Current Topics

New Zealand Tablet, 27 September 1906, Page 9

Current Topics

Facilis. Descensus . ■ - The road to ruin is broad, well-kept, and graded ' for fast going. A wide strip of it is neatly paved with empty bottles. That < Referendum ' Again Brigadier-General Thomas Francis Meagher's famous division was wiped off the face of the earth in the two days and two nights of desperate fighting that* took place around Chancellorsville in May, 1863, during the great American Civil -War. Only a few of the 'dashing leader's valiant men answered the roll-call when the grim work jwas over. A few days later, Meagher handed in his resignation. It would, said he, foe ' perpetrating a public deception ' to keep up the pretence of a brigade when if had been practically wiped out, and when he had been refused permission, to withdraw the little remnant of his men from service for a time in order to recruit. The leaders of the Bible-in-sohools Referendum League would have been well advised had they followed the sensible and spirited example of ' Meagher of the Sword '. Their movement differs in one important respect from Meagher's hard-hitting death-or-glory 'brigade : it never was formidable. The country never could be induced to take it quite seriously, much less to wax enthusiastic over it. As a political fighting force, it never got beyond the hay-foot straw-foot stage, and the time is pretty well ripe for the undertaker to place it under the roots of the flowers that bloom in the spring. The leaders of the dead or dying movement that waited on the Premier on Monday were, in effect, ' perpetrating a public deception ' by inferentially professing to represent a live movement, with a big slice of the country at its back. They should, like the hero of Marye's Heights, have withdrawn and recruited and reorganised their shattered forces, if they could, and given some evidence — namely, the evidence of personal and collective effort and sacrifice— that they are in earnest about the Christian education of the children of their various flocks. They could then consistently approach Parliament— on the lines of the Catholic demand.

As matters stand, the bulk of legislators and of the general public can have no other feeling but one of contempt for ministers of the Lord whose ideals rise no higher than this : scheming to unload one of the sacredest and most elementary duties of their calling on to the shoulders of lay State officials ; to create and endow a new juvenile Established Church on Unitarian lines ; to turn the public schools of the Colony into supplementary Sunday-schools for the propaganda of the latest fad in religion-making ; and to pick the public pocket for the cost of the process. It is cheap, to wag tongues where the footlights glare. But people who think, will think hard things of the sort of religion that for thirty years has not had sufficient steam in it to make the most obvious and urgent sacrifice for the little lambs of its flock. Are the shekels and the easy-chairs more precious than the souls of the little men and maids at school ? We Catholics think not. Has religion no head to think and plan, no heart to feel, no hand to work, for God.'s little ones in the schools ? Or is it merely a Tongue clacking sleepy political clap-trap, and beseeching Parliament to put surplice and gown-and-bands upon the Civil Service, so that the clergy; like the dormouse, may 101 l and sleep in ignoble peace ?

A Fantastical Story x He is a bit of a jolthead or a -hurry-worry 'or a don't-care who allows himself to be bitten twice and thrice by the same yapping cur-dog. Yet secular pa-

.pers continue, despite the lessons of experience,, to allow themselves to be bitten again and again by sundry journalistic curs' who invent and retail the sort of Vatican • news ' that is fit only for the marines or the silly season. The latest sample of - this .sort of stuff is now going the rounds of the New Zealand secular press— appearing, thus far, in the Saturday brimstone-columns. It . is a romance about Father Tyrrell's passing from the Jesuit society to the secular The story (which is credited to the ' Rome correspondent of the ' Berliner Tagblatt ') rehearses a lot of fantastical nonsense as to what the Pope has been doing, is doing, and is going to do in regard to the Jesuits. The mooncalf who concocted the story winds up with this fine bit of extravaganza : ' There is also talk- of Cardinal Newman, one of the most liberal-minded members of the Jesuit Order, being visited shortly by a practical demonstration of the displeasure of his superiors in the faith.' There is only one thing the matter with this story : it is a piece of grotesque folly from beginning to end. The writer is so ill-informed that he takes Cardinal Newman to be a living member of < the Jesuit 'Order 1 . It so happens that Cardinal Newman has been dead for tne past sixteen years and more. He has no longer any ' superiors in the faith ' upon this earth. With him, we trust, faith has given place to the Beatific Vision. And he is far beyond the reach of being personally ' visited ' by the ' displeasure ' of mortals here below. Moreover, Newman never was a Jesuit. The truth of the story about Father Tyrrell may be well gauged by that of Cardinal Newman and ' the Jesuit Order '.

' Tell the truth and shame the devil '. So runs the old motto. There are a great many people (says an American wit) who find no difficulty in shaming the devil, It is the other thing that bothers them. To this class belongs the imaginative wight who devises Vatican news for the silly season. But for our knowledge of his high capabilities, we might have been tempted to take this latest bit of Vatican ' news ' as a hoax — somewhat similar to that of the petrified man with which an American wag imposed upon the too trusting 1 secular newspapers of the Eastern States. They did not notice that the petrified man's ten fingers were spread fanwise, in an attitude of derision, frdm the point of his stony nose. And our incautious, and perhaps over-driven, journalists forgot for the moment that Newman sang his last rondeau in 1890 — a date that in these fast-moving days seems almost as remote as the times of the Barmecides. It is another instructive instance of the dangers of taking Catholics news and comment from other than wellinformed Catholic sources.

A Slump It is a bank-note world, as Halleck hath remarked. Finance has a sensitive skin, and a big monopoly is easily sent to bed in a fever of fear. This is apparently what seems to have got into the blood of a great Irish financial corporation, if we may credit a cable-message that appeared in last Saturday's daily papers :—

' The Bank of Ireland, stock fell from £330 to £307 in ten days, owing to alarm over the Government's Home Rule intentions.' The Bank of Ireland was founded in 1782. It was the year of the Volunteers— the period when bigotry had largely lost its force in Irish public life ; when the penal code had (as Lecky said) ' perished at last by its own atrocity ' ; and when Irish Protestants were eagerly moving to place a large measure of political power in the hands , of their Catholic, fellowcountrymen/ • Catholics,' says Lecky, « had begun to take a, considerable place among the moneyed men of Ireland ; yet \ he adds, • when the Bank of Ireland was founded in 1782, it was specially provided that

no Catholic might be enrolled among its directors '„ It was a whiff from the spirit of the penal days— a spirit that, despite the growing tolerance of the time, still survived in many parts of Ireland. In the course of time this intolerant proviso was abolished. * In 1802— after the Act of -Union had been passed by bribery, force, and fraud— the Bank of Ireland purchased the beautiful building in which the sessions of the old Parliament had been held. The Government made a curious secret stipulation in consenting to this sale. It is thus set forth in a letter to Lord Hardwicke, approving the purchase : 'It should, however, be again privately stipulated that the two chambers of Parliament shall be effectually converted to such uses as shall preclude their being again used upon any contingency as public debating rooms.' 'It was feared,' says Lecky, ' that disquieting ghosts might still haunt the scenes that were consecrated by so many memories.' Recent rumors declare that the Old House in College Green is again to be restored to the uses for which it was originally intended. Negotiations are said to have been recently afoot for its repurchase and restoration to the nation. This may possibly mean more to the Bank of Ireland than the loss of the beautiful offices whioh, to the chagrin of the vast body of the people, it has so long occupied in the 'heart of Dublin city. The Bank has had, since the Union, a vast monopoly of Government business. And the fear that a Home Rule Government might distribute a portion of its business among other and more popular banking institutions is, no doubt, amply sufficient to account for the fall in Bank of Ireland shares that was recorded by the cablcman in the daily papers of last Saturday. There will, of course, be the customary clamor of martyrdom'that arises when monopolies are hit or threatened. Sydney Smith, in his day, deplored the fact that Catholic Emancipation was for a long time blocked ' because one politician will lose two thousand a year by it, and another three thousand, a third a place in reversion, and a fourth a pension for his aunt '. ' The great soul of this world is just,' says Carlyle. And justice to Ireland, so long delayed, is not, we hope, to be now baulked by the fear that the titled and untitled stockholders in the Bank 'of Ireland are to draw dividends of fourteen per cent, instead of fifteen per cent, upon their shares. People do a good deal of dancing and singing nowadays around the golden calf. But justice is more than moneybags, and a nation's liberties more than shent. per shent.

Home Rule The leaf of the asj,<m is so neatly balanced upon its stalk that the gentlest breeze of heaven will set it trembling. It is even so with financial institutions. They are agitated by the smallest breath of fact or rumor that comes their way. What is more gentle than a message of hope to suffering man or hard-tried nation ? Yet it was ' a message of hope ' to Green Eire of the Tears that set the aspen sharelist of the Bank of Ireland trembling so wildly during the past few weeks. It was a double message. The first was spoken by Sir Antony MacDonnell, Under-Secretary to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, at a banquet in Dublin. He said :— 1 He came before them that night after three years of work, some of which had brought great satisfaction, awd some of which had brought regret, and he came 'before them, as he came before them three years ago,' with a message of hope. He was no more entitled to tell them that night the grounds on which the hope was based than he was able to tell them three years ago the grounds upon which his hope was then based ; but his firm belief was that the coming year IDO7 would see the fruition of many of those hopes which the best Irishmen had for many years entertained. It might'^ not be the fruition of everything which Irishmen had hoped for, but it would

be, he believed, the fruit-ion of- so' much that Irishmen, if they were true to themselves, would make the fountain and the* source from which the whole of their hopes might be fulfilled.' The other part of the c message of hope ' was delilivered in the House of Commons by Mr. Brype, Chief Secretary for Ireland. 'It was,' he said, ' the wish of the Government to secure equal justice for all classes in Ireland, to render Ireland peaceful and prosperous, and to see that respect for the law went hand in hand with that large measure of self-gov-ernment which they all thought Ireland w ought to enjoy.' • . ~" Time is the corrector of many a wrong. It is (as Rosalind said in the play) the Jus-tice of the Peace that tries and sentences old offenders. Slowpaced but sure, this great avenger has been on the side of the Irish people in their legitimate demand for the right to manage their own internal affairs. For over a hundred years they have been ' pining for the dawning of the day \ It has 'been ' lang acomin' '. But the sun seems to be peeping over the edge of the horizon at last. Twenty years ago (says the Dunedin ' Evening Star ' in the course of an eminently fair and well-informed article) even a scheme of devolution or co-ordination ' would have been damned with bell, book, and candle as vigorously as were the Gladstonian proposals for a separate and distinct Legislative Assembly on College Green. " The rising tide is with us ", said the Grand Old Man on one memorable occasion ; and the boast, interpreted in terms of time, has been marvellously justified. . . The social and moral forces at work throughout the civilised world are on the side of those communities which demand freedom to govern and develop themselves, subject, of course, to the paramountcy of the Sovereign Power by virtue of which the nation in its integrity is held together. All parties, as far as Ireland is concerned, are agreed that the past is a black record that has to be wiped out ; the difference is merely one of how far and how soon shall the forward move be taken.' There will, of course, be tf>e customary vilification, threats of rebellion, etc., ' from the little knot of representatives from one small and ' yellow ' corner of Ireland who are traditionally known in the House of Commons as ' the deadheads of Ulster '. Our local evening contemporary displays an intimate acquaintance with the methods of political propaganda usually adopted by the ascendancy party in Ireland :— 'We may safely anticipate exciting scenes, angry recriminations, and sensational language. The colosvies particularly, if the history of the past may be take» as a precedent, will be supplied with concise details of outrages that never happened, and of disloyal sentiments which, shorn of their context, will look very black. In this connection, however, it is well to remember that the ebullitions of religious rancor, the creation of irrelevant issues, and the assumptions as to what will or will not follow ought not so affect our judgment on the justice of the fundamental principle to which the Imperial Government propose to effect. Much of our cable news, experience 'has shown, should be accepted with caution: The Camp-bell-Bannerman Ministry during the recent session complained strong-ly of the nature of the news received from and sent to South Africa, and felt constrained to take steps to counteract its unfortunate tone ; whilst Sir William Butler, an able and proved public servant, a few weeks since gave publicity to the statement that the telegrams published in the London press prior to the outbreak of the Boer War, which were instrumental in rousing popular sentiment, were written out after dinner in a certain well-known house near Cape Town every Sunday, and then flashed across the wires in time for the Monday morningpapers. We mention these items as we believe it to be imperative, now that the Empire is on the eve, not perhaps of- a Home Rule Bill in the Gladstonian sense, but of a larger measure of representative local self-government, that colonists generally should preserve " a dispassionate and judicial standpoint, and not permit themselves to be swayed by what ma^ be termed ex parte snapshots.'

Forewarned, forearmed. When t*»>,storm of calumny and vituperation bursts— as it surely will— and, its outer wavelets strike these shores, there will, we trust, be many who will recall the fair and outspoken warning of our Dunedin evening contemporary. We have done our part, even at a recent date, in exposing the detailed Irish ' outrages that never happened '. It is not well for either man or newspaper to be alone in opposing a reactionary crusade against , popular -rights. And in this battle for the right we gladly welcome so outspoken an ally as the ' Star '. There now lives in New York, in a green and honored old age, an Englishman who sang the rights of Ireland at a- period far removed from that in which they were advocated by the greatest and most progressive party in the Westminster Parliament. His name is William James Linton — artist, engraver, and poet. Under the pseudonym of ' Spartacus ', he wrote much stirring verse to the Dublin ' Nation ' in its palmy days— songs which formed a miniature epic embracing the whole cycle of Ireland's wrongs. They closed full many a year ago with a prophetic lay of triumph, in which he pictured as follows a happy nation freed from the grip of landlord tyranny and irresponsible Castle rule : * ' The Happy Land ! Studded with cheerful homesteads fair to see With garden grace and household symmetryHow grand the wide-browed peasant's lowly mien, The matron's smile serene— O happy, happy land ! ' The days of ' Spartacus ' are now far in the yellow leaf. Yet he that poured the tonic of hope into hard-tried and despondent souls may yet, even in his life's decline, witness the beginnings of the happy days that he prophesied for the land of the tear and the smile. If, however, this is to come to pass, there must be no tinkering and half-measures over Home Rule. Such a course would serve only to exasperate, by raising hopes and then dashing them to the ground.