with their purpose and character. Protestant and Catholic alike were horrified in Dublin when Cromwell, without any plea of necessity, but in mere despite and contempt, stabled the chargers of his Ironsides under the vaulted roof of St. Patrick's Cathedral. We do not contend for the absolute and perpetual inviolability of church buildings. Events have occurred, and may occur again, which justify the occupation, defence, shelling, storming, or even destruction of a church. Thus, the presence of a post of observation on the ' platform ' of Strassburg Cathedral during the siege of the city in IS7O led to the shelling of that noble fane. And — apart from a disobedience of orders — the occupation and gallant defence of the church Le Bourget during the siege of Paris form another incident of war which, in the eyes of every churchman, justified the attack upon it by sapper and rifle-man and the blowing-in of its doors with field artillery. But it is quite another thing when professing Christian soldiers plunder the sacred vessels, relics, vestments, and other valuable furnishing 3of our churches. Such sacrilegious .robbery has, on a vast scale, disgraced the operations of the United States troops in the Philippines. Such conduct violates both the letter and the spirit of international law. It represents a form of military thievery which, we had hoped, went out with the wild days of the Peninsular campaigns. The Irish memories of the insurrection of 1798 take their colour and character not from the generally good character of the English regiments that were sent to quell it, but to the unspeakable savagery and lust of the Orange Yeomanry and the Hessian mercenaries and the Ancient Britons. In like manner, the Filipino traditions of the present war will not be created by the thousands of honourable American officers and men who are associated with the ill-starred military blundering that has been going on for the past twelve months in those fair eastern islands. No. This miserable campaign will be burned into the Filipino memory by those American Bashi-Bazouks who — by their own confession — have wantonly murdered women and children in cold blood, outraged the sanctity of so many homes, slain unarmed and unresisting prisoners of war, and sacrilegiously plundered churches and shrines in every part of the islands into which they have succeeded in penetrating.

The charges of wholesale church-looting in the Philippines have been before the public for some time. They were denied, half-denied, half-admitted. The question has been discussed even in New Zealand. One of our great dailies recently put into the mouth of Cardinal Gibbons a contradiction of the charge which he had long before solemnly repudiated. But denial is now no longer possible. Thousands of returning troops have landed at San Francisco with vast quantities of church loot in their possession. There was no shame-faced concealment of the plunder. On the contrary, it was openly and vaingloriously displayed in

the camp at Presidio, and many of the military thieves boasted of their exploits in church desecration as if they had thereby, like old Fabius Cunctator, deserved well of the Republic. Officers and rank-and-file alike — from the general to the drummer-boy — are involved in the sacrilegious robbery. Hundreds of eye-witnesses — including the representatives of secular papers — have seen, examined, and appraised the articles stolen from the Philippine churches. Long lists have been published in Donahoe's Magazine, Drake's Magazine, and in scores of daily aud weekly papers, containing the full names, regiments, companies, etc., of the military thieves — both regulars and volunteers — and details of the nature of the church loot in their possession. The black list comprises the Oregon regiment, the Twenty-third infantry, the Thirteenth Minnesotas, the First Montanas, the Tenth Pennsylvanias, the First Idahos, the First South Dakotas, the First North Dakotahs, the Colorados, the First Washingtons, and many besides. It would seem as if few regiments were quite guiltless of this form of sacrilege. Their plunder included v hundreds of relics ' ; sanctuary lamps, some of them of enormous value ; costly crucifixes in great number and variety (one of them was offered for sale to Cardinal Gibbons) ; altar and other lace of exquisite finish and of great value ; ecclesiastical vestments of all kinds, some of them ' studded with precious jewels ' — one stole was valued at £100 ; paintings, miniatures, censers, chalices, pyxes, ciboriums, altar stones, gold lace, and other articles. Evidence was given to the visitors to the Presidio confirming the statements previously made in soldiers' letters that, in the work of church-looting, statuary was smashed, tabernacles desecrated, church furniture wantonly destroyed, pictures defaced, and many of the scenes of the Huguenot devastation of Rouen Cathedral reproduced.

As we have already hinted, many of the church-robbers gloried in their exploits and only regretted their inability to carry away more of the sacred articles with them. ' What harm is there,' said Private H. F. Thompson of the Thirteenth Minnesota Regiment, 'in taking these church furnishings !- I'd just as lief sanction and participate in divesting a Catholic church of its articles and forms of idolatry as assist in the burning of a statue erected by the Chinese to their god, Confucius !' Private Abe J. Ralston, of the First Montanas, considered such articles 'the most appropriate souvenirs of the war.' Private Frank Ellis, of the Tenth Pennsylvanias, thought the looting rare fun. He had in his possession, on landing, a bit of altar lace valued at £40, stolen from one of the churches in Manila. ' I had a merry time the day I took that lace,' he said, discussing the relic. ' The padres had to skip to save their lives and we boys took care of their bright ornaments for them. lam going to take this lace home as a present to my sister, aud maybe she won't look swell when she has a dress decorated with it.' Private Keoms, of the First Idahos, glories in his £100 jewelled stole and declared to a member of the Examiner staff : ' As I see nothing wrong in looting a house of idolatry, I take pride in showing this thing to all my friends.' The same pressman says of the Colorado regiment : ' Their depredations among the churches in the Philippines are known to nearly every citizen of San Francisco. From General McCoy to Private Flutow every member in the regiment has some relic from a Catholic churcL in the Philippines.' Flutow brought away ' one of the most valuable relics taken from the Manila convents.' * This,' said he, 'is the only souvenir I have of the war. Although I had the same opportunity as the other men of procuring more valuable church relics, I neglected to do so. lam sorry that I did not pay more attention to the things when I went with the boys* to the churches on a looting expedition, but my whole attention was devoted to breaking down the d n statues and idols.' This church-thief belongs to a regiment which is composed almost exclusively of members of the A.P.A. — the Orange Order of the United States. A correspondent of the Citizen who visited the camp at the Presidio declared that this precious set of armed ruffians ' easily held the first place as church and home looters,' and that they ' had sufficient loot in their possession to stock a large store.' The trade in church plunder is thus referred to in a telegram to an Eastern paper in our possession :—: —

San Francisco, Cal., November 16. — The members of the Roman Catholic clergy in this city have discovered that the pawnshops here are literally packed with clerical vestments and other relics from

the Manila churches, which were brought buck by the returning volunteers. They were sold by the soldiers at ridiculously low prices, but are now bringing fancy figures, as collectors are eager to get them. A score or more shops were visited by priests, and in all a number of sacred relics were found. The Chicago Record and other papers contain fuller messages, too lengthy to quote. In the course of a scathing comment on this crying military scandal, the New York. Times says :—: — The thing is simply awful, and not susceptible of any apology. And if there be one American citizen who holds it to be of no account, or of little, that American citizen is to be pitied, but also he is to be greatly blamed. The thing is of the most enormous political significance. It is, through and through, a sickening^story of bigotry and greed. And on top of it all comes the howl from the hysterical portion of the Protestant pulpit to have this miserable looting of homes and convents and ' mass-houses ' followed up by the complete confiscation of all the property of the Catholic Church in the Philippines !

Uncle Sara's army has found in the Philippines the Majuba Hill of its military renown and — worse still — a serious blot upon its corporate honour. The muddling of the Crimea has been out-muddled in these fair islands. To the temperate natives of the Philippines the new policy of expansion has brought ship-loads of fiery drinks ; on a pure people it has let loose a tide of western blackguardism ; it has familiarised the patient Filipino with the sight of a savage disregard for the rights of property, the dearness of human life, the sanctity of the domestic hearth ; and it has given him some reason to fear that under the Stars and Stripes, the Filipino will fare no better or little better than the Red Man, and that of the two masters who contended for him the less objectionable is tha Spaniard, who, whatever his faults, at least christianised the islanders, raised them to a relatively high state of civilisation, left scarcely an illiterate among them, and made them, in the words of a non-Catholic writer, ' the happiest people on earth.'