Current Topics

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXVIII, Issue 49, 6 December 1900, Page 1

Current Topics

AT HOME AND ABROAD.

« KEYHOLE CATHOLICS. 1

' The same Catholics/ says the S.H. Review, ' who fight for front seats at some theatrical show are quite content to just barely enter within the doors of the church to hear Mass. Nay, they are sometimes content with remaining outside. The Catholic Universe calls them " keyhole Catholics," a mighty good name for them, and the editor says they rarely amount to much. " Always the last in and the first out," says he, " they often regard the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass as an ordeal to be avoided. If they would get up nearer to the altar and the priest, the experiment might reveal beauties in our divine faith that they have little dreamed of. Move up, gentlemen, and take your religion at short range." '

THE GOVERNOR OF FIJI.

The Governor of Fiji, Sir G. T.M. O'Brien, K.C.M.G. — we give him his whole vanguard and rearguard of verbal prefixes and suffixes — has been mightily flailed and blankettossed by a section of the New Zealand Press. The head and front of Sir G.T. M.'s offending consisted of remarks made by him in opposition to federation with New Zealand, in the course of an address delivered to a mixed gathering of brown men and whites at the opening of a hospital at Wainibokasi. Briefly, Fiji's Governor told his hearers that the New Zealanders had their own interests chiefly in their minds' eye in proposing this federation ; that ' white men have always taken the land from colored owners '; that only ' a fragment ' of the land of New Zealand has been left to its original owners ; and that, in the event of the proposed federation coming to pass, the same fate might ultimately befall the native land-owners of Fiji. He advised the dusky portion of his audience to ' keep very quiet and to give no sort of trouble,' whatever the issue of the federation movement might be. His advice was timely. His statements of historical facts are scarcely disputable. His prophecy is of highly probable fulfilment.

Now the New Zealand Government has rightly or wrongly set its heart upon having Fiji among its cluster of attendant satellites. And the little speech at Wainibokasi has made it —in ' Mr. Dooley's ' phrase — * mad in iv'ry vein ay its body.' It has reprinted Governor O'Brien's speech and distributed it all over the Colony, without note or comment : its anger too full for utterance. Some of the newspapers cudgel the ruler of Fiji for having, in his capacity of Governor of a colony, dared to bray politics at all. But the good souls forget that Fiji is a Crown colony, that the Governor is an active and actual ruler, that he is President of the Legislative Council, and takes, and is entitled to take, as active a part in the Little Peddlington politics of his tiny dominion as Mr. Seddon does in those of the Greater Peddlington of New Zealand. Others kick Governor O'Brien severely for the alleged sublime folly of his political utterances. Federation with New Zealand would conceivably benefit both Fiji and Moa-land. But we fail to find any conspicuous folly in Sir G. O'Brien's speech. And in any case, why should a politician banished to that lone Pacific isle be deprived of the right to desipere\in loco— to make

PAVITT AND THE BOERS.

a fool of himself on occasion — a right of which bountiful advan* tage is taken among our own Parliamentarians, both in the House and out of it ? 'Long journeys, long lies/ So runs the Spanish proverb. This may account for the conspicuous skill acquired by the Rome and Pretoria correspondents of the London Standard and Daily Mail. Among newspaper correspondents they stand in a circle apart for the skill which they nave acquired in the feat of archery known as drawing the long bow. One of this promising pair cabled to London a story which represented the founder of the Land League as being ' disillusioned' and filled to the chin with disappointment and disgust at the Boer army and its leaders. There was nothing from first to last in his letters to the Dublin Freeman to indicate that his first impressions of Oom Paul and his men had undergone a change, and the Pretoria correspondents' statements were promptly contradicted by him in a letter which appeared in the columns of the Standard. The story, however, was flashed over the cables to the ends of the earth, • • • A revised version of it appeared in last Monday's issue of one of the leading New Zealand daily papers. It practically charges the Irish labor leader with being a fibster and hypocrite. There are corners in the field of politics for which our eyes are not focussed to those of the distinguished Irish politician and writer. But we know that thus far he has never given even his enemies just cause to charge him with either double-dealing or the moral cowardice that rushes for temporary safety behind the shelter of a lie. We have no hesitation in expressing our strong conviction that the imaginative Pretorian has been again seized with a spasm of horror for what Kinglake terms ' profane facts,' and that he has been once more at his old trade of evolving ' news ' out of his inner consciousness. The editor of the Chicago New World claims special knowledge of the inner working of the canard. And he states that the story was ' deliberately concocted to order by the correspondents of the Standard at Pretoria, and then transmitted by the Standard or the Associated Press to the leading papers of this country, for the purpose of discounting in advance the effect of Mr. Davitt's history of the Boer war and its causes on American public opinion.' ' He who serves queens may expect baksheesh.' Thus speaks Darkush in Disraeli's Tancred. The Irish Orange fraternity stipulated — and still stipulate — for baksheesh as a condition previous to service. The upset price which they set upon their strictly and expressly conditional allegiance in A.D. 1800 was a distinctly high one. It was expressed in a Protestant ascendency manifesto which they adopted as the chief plank in their political platform. The term ' Protestant ascendency ' was in the manifesto explained to mean : ' A Protestant king of Ireland ; a Protestant Parliament ; a Protestant hierarchy; Protestant electors and Government; the benches of justice, the army and^ the revenue, through all their branches and details, Protestant ; and this supported by a connection with the Protestant realm of Great Britain.' So long as this strict, searching, and perpetual monopoly of place and power and shekels was assured against Catholics and Dissen-

ters, the fraternity would graciously consent to remain c loyal ' to the Crown. The dream of a perpetual monopoly of power was rudely broken by the agitations for Reform, Catholic Emancipation, and Disestablishment. The pocket-loyalists — as the Protestant historians Molesworth, Killen, and others testify— thereupon became ' absolutely furious,' and rose against the Crown in a state of armed frenzy bordering on open rebellion. ' Every attempt,' says Molesworth, 'made by English statesmen to apply to Ireland the most elementary principles of civil and religious liberty was encountered by these (Orange) societies with bitter hostility and fresh insults on their Catholic compatriots.' • • * The standing boycott of Catholics in Derry and Belfast endured until Parliament was shamed into applying a tardy, grudging, and partial remedy by special Acts passed in 1896. For the rest, discrimination is still exercised against Catholics to a disgraceful extent in the matter of public appointments in the most distressful country. Just before the recent general election the Orange party levelled a charge against the Government that they had endeavored to give to Irish Catholics something like a fair share in the administration of a country of whose population they form three-fourths. The plaint of the brethren became the rallying-cry of their opposition to Mr. Plunkett at the polls. At the census of 1891 the three leading denominations stood numerically as follows :—: — Catholics, 3,549,956 ; Anglicans (Episcopalians), 602,300; Presbyterians, 444,974. Anglicans and Presbyterians taken together were considerably less than a third of the Catholic population of the country. The Attorney- General hotly stigmatised as ' baseless ' and ' shameful ' the Orange accusation that the Government had endeavored to be simply fair to Catholics in its distribution of patronage. The ' shameful accusation ' was disposed of by him in the course of a speech which is instructive as showing the extent to which the old spirit of ascendency is still rampant in Ireland. * ♦ • ♦ No record,' he said, ' was kept of the political or religious opinions of the persons employed in Government posts. He had, however caused inquiries to be made, and the result he had arrived at, which was substantially accurate, he would give. Of the Privy Councillors appointed 10 were Episcopalians, three Presbyterians, two Roman Catholics; Judges of the Supreme Court, two Episcopalians, one Presbyterian, and one Roman Catholic ; County Court Judges, two Episcopalians, one Presbyterian, and one Roman Catholic ; Crown solicitors, five Episcopalians and one Roman Catholic; Resident Magistrates, 10 Episcopalians, one Presbyterian, and three Roman Catholics; Presidents of the Queen's Colleges, two Roman Catholics; Resident Commissioner of the National Board, one Catholic; Commissioners of the Local Government Board, two Episcopalians and one Catholic ; Inspectors of the Local Government Board, five Episcopalians, one Presbyterian, and two Roman Catholics ; auditors of the Local Government Board, five Episcopalians and one Roman Catholic' The case is even more complete, for one of the Catholic appointments to the Queen's Colleges has since been nullified. The list accounts for 67 official appointments. Of the 67 only 15 are Catholics. In other words, while more than three out of four of the population are Catholics, more than three out of four of the appointments made by the Executive of the Country are Protestant. ' Those figures,' said the Attorney- General, 1 showed that these accusations were as baseless as they were shameful, and removed forever and forever all justification — the alleged justification— that was put forward for this opposition to Mr. Plunkett.' * • * But Mr. Plunkett was, nevertheless, packed off into the obscurity of private life, chiefly by the vote of the saffronscarved brethren. They still live on the memory of the good old days of their patron saint, King William, when no Catholic could hold any office, civil or military, under the Crown ; and their ' accredited organ ' in Australia, the Victorian Standard, in its issue of May, 1893 (p. 6), editorially characterised as a ' fatal error ' the Emancipation Act of 1829.

WARRIORS THAT 1-EAR.

' Banjo ' Patterson shares one conspicuous merit with the great war correspondent Archibald Forbes : there is a halo of refreshing candor about his descriptions of some of his experiences in the South African war. He sketches in the comic and paltry, as well as the tragico-heroic, side of this squalid struggle. Inter alia he tells how youthful officers, despite their best resolutions, ' ducked ' when they heard the demoniacal shriek of the first shells that were fired at them with hostile intent. And again, he records how, on one occasion, w+ien Mauser bullets began to play the devil's tattoo about him, he dropped into a friendly hollow in the ground and lay there as flat and motionless as a pancake until the leaden music had ceased to play. ' The Man from Snowy River ' was, we know, gifted with as bulky a stock of native pluck as most men. But fear of death is a natural instinct. The mere possession of it— and a keen sense of the fact of such

possession— are no impeachment of a man's courage, and the acknowledgment of it is a testimony to his sense of truth and honor. It is only your braggart cowards that never admit such an experience as fear : such as Don Adriano de Armado in peace ; Parolles in war ; Bob Acres on occasion ; Falstaff at all times; and (in Sir Philip Sydney's Arcadia) the two poltroons Dametas and Clineas, who protested that they would fight their duel like Hectors, and bragged themselves the most valiant champions in the world — each confiding in the cowardice of the other. Sir Philip Sydney, Sir John Moore, General Wolfe, and Nelson were nerve-bundles of sensibility and of delicate constitution • they probably felt the knee-shaking and the ' sinking ' about the epigastrium that have often been experienced by men who — like the nameless soldier of The Red Badge of Courage — afterwards proved themselves heroes of Homeric mould. And if report be true, Frederick the Great was but a sorry hero in the earliest tussles of the Seven Years' War. • • • In the second volume of Coleridge's Works a distinguished British naval officer tells the following story at his own expense : ' When Sir Alexander [Ball] was Lieutenant Ball, he was the officer whom I accompanied on my first boat expedition, being then a midshipman, and only in my fourteenth year. As we were rowing up to the vessel which we were to attack, amidst a discharge of musketry I was overpowered by fear, my knees trembled under me, and I seemed on the point of fainting away. Lieutenant Ball, who saw the condition I was in, placed himself close beside me, and still keeping his countenance directed towards the enemy, took hola of my hand, and, pressing it in the most friendly manner, said in a low voice : '•' Courage, my dear boy ! Don tbe afraid of yourself ! You will recover in a minute or so. I was just the same when I first went out in this way." Sir, added the officer, it was as if an angel had put a new soul into me. With the feeling that I was not yet dishonored, the whole burden of my agony was removed ; and from that moment I was as fearless and forward as the oldest of the boat's crew, and on our return the lieutenant spoke highly of me to the captain. I am scarcely less convinced ol my own being than that I should have been what I tremble to think of, if, instead of his humane encouragement, he had at that moment scoffed, threatened, or reviled.' Pride, ambition, a sense of honor, the presence of comrades, and finally habit, usually overcome the pressure of vulgar and unromantic ' funk ' on the young soldier in his first encounters with the enemy, when overmastering feeling would tempt him to make a bee-line to the safe side of the first wall or tree or boulder that promises to protect his cuticle from the impact of hostile lead. Men of some name as fighters have run fast and tar from battle. James 11., for instance, 'stoutly ran away ' from the Boyne and easily won the race from there to Dublin. And the Earl of Argyle shifted scenery so fast in his hurry to get away from Munro that he was made the subject of the following sarcastic quatrain, which is preserved in Wishart's History of Montr ose :—: — But thou that time, like many an errant knight, Didst save thyself by virtue of thy flight ; Whence now in great request this adage stands, One pair of legs is worth two pair of hands. • • • ' Bolting ' from the zone of fire is a rather usual incident in war. It is a failing with soldiers of every army. Germans were furious with ' Fighting Phil ' Sheridan because he faithfully described in his Memoirs some panics which he witnessed among the sturdy soldiers of the Fatherland during the campaign of 1870- 1. Fear is credited with sometimes doing braver feats ' than ever courage did in arms.' The English Cervantes says :—: — For men as resolute appear With too much as too little fear ; And when they're ont of hopes of flying, Will ran away from death by dying, Or turn again to stand it oat, And those they fled, like lions, roat. But fear more commonly gives wings to flying heels than steadiness and strength to nervous hands. A large body of German troops— with all the moral advantage of rapid and repeated victories on their side — once bolted pell-mell from the danger-zone in 1870. They swept with them in their mad onset their officers, who swore like the British army in Flanders, and hurried off in their panic-flight the aged Emperor, who tried in vain to induce them to again face the foe. At the battle of Worth the sight of an officer (Futzunde Lascarre) unconsciously leading a charge against them with his head blown off by a round shot, very nearly caused a scare among one of the most gallant of all the Prussian infantry regiments. General von Goben's victorious troops were for a few moments on the quivering verge of a panic at Forbach, in August, 1870, when a solitary French charger galloped in amongst them with the severed and bleeding arm of its lost rider still firmly grasping the reins. And do not the livid pages of La Debdclt give as a fearful insight into the effects, among the French

troops, of those mysterious war panics which sometimes take place among even seasoned old fighters just as unaccountably as stampedes occur among cavalry horses or baggage mules ? • • • We have once before quoted Lord Wolesey upon a kindred subject in the N. Z. Tablet. 'The public little know,' said he, *how often soldiers "cut and run." On one occasion my own men ran from me in sheer panic, leaving me alone. All soldiers run away at times. I believe that the British soldier runs away less than the soldier of any other nation, but he also runs away sometimes. There is a great deal of human nature in soldiers, but the loss from skulking and desertion in the great conscript armies of the Continent attains dimensions of which the English public have no notion.' During the Peninsula War two crack British regiments were once on the march. A false rumor suddenly went like an electric shock through them. They threw down arms, abandoned baggage, and bolted madly in all directions — a mere disorderly mob crazed with blind terror. South Africa had an evil reputation for such unceremonius leave-takings long before the outbreak of the present wretched and long-drawn campaign. At Majuba Hill, for instance, both Boer and Briton felt the cold impact of a simultaneous scare when they stood facing each other at short range. But the Dutchman had the steadier nerve : he pulled himself together sooner and was ' quicker on the draw than Mr. Atkins. That was all. Several small panics occurred during the Zulu War. Some of them were caused by nearsighted or excited sentries mistaking a bush or shrub or chunk of rock for a Zulu. One was brought about by a harmless, necessary cow, browsing the sparse herbage too near the camp. The battle of Isandlana (January 22, 1879) could not have proved such a crowning disaster to the British troops but for the panic which seized the men as Cetewayo's hordes of darkskinned warriors swept down upon them. Another raging scare led to the follies of Ginghilovo, which has been ever since known in military circles by the appropriate name of ' Fort Funk.'

Few living men have seen amidst the battle smoke so many different nationalities engaged in • . . that noble trade That demi-gods and heroes made — Slaughter and knocking on the head, as Mr. Archibald Forbes. He was with the German army in the campaign of 1870-71 ; he saw the red and fiery close of the Commune in Paris; he was on every side of the triangular duel between Carlists, Republicans, and Alfonsists in Spain ; he went through the Servian war in 1876 and the RussoTurkish campaign in the following year ; he witnessed the taming of the hill men in India, and was in the thick of fighting in Afghanistan ; and he went through the laager-making, powder blazing, helpless blundering, and kraal -burning that nave been dignified with the name of ' war ' against the oncedreaded Cetewayo, king of the Zulus. His campaigning experiences have left him somewhat of a sceptic on the subject of military courage. In his Barracks, Bivouacs, and Battles he almost falls plump into the rank military heresy of declaring that a ' naturally ' brave man is almost as rare as a Notornis Mantelli. In fact, it would almost appear from his words that 'there ain't no sich a person.' But perhaps Archibald means by a ' naturally ' brave man one who is merely hard — as some criminals are — or one who is stupidly indifferent to, or stolidly disregardful of, life, like some Eastern fatalists ? •My own belief,' says he, • founded on some experience of divers nationalities in war-time, is that most men are naturally cowards. I have the fullest belief in the force of the colonel's retort to the major. " Colonel," said the major, in a hot fire, " you are afraid. I see you tremble." " Yes, sir," replied the colonel, " and if you were as afraid as I am, you would run away." I do think,' continues Forbes, ' three out of four men would run away if they dared. There are, doubtless, some men whom nature has constituted so obtuse as not to know fear, and who, therefore, deserve no credit for their courage ; and there are others with nerves so strong as to crush down the rising " funk." The madness of blood does get into men's heads, no doubt. . . But most men are like the colonel of the dialogue — they display bravery because in the presence of their comrades they are too great cowards to evince poltroonery.'