Some Failures.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXIX, Issue 1, 3 January 1901, Page 16

Some Failures.

We are not of the number of those who sound the loud timbrel in indiscriminate worship of the nineteenth century at th.3 expense of the centuries that have preceded it. 4 Praise undeserved,' says Pope, 'is satire in disguise.' The vanished century has its evil aspect as well as its bright Bide ; its points of retrogression towards pagan ideals as well as its advance towards the higher things that constitute real progress. Side by side with the real triumphs that graced its course are many political, social, moral, and intellectual failures : the worship of wealth ; the feverish hurry and rush of life ; the simultaneous increase of millionaires and of paupers in England and the United States ; the curse of militarism and the rule of * the man on horseback ' ; the advance of socialistic anarchism ; the spread and dangerous activities of secret societies ; political crimes of the first magnitude, such as the spoliation of the Temporal States of the Holy See ; the greed of territorial expansion ; the noisy and vehemently dogmatic propaganda of changing pseudo-scientific theories of a materialistic tendency as though they were the proven truths of science ;

and the melancholy increase of insanity, suicide, divorce, and crimes that strike at the root of family life. These failures are blemishes upon the century like patches of lupus on the face of a maiden otherwise fair to see. They are as characteristic of the century as are its successes. The indiscriminate panegyrist sees them not or ignores them. And yet they cannot be passed over in any review of the nineteenth century that lays claim to impartiality.