Current Topics

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXII, Issue 34, 25 August 1904, Page 1

Current Topics

A Correction In our last issue (p. 2) the statement that the Quichua Indians (Bolivia) are ' devout Uatiholi.cs ' was credited tio' Chambers' Encyclopaedia' (Ed. 1891). Ihc edition actually quoted was the latest, that of 1901. The Catholic Congress Preparations for t,he Second Australasian Catholic Congress are already far advanced, and there is e\ery indication that the event will be one of the most memorable in the history of the Church under the Southern Cross. • The Congress opens on Sunday, October 23, and closes on the following Sunday, October 30. The various New Zealand Shipping Companies offer a reduction of ten per cent, to persons travelling to attend the Congress, and those of them who make use of the NewZealand Government Railways on their way to the various ports of departure will receive the following loti cession : first-class holiday excursion tickets at two pence per mile, mileage being counted one way only. In the case of both steamboat and railway travelling, the concessions will be granted on presentation of vouchers signed by any one of the four Diocesan Secretaries : namely, the Very Rev. P. Power (Ilawera), for the Archdiocese of Wellington ; the Right Rev. Monsignor O'Reilly (Thames), for the Diocese of Auckland , the Very Rev. Dean Folev (Temuka), for the Diocese of Christchurch ; and the Rev. IT. W. Cleary (Duncd-n), lor the Diocese of Dunedin. Membership (for which the fee is 10s 6d) entitles to all the privileges of the Congress and to a copy of the splendid memorial volume which will be issued in connection therewith.

Prohibition Here is a passage from Commissioner Dinnie's recently issued annual report on the Police Force : ' The effect of prohibition as regards drunkenness in public places within the areas in which the no-license vole obtained has been marked, a considerable reduction in the number of arrests for that offence having resulted, and less complaints having been received of street brawls or annoyance caused by drunken persons. On the other hand, it is evident that liquor has h%en introduced into private houses where it did not previously exist, and a considerable amount of sly grog-drinkin° is indulged in which is difficult to detect, and more difficult to prove, ■because of the amount of perjury committed. Travellers also complain of a change for tho worse experi-

onced in the comfort and •cleanliness of hotels since nolicense obtained.'

On June 21, 1595— over three hundred and nine years ago— there "began a historic lawsuit before a Bavarian court. The parties to it were the market community of Burgmn and the Lords oE Thungijnm. The Burginn people sued the noble Lord for a sum of two million marks, xJie value of a forest of magnificent oaks and beeches, claimed by them as their property, but which the blueblooded defendant had (it was asserted) ' benevolently, assimilated.' The case was like that of Jarndyce v. Jarndyce long drawn out. Tt hummed and grumbled wearily on year after year. Death thinned the ranks of the litigants on both sides, but others stepped into their uhoes, and in 180G, when we last heard of it, the threadbare and "venerable suit was again before a Bavarian court. The case, prohibition v. non-prohibi-tion, promises to drag its slow length along after a similar fashion. Commissioner Dinnie's report will start it afresh, and some fine day in the year of grace 2201 the disputants may be merrily heaving at each other the same chunks of old red sandstone controversy with which they smote each other in 1904.

The Yellow Plague Was there c\er a quack, medical or political, Ihat admitted the failure of his panacea ? Waltho Van Cluttcrbanlc was the inventor of the ' BaJsam of Balsams '—which he likewise designated by the sub-titles ' Nature's Palladium amd Health's Magazine.' ' Should you chance,' said he, ' to have your brains knocked out, or your head chopped off, two drops of this, seasonably applied, will recall the fleeting spirits, reinthrone tho deposed archeus, cement this discontinuity of parts, and in six minutes' time restore the lifeless trunk to All its pristine functions, vital, rational, and animal.' When Van Clutterbank's nostrum did not ' touch the spot/ this was, of course, due to failure to apply it at the psychological moment or according to the prescribed rules. If this contention could not be maintained— well, the ' cure ' would operate in time ; and, in the meanwhile, the oily-tongued quack betook himself 'ad altri lidi, altire terre ' — to safe quarters elsewhere. Lord Mil'ner was one of the knot of political Clutterbanks who invcnteld arid prescribed the Yellow Balsam of Balsams as the Grand Palladium of South Africa. The hook-nosed German mine-owners and their English.' confreres wanted to fob more millions. The cheapen the labor the bigger their profits. British workers were so fastidious as to wish to live like human beings— as they

> had lived in the days of O"om Paul. For this impertinence they were left, after the war, to starve like ownerless dog,s in the streets of Johannesburg Even black labor was too dear for the purses of the mining millionaires. And so ' Chinese cheap labor ' was struck upon as a sure means of turning the Transvaal into a money-making paradise of hard-fisted monopolists.

The vanguard — a thousand strong — of the yellow inSnvasion reached the Rand some time ago. The slanteyed slaves were packed oft to the mines close prisoners and sent to pig together in the stockaded gaols known a»s compounds Lord Van Clutterbank Milner is not yet quite able to say that the Yellow Balsam has been successfully applied, but he avers that it ' apparently ' promises to be successful— by-and-by. ' The Chinese laborers,' he says, ' are apparently keen to become efficient miners. They neither fear nor dislike working underground.' But there is another side to the story. So, at least, the papers say. The Johannesburg correspondent of the ' Otago Daily Times,' for instance, says : : Our first experience of Chinese labor is not reassuring. . . The labor problem is by no means solved by the introduction of the yellow man. Despite inspired reports of a few individual cases, in which Chinese have performed so much rock drilling, in a givon time, the aliens now working on the Comet mire aie found to bj in every way inferior to the Kaffiis. This is not surprising to those who have all along contended that on account of the physical superiority of the blackit would require a far greater number of Chinese to'do an equal amount of work. Not only as workers na^e the aliens so far proved a disappointment, but their docility is not what it was lauded. They were to be comfortably compounded and kept quite isolated from the white (also the black) community. Whether the comforts provided are not up to the standard of the tastes of our Celestial visitors, the talked-of isolation is a farce. Out of the 1000 Chinese that have reached the Rand, a tenth have been reported as deserting. Most of these have been apprehended, but there are still some of the number roaming about looking for more congenial occupation than underground mining. The Kaffirs have shown no open or combined hostility t o the aliens, but all the same they are bitterly incensed against the co-workers, and express resentment to any white " baas " that will care to listen ; moreover, 'here is a tell-tale falling oft m Kaffir recruits.' The mining houses (we are told) are ' in dospair over the outlook.' The pig-tailed serfs f i om the Ilvva Kwo or Flowery Larid were to have sent the share market up. Instead, ' values are sagging away ' ; ' there is another slump ' ; the gold output is falling oft somewhat ; and ' the days of tribulation are not nearly over.' And for this Xcw Zealand sacrificed so many useful lives, the British and Irish taxpayer spent £2G0, 000,000 in good minted gold, without counting the Empire's loss in money, blood, and prestige.

The placid slav ( e from Far Cathay may yet pro\e a ' yellow peril ' to the pro-Chinese British Conservative Party as well as to the millionaires who engineered the war. If the Heathen Chinee may displace the British worker on the Rand, why not in England as well ? At the Chertsey election this point of view received rfTective prominence at the hands of the Liberal party. One of their placards ran as follows : ' Wanted for employment in the coal mines of Great Britain, 200,000 Chinese ; salary 30s a month. Deities of the best Birmingham make and chopsticks provided. Genial overseers. Gentlemen will be expectefd to bring their own birds' ncste. Opium allowed. Beriberi discouraged, but all corpses returned at owner's risk to Ohina.' The Sydney ' Freeman,' reading tihe signs of the times, says: ' The chances are that the Liberal Government when it attains ofTicc will bundle the Chinese out of South Africa and frame decent conditions for the coy Kaffir.

Incidentally the ainti-Chinese cry in England is fastening the return to power of a Home Rule majority.' And thus the whirligig of time may bring in his revenges.

A Burning Question A correspondent, writing on behalf of himself and others, asks for ' a statement of the leasons why the Cliiueh discountenances, ciemation.' The subject hay been debated in all the moods and tenses from the days of Julian the Apostate down to Eriehsen> Since"-1874 over three thousand books and pamphlets have tortured it from the sanitary, the legal, the economical, and the religious poinlte of view. Siemens's and Gorini's furnaces undoubtedly minimised the sickening exhalations that arose from funeral pyres and from the old forms of crematorium. But the process is expensive, and the great/ majority of people regard the process of incineration as unsightly and repulsive. 'The legal objections to cremation— as in cases of poisoning, etc.— have never yet been satisfactorily answered. It has, moreover, yet to be shown that the revival of the old pagan practice is, on hygienic grounds, preferable to a proper &raAC-buiial with perishable coffins, and the avoidance of such abuses as leaden ca9kets and such other hindrancerj to the antiseptic action of mother-earth. What is wanted is not an overthrow of the ancient system, but a reform fn the direction of greater simplicity. The present abuses are partly intended to inflate the vanity of the living, but chiefly in <the interests of the undertaker. They are not inherent to the system of earth-burial. Evccptional cases sometimes arise in which cremation is preferable to inhumation— as, for instance, in seasons of pestilence, or on battle-fields (,as recently happened in Manchuria), when large numbers of fostering bodies corrupt the atmosphere. In such exceptional cases the Church not alone permits, but urges (as she did in the great plague at, Milan) a departure from her ordinary rule and sanctions tho use of fire or wholesale calcination in pits of quicklime in order to avert the spread of disease.

For the rest, the Church looks upon even a lifeless Christian body as something difieient in nature and destinr irom the remains of a horse or a chimpanzee. It, is, in her eyes, something sacied. It was once the ' temple of the Holy ({host ; it was washed with the waters of Baptism and anointed with tile Holy Oils. It is not in every sense dead. Like Lazarus, it ' only slcepetih ' — awaiting the wondrous hour of i the resurrection. That doctrine is, of course, in no way impaired by cremation. The least instructed Catholic need not be told that the burned body is not thereby rendered less fit for its rising— identical as to substance, but (as St. Pa«ul says) ' a spiritual body '—on the last day. From the Church's standpoint the chief objections to cremation are : (1) The canonical processes required regarding the mortal remains of her saints, some of which — as those of St. Teresa, St. Charles, and St. Catherine of Bologna — have been preserved in a wonderful way ; (2) her practice of venerating their relics ; (3) the fact that earth-burial has been accepted from the first dawn of our era as part and parcel of the most solemn and touching rites of the Christian faith ; ( 1) the feeling that the bodies of our dead are treated with greatest respect when consigned to mother-earth with placid face to await their resurrection. Fmally, (5) there is the fact that cremation is a pagan system of disposing of the dead ; that it has been, since the days of Julian the Apostate, adopted by many as a public repudiation of belief in the resurrection and the future life. Such is the case with the atheist and Freemason sectaries of Continental Europe. It is chiefly for the last-in entioned reason th£t cremation was formally forbidden to Catholics by a decree of the Holy Office dated May 19, 1880. Curiously enough, a similar prohibition was issued to the Jews of Italy, about the same time, by the General Consistory of Raboins at Turin. In the cir-

cumstances of our time good Catholics— whose best hopes lie beyond the grave— will leave to others a monopoly of that method of disposing of the dead which suggests the repulsive scenes of the Rali Ghat of Calcutta.