Current Topics

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXIII, Issue 29, 20 July 1905, Page 1

Current Topics

Divorce Legislation Our over-accommodating legislators are once more busy planing, sandpapering, an-d greasing the slippery slope that leads disgruntled or misfit wedded couples to the divorce mill. All .such legislation against the unity and sanctity, of family life starts on the strange as^sumption that matrimony is> a temporary contract, terminable (to all intents and purposes) by whim, temper, or mjutual arrangement ; that the need of patience and mutual forbearance can be legislated out of the married state ; and that when white-gLoved couples stand before the 'altlar and solemnly promise before God and man that they will cleave to each other , for better or worse, till death does part them, they are deliberately lying, or taking their words in a Pickwickian or nonnatural sense. In either of these cases there would be no true marriage. Samuel Butler, in his ' Iludibras,' gives! some quaint reminders to impatient and ill-assor-ted pairs who find their self-inflicted woe ' beyond enduring./ He says :—: — ' 'Tis of their own procuring. As spiders ne\er seek the fly p But lea\e Bim, of himself, t.'apply, So men are by themselves employed, To quit the freedom they enjoy 'd, And run their necks into a noose, They'd bheak 'cm after, to break loose. As some, whom death would not depart, Have done the feat themsehes, by art.' Some people, like the French cynic, find that it ' gets on their nerves ' to have to try, day by day, to be agreeable to the same peTson. Generally speaking, those that by temper or temperament are unfitted to bear the gt'ave trials of the marrield state, should take Punch's historic advice, and adorn a single life with so much virtue as they can attain. One of the curious and instructive features of the discussion on Mr. Laurenson'si Divorce Act Amendment Bill (now before the House) is this : that Mr. Heke, a Maori Member, has given expression to more correct ideas as to the sanctity of the marriage bond than the great majority of his co-legislators of the ' superior ' Pakefoa race. He, at leaat, had the grace to ' oppose the Bill as a whole, objecting to any interference with the solemnity of the marriage tie. 1 And he is right. For the pagan idieals canonised in our divoroe legislation tend of themselves to shatter domestic r>eace, to destroy family life, and to induce a form of moral degeneracy that would do discredit to the civilisation of Liberian negroes. Which is a hard saying, but true,

4 Dirty Foes ' Even in self-defence decent people draw the line somewhere They do not, for instance,, stop to argue at fisticuffs with a drunken brawler, nor do they exchange verbal compliments with a foul-mouthed blackguard that volleys coarse brutalities from the vantage-point of a street-cornar. These are left to the uncovenanted mercies of the p'leeceman or to the cat-o '-nine-tails of Decent Public Opinion, Esq., J.P. For this reason we cannot accept the invitation of a correspondent to enter into a discussion with a lewd fellow of the baser sort who has recently been trailing his controversial coattails and cutlting the customary July capers on the! Donny brook Green of an Orange platform. His warwhoops and menially drunken antics have had a disquieting effect upon the mind of our correspondent, who wonders why his local clergy don't descend into the arena and ghe the combative ex-cobbler— or whatever 'he may have been— the father and mother of a controversial ' batin' ' for his coarse attacks on Catholic womanhood. Good old Samuel Butler supplies' a bit of wisdom which fits such cases to a nicety. He makes Hudibras say to his squire Ralpho— the Sancho Panza of the piece :— ' Quoth ho . That man is sure to lose That fouls his hands with dirty foes ; For where no honor's to be gained, 'Tis thrown away in being maintained. X » But as those poltroons that fling dirt, Do but defile, but cannot hurt ; So all the honor they have won, Or we ha^e lost, is much at one.' A good deal of this malodorous July oratory—especially the clerical part of it — comes from the lips of men who, like Old'ham's Ugly Parson, nave ' dieted on assafoetida '—fed on the swinish garbage that (like the unclean romances of Maria Monk, Margaret Shepherd,, antl other suoh-like gaol-bixds and impostors') is industriously circulated in the lodges. • -■ ■ Don Quixote was the Spanish Hudibras'— but cast in a much nobler mould. He took a line somewhat simitar to that of his later English counterpart in his dealings with ' dirty foes.' ' Friend Sancho,' said he t 0 his squire Panza,- ' for the future, whenever thou perceivest us to be any ways abused by such inferior f ell ows i thou art not to expect that I should offer to draw my "word against them, for 1 will not do it in the least. No ; do thou draw and chastise them as thou thinkest fit. But if any kinlght come to take their part, then will I be sure to sltep in between thee and danger.'

4 Undenominational ' Teaching Butler, in his ' Modern Politician,' looks upon the Insincere and tricky use of words as something akin in malice to the crime of treason. For some years past this form of offence has- been committed with pestiferous iteration by the clergy of the Bible-in-schools League. They have dbawn up a ' non-final ' scheme for the teaching of a flaccid Unitarianism in the State schools at the exj en^e of the taxpayers of the Colony. It is ultimately based on the Reformation principle of ' the Bible and the Bible only ' , it is an unsuccessful attempt to discover a common denominator for all the Protestant creeds ; and yet it is blandly labelled ' undenominational.' The Bible-in-schools clergy ha\e left their proper sphere of quiet duties and thrown themselves upon the political stage— right in front of the footlights. Ancl they have not adorned their new profession. Like Pudd'nhead Wilson, they seem satisfied to ' get the formalities right— ne\er mind about the moralities.' Their talk about ' undenominationalism ' is, like that about their vaunted ' conscience clause,' a piece of sheer verbal jugglery— a meie electioneering trick. There is, of course, no such thing as ' undenominational ' religious or moral instruction. It has been pointed out to them— and they have not denied it and cannot deny it— 'that from the view-point of the Atheist Dr Agnostic all Theistic teaching is denominational ; that in the eye of the Jew all Christian teaching, is denomina+ional ; that from the standpoint of the .Catholic all Protestant teaching is denominational ; and that the doctrinal attitude- of the Catholic Church, ancl that of the Bible-in-schools clergy, towards the Sacred Scriptures, are hopelessly , ' denominational ' one towards the other, * In England some spider recently spun this queec fancy of ' undenominational ' religious instruction in the brain of Mr. Asquith. Mr. G. K. Chesterton, in an article in tlhe ' Daily News ' of May 27, safS some things that were highly calculated to remove the cobwebs from the headpiece of the Member for Fife. Mr. Chesterton says in part :— ' There may be such things common to all Christians. Presumably, theie are But the one thing i erfectly evident is that the supremacy and sufliciency of the Bible is not one of them. . . Mr. Asquith m-ay be quite right in saying that the* c is a grand something common to all our European cr ecu's. But his hair will be very white and his soul \ery faint with lieice and spiritual labcx s before he has found out what it is. Mr. Asquith will ha\e brought mystical meditation to the border of madlness before he has seen that thing common to Christendom. . . It is much more dogmatic to be undenominational than to be denominational. For the man who propounds an undenominational religion is propounding a new religion ; a religion made up of what he, on his own responsibility, supposes to be the first or best or deepest elements in the old ones. The sectarian only professes to know what is most important to him. But the unsectanan professes to 1-now what is most important to everybody— even to his opponents, lie claims to be in the love-secrets even of his enemies. Now there is plenty to be said for the sincerity or spiritual value of both these positions ; but surely thore can be no doubt about which is tihe more arrogant, dogmatic, and final. The man who claims to ha\e found tbo truth in his own religion makes a claim comparatively modest. But the man who claims to h^o 1 found the truth in other people's religions makes a claim of which the sublime and sacred impudence reaches the madness of Mahomet. He declares himself to have seen something more than all the creeds of the earth. He has seen the creed below the creeds ; the sea below the sea. He understands Calvinism better than Calvinists, and Catholicism better than Catholics ; he knows the first principles of Sandemanianism better' than the Ranflemanilans ; he knows why Salvationists wear red jerseys better uhan they know it themselves. In the dark heart of some Indian temple he learns the secret which is hidden from the priests. lie picks up the missals of the mighty mediaeval civilisation, am?!ie roads them right while those who would die for them read them wrong.'

We commend this luminous extract to the careful consideration of the know-alls of the Bible-in-schaols League, with this one observation : that the best way to see the daylight is to put one's smoking candle out.

Confiscation-Taxation In his ' Tancred,' Disraeli laid down the seeming paradox that confiscation destroys public credit, taxation improves it, and that both, nevertheless, come to the same thing. Ireland has lon- been afflicted with the kind of taxation that is a form of confiscation. And the steadily progressive character of her fiscal burdens promises 'the near approach of the state of things that was satirised as follows by Sydney Smith : 'The schoolboy whips his taxed tops, the beardless youth manages his taxed horse, with a taxed on a taxed roaa ; and the dying Englishman, pouring his medicine, which has paid seven per cent., flings himself back on his chintz bed, which has paid twenty-two per cent., and expires in the arms of an apothecary who has paid a licqnse of a hundred pounds for the privilege of putting him to death.' In January, 1896, the Royal Commission on the Financial Relations between Great Britain and Ireland pu'bjlisibed their historic report.. It was duly presented to her late Majesty and opened the eyes of some British politicians with surprise ; for did it not show that the Cinderella Nation of the West was o'.ertaxed for Imperial piurj oses to the lively tune of practically two and thiee quarter million sterling per annum ? The finding came with the electric shock of a gfeat surprise to English politicians who knew nothing of the western isle. And they made haste to swathe the report in cotton wool and lay it on a shelf, a prey 'to moth and dust— like the heartless mother that soothes her crying child with doses of chloroform or laudanum. The subsequent course of Irish taxation is told In an article in the June ' Contemporary ' on ' Ten Years' Tory Rule in Ireland.' The author is Mr. Thomas Lough, M.P., a noted writer on questions of Irish public finance. He points oat how, on this excessne drain of some two and three quarter millions annually ' was based the total taxation of 1893-4, which amounted to seven and a half millions. It was,' he continued, ' this finding that the Government resolved to set aside, but the decision would, at the worst, only imply thait no relief could be gi\en. Few would think that it would justify a direct increase of burdens far exceeding in weight anything that Ireland had yet been called upon to bear. Yet such has been thie case.' * He then proceeds to enter into full details of the progress of Irish taxation duiing the last ten years of Tory rule We extract the following summary statement only : ' The amount named abo\e as the total taxation works out at an average per head of £1 15s 9d. The report of the Commission implied that this was excessive to the extent of 12s per head of the population. Instead, however, of any reduction being made, the amoutnt has bc|en increased to £2 5s 6d per head. The only period of similar duration since the Union in which any such severe change bad been made in the taxation was in the ten years after 1849. In that year the total Imperial taxation amounted to 14s 9d Der head, and by 1859 it had been increased to 26s 7d, being an increase of 11s lOd, as against 9s 3d during the past ten years. During thirty years after 1859, further increases amounting to 11s 7d were made. These figures lead us at once to the root of every Irish grievance. Ever since the famine period, the British Chancellor has been piling fresh burdens on a population that is rapidly wasting away.' During the past ben years alone thd fresh burdens of taxation thrown upon the unhappy country have amountea 1 to two and a half millions sterling r><er annum. And a great part of this has been imposed upon the people for the blundering campaign against the Dutch Republics in South Africa.

Daniel Webster laid i\» down as a beti-rock principle of sound policy that a people's government should be made for the people, made by the people, and answerable to the people. Under the Tory regime the government of Ifreland has been practically handed over to the Orange party in Ulster. It is no wonder, then, that the boyoott of Catholics goes merrily on, and that the ascendancy faction st'll keep something approaching— as nearly as they can secure it— a monopoly of the chief emoluments of the country. In the Lord Lieutenant's household, for instance, nOn- Catholics draw in salaries £36,230, Catholics £650 ; Chief Secretary's office, Protestants £14,200, Catholics £2920 ; Judges of the High Court, Protestants £51,692, Catholics £13,112 ; Law Offices of the Crown, Protestants £9050, Catholics nothing ; Recorders and County Court Judges, Protestant? 1 £21,500 t Catholics £10,000 ; Resident Magistrate^ Protestants (49) £29,400, Catholics (19) £11,400; County Inspectors of Police, Protestants (33) £14,850, Catholics (4) £1800 ; District Inspectors of Police, Protestants £29,876, Catholics £11,640. And yet the ascendancy party are not happy — just because Catholics have been permitted, like Dives' dogs, to pick up some of the crumbs that fall from the public table. Their plaint reminds an esteemed Glasgow contemporary of the ad\ice given by an old Scotch laird to his son : ' Keep aye askin 1 and aye takin', and aye sayin' ye're gettin' nasthing.' In the meantime the people are crowding every ship and fleeting from a country that is cursed with the deep curse of a ' Castle rule ' that is directed by the tap of the Orange drum. From December 31, 1851, to December 31, 1902, no fewer than 3,997,913 nati\e-born emigrants left Irish ports to seiek a home or a grave In other lands. During the first three months of the present yelar more th~an four thousand young men and maidens sailed away from Ireland in excess of the number that wont/ the previous year to li\c among the stranger. ' 111 fares the land, to hastening ills a prey, Where wealth accumulates- and men decay.' But in Ireland both wealth and wealth-producers vanish. A pamphlet published three years* ago sums up the situation as follows : ' Forty thousand young emigrants left yearly during the lait se\ en years, making 280,000 in all, and it cost about £100 to rear and emigrate and fiu out each emigrant, making a loss of £28,000,000 in all, chiefly falling on these poor peasant classes. Four per cent, interest on this £28,000,000 comes to well over £1,000,000 a year, which^ I consider a permanent lossi of income to the country.' But that is not all. Their value as producers and consumers is lost to Great Britain. Moreo\er, these scions of ' the fighting race ' lea\e the green shores of Erin with anger in their hearts, and the vast majority of them eniol themselves as citi/jens of the great Republic of the West that might at any time be engaged, as it was twice beforej in a deadly conflict with Britain.