Current Topics.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXIX, Issue 9, 28 February 1901, Page 1

Current Topics.

The question of Juvenile Branches was turned over and over and examined from various points of view on last Sunday at the Communion breakfast of the Hibernian Society in Dunedin. Such branches are in operation in Auckland and Wellington. They deserve the flattery of more widespread imitation, (i) because they furnish the best recruiting ground for our only Catholic Society; and (2) because they offer a partial solution of the aching difficulty of dealing with the dangers surrounding our boys who, at the close of their schooldays, are — as Cardinal Manning puts it — • cast headlong into the vortex of modern life, with no other stay and security than the half-digested instruction they have received in early childhood.' During their schooldays we cram and stuff them like Strassburg geese. But at or about their thirteenth year we suddenly drop them. We turn them adrift to shift for themselves during the most dangerous and impressionable period of human existence, and — in Carlyle's words — ' when the hungry young look up to their spiritual nurses for food, they are bidden to eat the east wind.' At this plastic period of their lives their minds and hearts can readily be fashioned after the right model. It would te a task of far greater difficulty to reform them at a later age.

This idea is feelingly, but despairingly, expressed by the grown-up Tilda in the fascinating story, No. 5, John Street. Tilda was greatly neglected in her younger days, and this is what she says : ' I warn't made right at the start, I was a bit o' slop work. So was Covey. That's wy we both got to 'ang together on the same peg. That's jest what's the matter with all on us in John street. We can't do no good with ourselves now. We want pickin' all to pieces, and if you begin that you'll only tear the stuff. Give the young uns a chance in their cradles, an' let the old uns die off ; then you'll see a change. All these missions are trying to make us mealy-mouthed. It makes yer larf like, to 'ear us talkin* and to see our funny wyze. But some time you'll see us jest as we are. Then you'll git the 'ump, an' cuss the dye you tried to mike a lidy out of a fightin' flower-gal. "Oh, wy didn't yer ketch me when I was a kid ? " '

Yes. If we are to hold our youths, we must ' ketch 'em when they're kids.' And if the Hibernian Society helps in the good work, it has established a fresh claim upon the support and encouragement of parents and priests.

QUACKS AND QUACKERY.

Towards the close of last week a self-styled • cancer specialist ' was mulcted in Dunedin in the handsome fine of £50 for illegally using the title of c Doctor.' The penalty was an exemplary one. But unfortunately ' The Medical Practitioners Act, 1869,' does not reach the root of the crying evil of quacks and quackery. It catches an incautious irregular practitioner here and there and at painfully long intervals. But it does nothing to prevent the wholesale and heartless frauds that are being perpetrated on the luckless

A BOYS' BRIGADE.

public from New Year's Day to St. Sylvester's by a horde of what we may term in Carlyle's phrase, 'brass-faced, vociferous, voracious ' quacks who trade under the various titles of ' professors,' ' psychomants,' ' trance-mediums,' ' astro-mathemati-cians,' ' hypnotic healers,' ' mystic healers/ and heaven knows what besides. Your malades imaginaires, and a big section of the public that have got enlarged livers, rheumatic knee-joints, phthisical lungs, or tic-douloureux are, in the matter of healers and cure-alls, mere overgrown children, credulous, evergreen with verdant hope, and of their gobemoucherie there is no end. In the words of Hudibras : Some with a noise and greasy light Are snapped, as men catch larks at night. . . Some with med'oine and receipt Are drawn to nibble at the bait. * ♦ * Our paternal Government prosecutes the retail depredations of the miserable fortune-teller. It might legitimately afford more strenuous protection to the half-fledged public against those rapacious harpies of the quack fraternity, with their gaudy rings, their oily and (usuall}') ungrammatical tongues, their handfuls of dried ' yarbs,' their phials of corrosive sublimate, their non-committal pills, their copious shirtfronts, their double dose of low cunning, and their brazen affectation of supernal knowledge, which is intended to mask a baptismal innocence of all acquaintance with even the elements of anatomy, physiology, oi therapeutics. Their working creed is well summed up in the Biglow Papers '.— In short, I firmly dv believe In Humbug generally, Fer it's a thing thet I perceive To hey a solid vally ; This heth my faithful shepherd been, In pastura sweet heth led me, An' this'll keep the people green To feed ez they hey fed me. * • * When you go a-mountaineering in Switzerland there is always the off-chance that the rope which bears you may break or fray over the jagged edge of a precipice, or that you may fall into the depths of a dark crevasse through the thin and treacherous coating of frozen snow which covers it. In either event your insurance policy soon comes due. But it does not matter so much to the guide. He has taken the precaution to make you pay in advance, and the money is in the hands of his careful frau in the valley far below. The quack doctor acts in a similar way. He and all unregistered ' medical ' practitioners are debarred by law from enforcing payment of fees : the man in the street would do well to remember this. But this modicum of protection to the silly section of the public is usually rendered inoperative by the medical fraud almost invariably stipulating for, and receiving, his fees in advance. The law is much more far-reaching in France, where, less than two years ago, a notorious ' mystic healer ' who had set all Paris agog was heavily fined for the elastic crime of ' imposing on the credulous.' In one of the States of the Australian Commonwealth — we cannot at this moment remember whether it is Victoria or New South Wales — the Postmaster- General has for some time past refused the use of post-office | boxes to self-styled ' medical men ' who have become ! objects of suspicion. He has, moreover, claimed and

exercised the right of opening letters addressed to them, and has thus prevented some members of a fraudulent class from abusing a State Department to prey upon the ignorant by cunningly-worded advertisements and circulars, and in many instances following up the first extraction of abnormal fees by merciless terrorism, blackmail, and extortion. 'In all baseness and imposture,' says Kinglake in his Eotlien, ' there is a coarse, vulgar spirit which, however artfully concealed for the time, must sooner or later show itself.' Mcd'cil impo«;tnr»» m^kps a gross display of itself in its rank self-laudation. And the newspaper Press deserves censure for the manner in which it aids and r^bets medical frauds by publishing their vulgar and clamorous advertisements, and thus making itself the sounding board of a whole school of heartless impostors and charlatans.

SOME 'CANCER CURES.'

Nowadays the quack finds his victims almost exclusively among the masses. But there was a time when any plausible healer of human ills could impose his mighty pretensions on the dwellers in high places. Sir Kenelm Digby, for instance (1603-1665), stirred all the drawing-rooms of the English nobility and gentry of his day with his absurd 'sympathetic powder.' In the words of Charles Lamb, he was ' none of your hesitating half story-tellers, but a hearty, thorough-paced liar.' The British Parliament was so grealty impressed with the value of ' Stephens's Specific ' — an old-time nostrum that was supposed to be, among its other marvellous virtues, a remedy for cancer — that it voted .£SOOO for the purchase of the secret of its composition. The sale was duly effected. Mrs. Stephens got the money stowed away in the unexplorable depths of her feminine pockets. Then she handed over the recipe for which the expectant world was waiting with craned neck and on eager tip-toe. It was published in the next issue of the London Gazette. But when the fickle public read the list of ingredients they suddenly lost all interest in ' Stephens's Specific' The ingredients were as follow : Egg-shells, snail-shells (with the snails in them) — all calcined, hips and haws, swine-cress, and several other vegetables — all burned ! Plunkett's ' great Irish cure for cancer ' was sold by him in London after he had made a fortune by it, chiefly at the expense of the English gentry and moneyed classes. In six years the purchaser — one Richard Grey — had amassed by its sale as much money a- satisfied his utmost ambition. He then published its ingredients, for the public benefit, in Lloyd's Evening Post. The recipe is worth reproducing, if only for the reason that it is just as good — or as bad — as that of any cancer-curer between Auckland and the Bluff ; ' Crow's-foot which grows on low ground, one handful ; dog-fennel, three sprigs, two to be well pounded ; crude brimstone, three thimblefuls ; white arsenic, the same qu intity. All to be incorporated well in a mortar, then made into small balls the size of nutmegs, and dried in the

Times have changed and many things have changed with them. But the quack — medical, social, and political — and the dupe we have always with us. And ' quack and dupe,' as Carlyle reminds us in his Past and Present, ' are upper and under side of the selfsame substance ; convertible personages. Turn up your dupe into the proper fostering element, and he himself can become a quack. There is in him the due prurient insincerity, open voracity for profit, and closed sense for truth, whereof quacks too, in all their kinds, are made.'

THE PASSING OF ' COLD STEEL.'

The long butcher's knife called a sword has been from the world's infancy the emblem of war and of the last resort of brute energy j n man. The hard-hitting old chieftain in Ossian called to his bard : Sing me a song — a so" gr With a eword in every line. In later days the bayonet has shared with the sword the place of a war-emblem in a modest and apologetic way — as Tom Pinch shared the seat of a country cart after his departure from the office of Pecksniff. We hear, for instance, of the throne of the Third Napoleon being supported on bayonets; and Barbaroux, in refusing military protection in 1793, declared : ' I require no bayonets to defend the liberty of my thoughts.' But the tired pressman must soon cast about for fresh figures of speech to apply to the art of war. The AngloBoer campaign may be said to have closed the era of the anne blanche or cold steel. Sword, bayonet, and the gay lance with its flying pennon have had their day and are now doomed to go. Almost from the beginning of the South Alrican war the sword was discarded by British officers. Once, by a fluke, the lance found its way into action and did some irregular ' pig-sticking ' among sundry luckless Boers who had thrown down arms and asked for quarter. In the early days of the struggle gushing war-correspondents represented the Republican farmer-soldiers as being scared out of their five sen?es at the mere sight of a fixed bayonet. But we know now that so far as actual service in battle was concerned the bayonet was about as useless to Thomas Atkins, Esquire, as the sword was

to his commanding officer, and that it might as advantageously have been left in store at Woolwich or sold as old iron or consigned as a curiosity to provincial museums.

Time was — as in the Peninsular War — when the bayonet was the last and most convincing argument in battle. In infantry encounters the opposing forces marched boldly up to within eighty or a hundred yards of each other, exchanged a volley or two by way of preliminary greeting, then rushed lo^tl'iiei and pei Totaled euu'ti ollm lv U.c \j< of their respective abilities with the long and lerocious-looking triangular bayonet that was fashionable in those days. me stronger paily, or those who had the greater gluttony for punishment, remained the victors when the wild but brief melee was over. The weaker side gave way, took gallantly fo its heels, was saluted with two or three farewell volleys, and escaped in a leisurely sort of way — unless the cavalry came thundering along; and then there was red havoc along the line of retreat. But nowadays battles are fought at long range. And the rapidity and intensity of modern rifle and artillery fire have closed for ever the period when the glittering lines of bayonets were, so to speak, the fringe on the drop-scene of the battlefield. In the English translation of his Modern Weapons and Modern War Bloch says of present day conditions : ' Before an attack with the bayonet can be made, a zone of murderous fire has first to be passed. Retreat after a repulsed attack upon a fortified position will be accomplished only after the loss of more than half the attacking force. At such short ranges as will be found in bayonet attacks almost every rifle bullet will disable one soldier, and often more than one. On a smokeless battlefield the results of such an overthrow will be visible to all. At such close ranges the present covered bullet will penetrate the cranium ; but in other parts of the body will have a shattering and tearing effect.'

The casualties from cold steel have been quite insignificant in wars that have been waged with modern weapons of precision. ' Fisher,' says Bloch, ' estimates the proportion of wounds inflicted by cold steel in the war of 1866 in the Austrian army at four per cent., and in the Prussian army at five per cent., of all wounds. In the war of 1870-71 the proportion of wounds caused by cold steel in the German army was one per cent. In the Russo-Turkish war the percentage of wounds inflicted by cold steel was 2 - 5 per cent, in the Russian army of the Danube. The percentage of deaths caused by cold steel is also very inconsiderable. In the last Russo-Turkish war, of the number killed in the army of the Danube only 53 per cent. of deaths were caused by cold steel, and in the army of the Caucasus barely one per cent.' At close quarters even the stump)', dagger-like bayonet that is used as an appendix to the Lee-Metfurd rifle is an ugly-looking probe to fall upon. But soldiers don't get to particularly close quarters with the enemy nowadays. They squat as small as possible behind rocks or field-works halt a mile to a mile or so apart, with about half an inch of scalp appearing above the shelter-line, and squirt hypodermic injections of lead at each other. The ambulance doctor does the probing — if any — afterwards.

BACK TO THE FOLD.

A short time ago the New York Observer, a non-Catholic religious paper, published an article on the state of the Protestant Churches in Germany. The writer displays a thinlyveiled animus against ' Romanism.' But he describes the Catholic Church in the German Federation as being more active and zealous than ever in the work of making converts. Referring to Saxony — which was for so long a period the greatest stronghold of the Reformed creed — he says : ' There is perhaps one dark spot in the outlook — in Saxony. Here in the country where Luther was born, and where his wonderful Reformation work was begun, there is a singular tendency among the members of the oldest aristocratic families to join the Church of Rome. Whole families have gone over to Rome, families bearing names illustrious in the history of the Reformation. The reason is probably not far to seek. The royal house is zealously Catholic, and the King, now an aged man and no longer in the prime of mental vigor, shows a distinct inclination to fill all offices around his person and wherever his influence extends, with memhers of the Roman community. A near relative of the King's, Prince Max of Saxony, was recently consecrated a priest of the Catholic Church. This young man's influence among the Saxon nobles, especially among the ladies, is enormous, and it is probably these Royal and Court intrigues which are responsible tor many of the recent couversions. German Protestant associations are much concerned at the feebleness of the Saxon nobles, and on more than one occasion recently earnest appeals have been addressed to them conjuring them not to forget the faith of their forefathers, and to remain true in the principles of the evangelical faith.'

Tasaioura, the wonderful cough remedy — sold by all chemists and grocers. — mm * M