A Precious Pair

New Zealand Tablet, 8 November 1906, Page 9

A Precious Pair

A lank, pinched, sooty-handed philosopher of . Laputa spent eight yeais upon a project .for extracting- sunbeams out oL cucumbers. His task was -labor' -dire and heavy woe. But it -was as easy as making an applc-dumplin-g compared with -the hopelessness of any effort to extract ' the truth from those "^ wandering pets of Ananias who,_under the generally "false . designation of 1 ex-priests, and '. ex-nuns ', make a dishonorable livelihood by coarsely maligning the Catholic Cnuieh, and body. Six years ago our ' Pink -Pamphlets.' chased out of New • Zealand, Tasmania, and Australia a particularly odious pair of impostors— to^wit, the Slatterys — and

relegated them to. the obscurity which they were so well fitted to adorn. Plausible liars need a good memory, the constructive faculty,. a sense of proportion, and, a nice perception" of probabilities. Siattery and the female . impostor who accompanied , him were notably deficient in all these qualities. ' They lie bravely ', said we in one of our 'Pink Pills' (the name by which our widely-circulated pamphlets „ came to .be popularly known) ; ' but they lie so clumsily .and .inconsistently that they overstep the bounds of their art, aticd become, not so much relatively" "clever De Rougemonts, as vulgar, second-hand Munchausens— mere retailers'of other impostors' wares '. . p This precious pair of low Zolaesque romancers appear to have once more emerged from their retreat and to have begun again preaching *the sacrosanct gospel, of, assafoetida at the American equivalent of ' front seats one shilling, back, seats sixpence. ' Brann's Iconoclast 1 (a sprightly non-Catholic Texas journal) has taken the male fraud in hands, suspended the rules (as" is fitting in dealing -with such' animals)," and wiped the earth with him to the following lively tune (we quote from the San Francisco "Monitor ') : \ ThQre are three kinds of liars in the land : The harmless Munchausen who romances for amusement, and whose • falsehoods do no harm.; the Machiavellian liar, whose mendacity bears the stamp: ot original genius, and the stupid prevaricator, who rcchews the fetid vomit of other villains .simply because he lacks a fecund brain to breed falsehoods to which he may play the father. And Slattery 's a rank specimen of the latter .class," When, he.attempts to branch out for himself he invariably comes to grief. After giving a dreadful account of how Catholics persecute those who renounce the faith, declaring that they we're a disgrace t 0 the Church while they were" within its pale," he' produced a certificate from a Philadelphia., minister to the effect that he— the Philadelphian— had visited- Slattery's -oldparish in Ireland and- the ""Catholics there declared that he was a good and faithful priest ! What Slattery seems to lao\ to become a first-class fraud is continuity of thought.- He lies fluently; -even entertainingly, but not consistently.' The Genial Showman once said that ' it would have bin ten dollars in JeflLDavis's pockets if he'd never been born . It would have been dollars galore in Slattary's pocket if -he had never bumped up against the ' Iconoclast "or the. 'New Zealand Tablet '. Strewers of .poisoned tinned-tacks always safely waltz about bkiefooted. . And wherever the Cliftondale adventurers may stroll in search of filth-stained shekels, they will probably iceep clear of our tight little islands. - -