Current Topics

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXVI, Issue 21, 28 May 1908, Page 9

Current Topics

Dirty Bank Notes In a weird and 'creepy', story entitled 'The GermGrowers,' an Australian Anglican dignitary imagined, some years ago, a colony of half-demons, half-men, living in the heart of the great lone continent. The chief occupation of these malignant beings was to produce the germs of various deadly diseases and distribute them to the ends of the earth in invisible 'volors,' or balloons. But, as the bacteriologists assure us, there is little need for the germ-plcfts or the guidable germ-balloons, so long as such things as milk and meat and dust and clothing and bank notes form such excellent vehicles for the propagation and spread of deadly microbes, from those of influenza and lockjaw up to those of typhus and cholera morbus. Most people would, perhaps, be quite willing to accept a barrowful of the uncancelled notes of a solvent bank, and take their chance with whatever microbes had their local habitation therein. But Dr. Purdy (District Health Officer) has been suggesting to the Auckland Chamber of Commerce a means by which the public may, so to speak, pull the teeth of the microbes that infest filthy bank notes. You simply take a file and run it through the note. This does not destroy its face value, but it would probably prevent its re-issue. Some of the bank notes in circulation seem to have passed through a charmin ' variety of experiences — per varios casus, per tot discrimina rerum — and to have picked up samples of every sort of grime (and, presumably, of every family of germs) within the limits of the Dominion. They do things better in the Bank of England. An average of about £25.000,000 worth of its notes is constantly in the hands of the public. But no note, once received by the Bank, is re-issued. It is cancelled and destroyed. As many as 300,000 new notes are issued sometimes in one week, and the Bank of England paper thus remains clean and crisp, and its population of enemies of mankind, per square inch, must therefore be vastly less than that which swarms in the disgustingly filtby notes that one sees so often in New Zealand. Punishment in School Once again the question of corporal punishment in the schools has been ventilated in our courts during the past few days. And again, judgment has been given to the effect that the reasonable use of the rod for the preservation of necessary discipline is upheld by the law of the land; but that the teacher must mind his p's and q's in the matter of delegation and in the mode of infliction. * The incentives to study have changed almost as much in the past generation or two as the apparatus of education. .For the schoolboy brought up imder the old regime, the path of learning was strewn with thorns and nails and broken glass; bj r comparison the pupil of to-day passes between banks or roses, along a mossy carpet where only incautious feet strike tack or flint. Till a comparatively recent period, some of the traditions of the terrible Dr. Busby hung about our educational methods. 'Hudibras' has it that 'Men as resolute appear With too much, as too little, fear; And when they're out of hopes of flying, Will run away from death by dying, Or turn again to stand it out, And those they fled, like lions rout.' Fear was, under the old regime, the chief incentive to •work. And in the English public schools, and in the Lichfield and other Free Schools, men like Garrick, Addison, Ashmole, Locke, Dryden, Wollaston, Hooper, and so many others that bulk large iv English history, were 'birched into scholarship' on the 'altar of punishment' known as the flogging-horse. The 'too much fear' inspired by the Busby" methods seems to have spurred the youths of those times to scared exertions, and made them 'turn again to stand it out' against the difficulties that beset the thorny path of learning in those strenuous days. Our memory does not go far back, but it goes far enough to remember a school regime that was made a'

reign of terror by one who, like Goldsmith's pedagogue, was a man, a man severe and stern to view. Hood, the king of punsters, lamented lightly over the death of his hard-hitting old preceptor. 'He "died of a stroke," ' writes Hood; 'and I wonder none of his pupils have done the same. I have been flogged by many masters; but his rod, like Aaron's, swallowed up all the rest. "We often wished that he whipped on the principle of Italian penmanship — upstrokes heavy and downstrokes light; but he did it in English round-hand, and (we used to think) with a very hard pen. Such was his love for flogging that, for some failure in English composition, after being well corrected, 1 have been ordered to be revised. I have heard of a road to learning, and he did justice to it; we certainly never went a stage in education without being well horsed. The mantle of Dr. Busby descended on his shoulders — and on ours. . . . Pictures, they say, are incentives to learning; and certainly we never got through a page without cuts. For instance, I do not recollect a Latin article without a tail-piece. All the Latin at that school might be comprised in one line: "Anna virumque cano" — an arm, a man, and a cane. In one word, he was disinterestedly cruel, and used to strike as industriously for nothing as othter workmen strike for wages. Some of the elder boys, who had read Smollett, christened him Eoderick, from his often hitting like Random and being so partial to Strap. ' A Reform The 'S. H. Eeview' tells of a saloon-keeper (publican) in Renovo (Pennsylvania) who has begun a little reform movement on his own account. He advertises as follows in a local newspaper: — 'We wish to notify the wife who has a drunkard for a husband, or a friend who is unfortunately dissipated, to give us notice in writing of such cases as you are interested in, and all such shall be excluded from our place. Let fathers, mothers, brothers, and sisters do likewise and their request will be complied with. ' In this country, the real leaders of the Prohibition movemenb are not those whose names are commonly associated with it in that capacity. The real leaders are those scallywags in 'the trade' who set the human law and the moral law at defiance, and clutch at guilty shekels througli the souls of drunken fathers and sons and brothers. Up in a Balloon Says a cable message from London: — 'Messrs Kellow and A. J. Staughton, two Melbourne residents, ascended to a height of 4,800 ft in the Hon. Mr. Rolle's balloon, and travelled from Battersea to the shore of the North Sea at the rate of forty miles an hour. Mr. Kellow also made an ascent in Paris on M. Farman's aeroplane. ' The Hon. Mr. Rolle 's balloon is one of those enormous gas-bags with propelling mechanism that can drive the big, cigar-shaped contrivance more or less in a given direction through the fields of air, provided the conditions are favourable. But dirigeable balloons are 'kittle cattle,' as experience in England and France with warships of the air, and (a few days ago) American experience in Berkeley (California) when the Morrell airship, which was 450 ft long and propelled by five 40 horse-power engines, fell from a height of 300 ft on her trial trip, have testified. Maxwell's parodyballad of the balloon asks: ' Gin a body meet a body Flyin' through the air, Gin a body hit a body, Will it fly? and where?' And again: — 'Gin a body meet a body Altogether free, How they travel afterwards We do not always see.' Messrs. Kellow and Staughton may esteem themselves fortunate that their friends were able to tell how the balloonists travelled afterwards, and that their fate was not as that of the two French officers who first went up, and then went down, in the airship 'that never returned.' But, then, we cannot have omelettes without breaking eggs;

and there will probably be many more bones broken and many more lives lost before the world will have its practicable 'volor.' So it has been with the many who (aa Joaquin Millar hath it) 'Blazed out new ways for worlds to come, And mourned notj but bravely dumb, So died, full trusting God and time.' Of the pioneers of the new locomotion, many may yet pass, but in so far as each may have gone a little further than his predecessors in the path of achievement, the world is the better that they have lived and wrought and dared. The One Thing Needful When Calverley — he of the nonsense verses — went to school, and his companions 'never heard of Mrs. Grundy, ' all the theology they knew was that "they 'mightn't play on Sunday '; 'And all the general truths, that cakes Were to be bought at four a penny, And that excruciating aches Eesulted if we ate too many. ' That sort of thing represents about as much of moral truths and principles as a purely secular system of public instruction, left to itself, can well instil into the mind of girl or boy or hobbledehoy. It may impart a passable or sufficient measure of intellectual training. But that is not enough. The multiplication table or quadratic equations will not train the heart or develop the moral facilities or form the character. 'You said well,' said Vice-President Fairbanks (non-Catholic) to the faculty and students of the Jesuit College in Chicago a few weeks ago, 'that the education of the intellectual faculties, and the instilling of morality into the heart is the purpose of the school body. Yes, my friends, education, no matter how grand and how splendid it is, is a dangerous element if there does not go hand in hand with it the cultivation of the moral virtues in us. The permanence of our institutions does not rest alone upon the law; does not rest alone upon the virtue of constitutions and of statutes, no matter how wisely they may have been. framed or how well they may be expressed. In "the final analysis, the permanence must rest upon the honesty, upon the education and upon the morality of the great body of our countrymen.' Cardinal Logue We live and learn. The recent cable message about Cardinal Logue 's alleged prediction as to the dissolution of the Empire furnishes a fresh evidence of a crying need so often emphasised by vs — the need of a live Catholic News Agency. With such an institution in operation, and working in, so far as possible, with the secular news agencies, the full facts of the matter might have been placed before the Australasian public within four-and-twenty hours. Yes; we live and learn. And, where outside views and news of onr religion, its persons, and its institutions are concerned, we often learn in a hard school. But we are not in all respects apt scholars. For it seems to take a long, long course of hard knocks to make us realise in a practical way the extent to which the great world-channels of journalistic information are monopolised by agencies that are unfriendly to the Old Faith. _