The New Zealand TABLET THURSDAY, JUNE 25, 1903. COUNTING THE COST

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXI, Issue 26, 25 June 1903, Page 17

The New Zealand TABLET

THURSDAY, JUNE 25, 1903. COUNTING THE COST

* To promote the cause of Religion and Justice by the ivat/& of Truth and Peace.' Leo XIII. to the N.Z. Tablet.

—^ — HE world is a great university, and nations, like individuals, are ever at school. But some of them are dullards and some too intent upon chasing political rainbows to make much progress in true knowledge. The lessons of hisi. Tory are, for instance, plainly lost upon lodgeridden France, whose stunted politicians are in V the full fury of a war upon the Church and upon some of the natural rights of man that were respected even amidst the whirl and storm of the great Revolution — which the poet Samuel Rogers likened to the irruption of the Goths. The suppression of the monastic and teaching Orders is no new expedient in history. France's 'crossChannel neighbor, England, tried it, and with disastrous results, in the reigns of Henry VIII. and the hixth Edward. Henry succeeded to a well-filled national treasury, piled up high, by the thrifty management of his careful father, on the contributions of the prosperous and contented England of the day. But the accumulated funds flowed from his hands iv monumental extravagance at home and in foolish expeditions abroad in fruitless quest of military fame. ' Rather than miss any part of his will,' said his Minister, "Wolsey, of him, 'he will endanger one-half of his kingdom.' The wasteful man of many wives endangered and impoverished it all. He giound the faces of the people with taxation to minister to his vanity and ostentation. When this source of revenue was exhausted — after his rupture with Horne — he devoured the patrimony of the poor — 3219 religious houses, with the considerable annual income, for the time, of £161,000. Practically the whole of that great capital and revenue was (sa}S a Protestant writer) 'granted to c >vi tiers and favorites, sold at nominal prices, or gambled away by the king and his satellites.' In four years the gains from the plundered monasteries and the stripped and ruined shiines had melted from Henry's hands aud he was again in financial t-tiaits. He next debased the currency and produced something like a famine in the land. One other method of plundering the industrial classes still lay open to him — the confiscation or the lands of the guilds or or trades-unions of the middle ages, lie did not live to see this through, but it was ruthle-sly carried out in the reign of his puny son an i successor, ti)\\ aud VI. The monasteries and the guilds had stood between the poor and want. The confiscation of their property was a fatal blow to the English fiinm r, laboier, and aruznn. 'Henry VIII. 's reign,' says the I'rotesiant writer Gibbins, ' witnes-ed the rise of pauperism in a country wh oh h.id been a few years previously in a state of considerable mat rial comfoit.' Ihe erstwhile independent 1 nghsh l.ibi rer tas-ted the bitterness of legal and actual slavery; nml the curse of pauperism is the evil legacy which the gie.it pi luge of Henry VIII. and Edward VI. has lefi to the peopk of Great Britain to this day. Italy has, within less than forty years, run a similar course. And France will piobably be no exception to what

we may regard as the general experience, that a measure of national calamity follows an act of national robbery of the poor. It has been estimated that the suppression and plunder of the religious Orders in France would bring into the coffers of the State some 80,000,000 francs (about £1,200,000) a year. But it would throw upon the Government an annual expenditure of some 270,000,000 francs (about £10,800,0u0) for allowances to aged and infirm 'suppressed' monks and nuns, for (he support of 110,000 old and sick poor, 60,000 orphan*, 12,000 penitent women, and 68,000 lunatics, blind, cripples, and deaf-and-dumb who have, up to the present, been maintained in comfort by the unrewarded toil and loving care of the religious Orders and the free gifts of the charitable public of France. In addition to this, the country (as stated in our issue of lasb week) will be put to the expense of £1 ,080,040 for the erection 2,257 new schools and £328,128 a year for the stipends of the new teachers. '1 here is a contagion in looting as well as in small-pox. And the principle of plundering property held by monks and nuns as trustees for the poor may be very eisdy extended to the garnered hoards of private citizens. Writing on this subject, when the Associations Bill was before the French Parliament, the late M. de Blowitz expressed, in the columns of the London * Times,' the fear than, in this respect, the French people may ultimately prove more logical than their rulers. « It is a r most dangerous precedent,' said he. ' Under this confiscation clause there is no logical reason whatever for not confiscating the superfluous wealth of men who use it for their selfish advantage to the deprivation of the less fortunate.' French legislators have evidently not counted the cost of this fierce war of repression and spoliation against religion. The country which they misrule so grievously may, like Italy and England, soon know the full meaning of the word pauperism. We know that individual nations may fall away from the faith. But the Church herself is indefectible* And the saying attributed to the persecutor Diocletian may be aptly applied to his puny modern counterpart, ' M. Combes : 'The more I seek to blot out the name of Christ, the more legible it becomes.'