Current Topics

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXII, Issue 42, 20 October 1904, Page 1

Current Topics

Fifty Years' Progress Situated as it is on the outer rim of the world, and remote from great centres ot the worid's population, New Zealand cannot show the phenomenal progress in settlement and trade that has marked the later history of new countries that are nearor to Europe. But for a young country so circumstanced its progress has been reasonably rapid. The latest advance sheets of the ' New Zealand Official Y ear-Book ' for 1904 contain, on p. s>ol, an interesting ' Statistical View of Fifty Years 1 Progress in New Zealand— lßs.l-1903.' The steady growth of aur tight little islands is given year by year. Here are a few of the ' outeide ' ciphers > — Population (exclusive oE Maoris) in 18£il, 32,551 , in 1903 (December 31), 832,54)5. Occupied and cultivated holdings over one acio in extent, 11,932 , in 1903, 06,082. Land (including scmn grasses) under cultivation in 1857, 121,048 acres ; m 1903, 13,504,001 acres Live stock in 1858, 1,686,691 (including 1,523,324 sheep) ;in 1903, 21,073,402 (including 18,{>51,5C8). In 18151 New Zoaland exported 1,254,1161 bof wool, having a value of £70,L03 ; in 1903 the expoit of this commodity had risen to 155,128,3811 b, and its valfee represented the tidy fortune of £1,011,27 1. New Zealand's gr.ain export in 1854 amounted to 93,700 bus.hels, of the value of £11,019 ; last year it was 5,362,748 blushels, valued at £5:33,865. The frozen meat trade was in its swaddling clothes in 1882. In that year we exported 15,24i4cwt, of the value of £19,339 ; m 1903 this great industry sent 2,378,6f*0cwt of fro/.an meat to feed hungry mouths in other lands and received for the service the sum of £3,197,013. In 1854 our export of 'butter was represented by a few modest shipments totalling 807 cwt ; last year the quantity rose to 2«85,106cwt. Our exports of cheese, ph omnium fibre (flax), gold, and Kauri gum have fluctuated somewhat, but the general tendency is in each case upwards. In 1857, for instance, the gold exported was only 10,4360/., valueKl at £10,412 ; last year we poured into the lap of Europe 538, 3*140/ of. the yellow treasure and received therefor £2,037,832. The export of provisions, tallow, timber, etic, represented in 1854 a total value of £170,967, and in 1903 £2,28-8,327. The total valfue of our exports in 1854 was £320,890 ; ita 19-03 it hatd scared to £14,838,192. In the first-mentioned year our exports reached a total vaiue of £891,2.01 ; lajst, year they) had risen to £12,788,675.

Jn 1871 we had only 209 miles of G-overnment railways, of a kind, opon and their receipts for the year amounted to a modest £21,198. Last year there were 3328 miles of Government lines open, artd they brought £2,180,641 into the public exchequer. In 4866 there wei-Q in all New Zealand only 699 miles of telegraph Unes, bringing in a modest revenue of £9,11*4 ; last year the mileage had risen to 7(779 and the 'cash 'values of the messages (including telephones) amounted to £,237,564. The average deposits in bam<ks for the four q'uartcis of 1857 were £343,316 ; in 1903 they amounte- to £19,014,114. There were 715 depositors ijn sav-ings-banks in 1358, and the balance to their credit on the last day of the year was £7862— a modest average ot about £11 each. In 1903 there were 280,011 depositors in post-ofhee and private savingsi-T>anks and there stood to their credit as the year was vanishing the sum of £8,132.958, showing an average of over £»30 par head. Such lap id progress in settlement, commerce, transport, and communications necessarily involved a heavy public indebtedness, which rose from £836,000 in 1862 to £55,001,328 net in 190-1. A Crimeless Catholic Land A perusal o! our news columms would tend to show that there was not, after all, so much of hyperbole in the figure of speech which declared that white gljovesr— the sign of a blank criminal calendar— fall like snowflakes aii Irish assizes. Here is an editorial paragraph from the Dublin ' Weekly Freeman ' of September 3 which will have a special interest ior those who have followed our articles on the question of ' Catholics and Crime ' in New Zealand :— ' The Report of the Prisons Board continues the sitory of Die decline of Irish crime. There were only 249 convicts- m the Irish prisons on January Ist, ais compared with 461 on the Ist of January, 18Q6, and #93 on the Ist of January, 1881. There was a decrease of a hundred in the committals of all classes. Tlie only unsatisfactory feature was the increase in the number of juveniles convicted. The »umber under 16 years of age went up from 135 to 192. The decrease in this class of offender had been steady and uninterrupted down to 1899, the year following Lord Cadogan's ill-j.iyd.ged arid illegal tampering with the aJdministtation of the Industrial Schools Act in the interest "of a few pounds of Treasury savings. Last year the number was higher than in 1899. But the Kumiber of juvenile criminals is also greater on aocount of the inidefensible action of the magistracy. The Prisons Board have again to repeat their complaint that magistrates do net

make use of their powers under the Juvenile Offenders Act tp avoid sending children to gaol. "It is disappointing to find ,s<o many juvenile offenders impris- ' aned." The Board give a list of cases. The worst camie from Cork. No fewer than eight children between the ages of 9 and 1H- were sent to gaol in Co 1k in 1903 for " obstructing the footway." Id Gal way a little gjrl of 10 w^s sent t° gaol for seven days for trespass! I,s it too much to say that the magistrate^ who did these things should get as many months as these children got days in prison ? ' • The apparent and artificially created increase in jUvfinile crime in Ireland will speedily disappear ■when. sanity and humanity return from their holiday and Hake up their quarters' in the brain-cases of the Irish Administration. In the ' Human it an an ' some two years ago Miss Rosa M. ■Barrett, a Member of the Royal Statistical Society, pointed out as a remarkable fact, that in Ireland alone, of alt civilised countries, there was a steady decrease of juivenile crime. In 18fl8 (sihe said) there were k&s tihan half as many juvenile criminals in Ireland as there waie ten years before, and during the tihree years following 1898 the figures were the lowest on repord. In the course of a reply to a discussion on her article on ' The Treatment of Juvenile Offenders ' in the ' Journal of the Royal Statistical Society ' about the same time, Miss Barrett stated that criminals fiom 16 to 21 years of agtt are increasing in England anjd Scotland. She, added : ' I am somewhat at a loss to explain why Ireland (so erroneously tihou'gM to be a specially criminal country) is so extraordinarily free from serious crime. With a smaller population Scotland has an enormtQ'usly greater number of prisoners (almost twice as many in some years), while serious offenders arc only 16.6 per 10,000 of the population in Ireland, as compacted with 25.4 per lO.OO'O in England. The convicted prisoners for aHI oaences in IrelanKi are but 7.3 per 1000 persons ; in Scotland they are 12.6 per 10"00. Convicts, both male and female, show an extraordinary decrease in Ireland,, and one is forced to belieVe that instead of the Irish being a naturally lawless, offensive people, as so many think, they are in truth naturally law-abiding arid well-behaved beyond most peoples. Whether this is due to their deep religious instincts or to otiiex causes, it is not for me to decide.' .In Uie course of the paper referred to above Miss Barrett states that in Ireland ' juvenile crime has diminished 39 per cent, in 20 years anti forms only 0.6 per cent of the total crime, falling, especially among girls, more rapidly than in any Europeain country.' She furthermore declares that, apart from, drunkenness and allied misdemeanors, ' female crime is almost non-existent in Ireland.' In his ' Kilmainham Memories,' published in 1896, Mr. Tigjhe Hopkins says : ' O\ir great guilds of crime— the bands of professional burglars and robbers ; the financial, conspirators ; the adept forgers ; the teamed thieves ; the habitual leviers of blackmail ; the bogus noblemen, parsons, and ladies of family ; the " longfVrm " practitioners ; the hotel and railway sharps. ; the ■" magsm'en," " hooks," land " bounces '''—these are almost unrepresented in Ireland. In a word, so far as habitual and professional crime is concerned, there is not as decent a country in Europe.' A Reverend Romancer A gay and reverend spinner of iridescent missionary tfoles is; just now perambulating New Zealand intent vipph. charming the chinking coin's cut of the public pocfyeij .for the funds of a Bible Society. The giood tnian's method is simplicity itself. It is in part the method pursued in the famine days by the Connemara 1 aqupfcrs/ ' who tried to inveigle the starving poor to l *Sell their sowls ' • • Fdr peniny rowls, For s'oiup and hairy bacon.'

Their mission was money, money, and di 'it, "tor 1 the cause ' ; and nothing filled the coffers &b fast as sensational tales of sweeping ' conversions ' of -Whole co:untry-sMes t/old on British platforms and- through the British religious press. Those enterprising ' ' soupers ' made, in tact, in single baronies p[ the West mote *■ converts ' than double the entire population resident there, But, siomeliow, when it came to a matter-of-fact count of head 1 ?, the rmil'titu'di'rious recruits vanisiieid into space and had no local habitation or a n'a>me. The Bible Society has taken a leaf out of the book of the 'AhglbIrisih Mission's imaginative ' soupers.' At Invercargill, for instance, the agent in eftect, informed liis auidielice tiliat t)hc Catholic clergy in France are running "in eager droves 4 away from Rome ' and into ■the welcoming arms of the Biblie Society. ' Only recently,' Said tihxs retailer of Munoha'usrn , talcs, ' seven hundred priests had seceded from the Church of Rome (in France^ and taken usp work as colporteurs.' Mark Twain once lamented his inability' to tell a fib that anybody would doubt,, or a truth that anybody would beliqve. It is, of course, just possible that the man who ssun that tall story in In\ercargill miay have accurately gauged the gullibility of the audience to "whom he addressed his fervent appeal for shekels. But he ■might an least have culled a more plausible 1 tale fro mi his repertoire, in view of the probability that it would be perused by people of normal sanity in the columns of the ' Southland Times. 1 As it is, the tinselled tale of the seven hundred recruits from ' Rome ' has about the same relation to sober fact as the story 08 Jack and the Beanstalk. No country or creed in the world has, peijhaps, a clergy :so exemplary, so pious, and so devoted to its work as the clergy of France. Rcnan, who was at one time a seminarian, had an intimate knowledge of many of them ; yet, -despite his anti-Catholic fajnaticistm, he declared in his ' Souvenirs dc ma J eunestse fi : ' I have never known any but good priests.' No Englishman of the present day, perhaps, has siuch an intimate knowledge of France as Mr. John Edward Courtenay Bodley. Fob fifteen years or more ho has resided in that country for the purpose of collecting materials for his great work on it 9 social and religious institutions. Yet, convinced Protestant though he is, he could write as follows in a volume that aippaared some fo'uir years ago : ' The parish priests of France, than whom there is not a more exemplary body of men in the land, illustrate the better qualities, refined by discipline, of those great categories of the people which constitute the real iorce of the nation.' And of like kind are the rest. But among such a multitude of metti as constitute the clergy of France, there must, nevertheless, be, as human nature goes, a certain small per\-centag i e of wreckage — of those who have fallon short of the requirements of their high calling an-d who are, perhaps, almost as dissatisfied with the restraints imposed upon them "by the Church as the Church is dissatisfied with them. But oven among those faithless few, the merest fragment have nibbled at any torm of Prote&tantism, and these (as( their spokesman Bo'urrler declared in London in IDO'O) did not wish to join the Reformed denominations, but to ' reform ' the Church from within ! Tho reason is not fat to seek. c The French Protestants,' says Hamerton (an English Protestant) in Ms 1 French v. English * (p. 155), ' form a little world apart, which (except, perhaps,, in the most Protestant districts, and they arc- of small! extent) ap-fjetars to ,be o/utside the current of national life.' Protestantism in France is stagnant and its progress has long 'ago ceased. But there is another reason for tfhe ex-ipiriests' avoidance of Reformed denominations in France. ' France, with .all her fault's, possesses, ' says' a wellinformed Catholic writer, • a certain measure) of self-res-pect ajn,d clear-sigh.-teid.ness which makes her a , very poor

exploiting ground for the recalcitrant clergy. Ttoe Widdowses, the Slatt&rys, the Connellasnst— even the Loysons — would not live for a week if they depended for their support upon such aid as they wdald receive from Frenchmen, A Frenchman may or may not be disposed to contribute tjo the maintenance of a priest, but, if he does, he certainly prefe-fc that the priest sihall be a good one. For the unfrocked priest and his inevitable female companion he has nothing but wntprngit ' Nobody can more keenly appreciate than Jacques Bonhomme the deadly pungency of Erasmus/'s saying — which is a$ true to-day as it was over Jthree hundred years ago-— that the adhesion of a priest to the Reformation resembled a comedy, as it always ended in the ding-fling-a-long of wedding bells. ' Duo tiantum. qjuaerunt, 1 siaid he, ' consum et uxo'rem '-—they are after two things, cash and a wife.' The story of the seven hundred ' lecent ' and sudden clerical seceders is, as a matter of fact, nearly five yeaxs old. Challenge after challenge hasi been issued to furnish the names of tine ' converts,' bfit to. 'no avail. Circulars were then sent to eJiery Catihohc bishop in France, wiMi the result that the story was dynamited by direct and positive evidence. This missionary ' snake-yafrn ' has long ago i>eabieii to be a safe one to Spin m (Jr-eat Britain or France. But, on the Connemara ' siouper ' principle, it has evidently beert considered good enough for export to New Zealand and for retailing to audiences with a view to the extraction of ' saxpences ' and other current coins of tiha realm. Any of our readers may safely challenge the truth of this re-ramped old missionary tale about the seven hundred French priests who have ' only recently ' ' seceded from the Church of Rome and taken U*p work as colporteurs.' The slory is a fabrication, and a clumsy and inartistic one at that. Another precious missionary tale told in Invercargi'll by the s\ame wandering evangelist affirms that there are in China ' only 10,001) professing Christians ' ' Prodigious ! The ' Statesman's Year-Book '■ — no mean authority, by the way— estimates the number of Catholics alone mi the Hwa Kwo or Flowery Kingdom to be ' abxxut 1,000,000. But possably the imaginative evangelist -does not regard these as Christians at all. Our readers are by this time sufficiently aware that our faitih in the veracity of the stories of the Bible Society's agents is not an abiding faith. We have to ai a good many of them to tatters during the past few years— fairy talcs from stuch far-off laads as the Argentine Republic (El Gran Chaco), Mexico, Bolivia, Italy, and elsewhere. A rose-colored glow pervades their re. ports : the people are always either ' hearing gladly ' or beijig numerously ' gathered into the fold ' There is no check, no error, no failure, and ' t!ic aim shines always there.' Zimmerman says that optimism arises either from stagnation of intellect or inaupeta'ble indolence. In the present instance it would appear to be the creature of external circumstances^— partly a question of mere policy, partly a matter of supply and demand. The report of the Established Church of Scotland Missionary Society for I*B 7>B complained that ' missionaries are discouraged by the notion tlhat their friends crave for exciting and novel narrative ; that the plain record of daily duties, petty disappointments, and serious hindrances would be unacceptable ? A Protestant clergyman, Rev. H. Hens ley Hanson, writing on the Subject of foreign missions in the ' National Review ' for December, 1897, thus accounts for the roseate hue of the typical non-Catholic missionary's report : 'He is ignorant almost always, and by necessary coMsequemce he is prejudiced. He is generally in a tho-rcAighly false position— the reporter and j-udge of his own achievements. He works uvnder thoroughly bad conditions, for his reports are the advertisements of a money-raising Society/ and they are addressed to consitiuuemtsi— the rank and file of the denominations— who are as greedy of sensation as they are credulous of prodigies.' There

is, them, a market and a market price for £io>us fiction of a certain kind. This will sufficiently account for tiie story of the spven hundred French clerical ' seceders '—which lias aboait as much of truth in it as the fairy tale of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves,