Current Topics

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXIII, Issue 24, 15 June 1905, Page 1

Current Topics

Knox's Last Descendant Apropos of the recent Knox centenary, the Boston ' Pilot ' reminds its readers that the last lineal descendant of the Scottish ' Reformer ' became a Catholic and is now a priest in the great Catholic University of Notre Dame (Indiana, U.S.A.). Time's whirligig does occasionally bring in strange revenges. • Idolaters ' There is one thing in which autocratic Russia sets — though in \ain — a good example to constitutional Britain. It ne\er entered the head of a Tsar to publicly proclaim .Catholic worship, at his coronation, ' idolatrous and superstitious. 1 Tsar Nicholas has travelled even further along the pleasant paths of religious toleration — although there still remains a long road to cover. By imperial ukase he has decreed that ' henceforth Buddhists shall not be chaiacicrised as idolaters in official documents.' In England the kingly office is degraded by a ' relic of barbarism ' m the shape of an oath by which the crowned head of the Empire is compelled; at the moment of his accession to power, to declare all adherents of the Catholic Faith — and them alone — idolaters. And yet we remember what whirlwinds of fiery rhetoric arose from scores of mostly ' yellow ' pulpits and platforms throughout New Zealand at the suggestion that Catholics should be treated by King Edward VII. at his accession with as much consideration us he was expected to show to the Buddhists and the Mahomedans and the Hottentot pagans that h\c under his farextiendurg nile.

They manage these things better in TUissia 5 likewise in Germany. In the Fatherland leligious distrust of royalty has burned itself out sooner than in the British Isles. In Wurtemburg, for instance, no declaration of religion will be demanded by the Protestant majority from the Catholic Duke Philip, the next hear to the throne. Saxony is mostly Protestant, but its crowned head-; are all Catholic, and no questions are asked as to the complexion of their religious belief. The Grand Duke of Baden is a Protestant , but his people, twothirds of whom belong to the Ancient Faith, never dream of exacting from him any declaration of religious belief. Neither does it enter the head of any person in the Fatherland — at least outside lunatic asylums—to suppose that the constitution of the Empire

would be endangered unless the monarcli were compelled,. on his coronation day, to denounce as idolaters the great mass of all the people that bear the name of Christian,, Among civilised, nations Great Britain alone can claim this evil notoriety.,

Race Suicide There are some social problems that promise to give many a heart-ache to the statesmen of the future. One of these— race suicide, to wit— is already causing much dismay in England, France, the non-Catholic countries of northern Europe, the United States, and the States and Colonies of Australasia. Ontario, the grjeat Protestant province of Canada, is fast treading the fatal path that is leading to the swift and sure extinction of the aecadent descendants of the sturdy Puritan settlers of the Linited States. The Toronto correspondent of a London daily paper recently wrote as follows :— ' Sociologists are considerably perturbed over the revelations made by the annual report of the Registrargeneral for Ontario for the year ended December 31, ID O.I just publishes. It is quite evident that " race suicide," so emphatically condemned by President Roose\elt, is a common practice in this, the so-called banner pro\ince of the Dominion. The population is estimated at 2,198,092, b/ut the births registered numbered only 48,7 12, or at the rate of 22.1 per 1000. This is far below the a\erage of most European countries, and comos close to that of France, which is 21.9 per 1000./

' The same correspondent,' says the Glasgow ' Obser\er ' of May 5, ' completes his tale by contrasting Ontario with the (intensely Catholic) French-Canadian districts -. "H is noticeable, however, that in the FrenchCanadian districts of the pro\ince there is no disposition to curtail the number of births, Nipissing, for instance, ha\ing the high birth-rate of 49.3 per 1000, while in a pin el y English-speaking district like Prince Edward County the rate was only 14.6." ' Despite the tide of immigration, the results of the variation in the birth-rate according to creed in Ontario are shown in a marked way in the schools, which are denominational, and for which separate statistics are kept. ' Whilst the Protestant school population,' says the Montreal ' True Witness,' ' has been steadily decreasing chiringthe past decade, the Catholic school population has snown just as steady a rise. . . The inevitable result of this state of things moist "be that the Catholic people of the Dominion will be the future possessors of the Canadian heritage.' The same remark promises to hold good for the .States and Colonies of Australasia.

One >of the chief causes of this systematic depopulation is nothing less than a deliberate massacre of innocents on a Jscale which far out-Herods Herod. In a recent issue of the ' Popular Science Monthly,' Dr. A. Lapthom Smith declared that ' 2,000,000 child-murders annually .are a fair estimate of the number occurring on the North American continent.' The ' New World ' (New York) declares that the actual tolal of the great massacre is far in excess of Dr. Lapthorn Smith's estimate of lin.s learsome butcher y. Sundry subsidiary remedies hn\o boon proposed for this menacing; public e\il. But the radical and indispensable cure is for the nations to retrace their steps to the old Catholic principles—to saturate the minds of people with the conviction of their personal responsibility to an all-seeing God, to bring home to them right teaching as to the sacred and indissoluble nature and true purpose of the marriage-bond. The school, the home, the paper, the pulpit — all are needed for this work. That way alone lies. the remedy. And bachelor-taxing and familybonuses and such-like quackhead remedies are no better than spraying a cancer with lavender-water or dosing cholera morbus with pink pills.

The Torpedo The dramatic success of J-apan over Russia in naval war has, even more than the success of the little yellow men on land, given the world an earnest of the fighting qualities of a nation that only thirty years ago started on a renaissance of unexampled swiftness. In the early days of the war relatively small havoc was wrought by the torpedo in the first naval attack on Port Arthur. But the news that still keeps filtering through the submarine wires has to a gieat extent retrieved the reputation of that engine of destruction when it gets squarely to work among the ships that fight upon the sea. In blood-letting inventions the world now moves with the speed of the Scotch Express. It seems a far cry back to the time when, in the American Civil War— a little over years ago— the torpedo was a crude bombshell tied to the end of a stick. In those days it had an uncanny trick of hoisting friend as well as enemy, with a serene but unpleasant impartiality. Sometimes the fiiend went up first— and farthest, liy 1877 the torpedo had been so improved that it sank or damaged six Turkish and seven Russian vessels of war of various soils and si/cs The French, in the Tonkin war of 1885, performed, with two orQun ary steam cutters, a feat which furnishes an almost exact parallel with the hmned but (to men of the world's navees) somewhat disappointing w r ork done by the two adventurous torpe'doers that stole past Russian watch and ward into the harbor of Port Arthur seventeen months ago They sank at he.r moorings a Chinese frigate of 3900 tons, and sent its crew to feed the sharks that prowl in the waters of the harbor of Shein Tn the Chilian war, the ' Rlanco Encalada ' was sent to the bottom by a torpedo after a brief exchange of leaden incivilities that lasted only seven minutes. * Rut the torpedo of the Russo-Japanesie war— with H.s two bundled pounds or more of high explosive— is a much more formidable dealer of destruction and death. The earlier form of this sinker of ships is to lhat used in the Straits of Tsushima pretty much what the old twelve-inch smooth-bore mortar — with its maximum range of 2500 yards — is to the modern twelve-and-a-half inch Oanet gun, which sends a shell weighing 380 pounds, and charged with 275 pounds of high explosives, shrieking through the air to a distance of thirteen and oneeighth miles. Some of the worst damage done to the Rassian shifts in the Korean Channel was effected by twelve-inch guns that ' lobbed ' high explosives among the upper works and knocked things to smithereens from a distance of five miles. When the torpedoers got to work, we are told that almost every messenger of destruction they sent out ' struck home.' In a little time they sent no fevvdr than seven warships to the bottom of the sea. All this seems to bear out the verdict

oassed some years ago by a United States naval commission,, which (says Bloch in his" Modern Weapons and Modern War ') ' came to the almost unanimous conclusion that torpedo-boats will certainly destroy an armorclad if they escape 3estruction during the two minutes in the course of which the vessel attacked will be able to employ its quick-firing guns. But,' adds Bloch, ' the effectiveness of defence is weakened by the fact that in all navies the number of torpedo boats is from three to seven times greater \>han the number of armor-clads, and the loss of several torpedo-boats cannot be compared in gravity with the loss of a single armor-clad carrying an incomiparably larger crew, and costing an incomparably greater sum.'