Current Topics

New Zealand Tablet, Volume 12, 12 November 1908, Page 9

Current Topics

A Jewish- View The London Jewish Chronicle of September 18 joins heartily . in the demand for equal treatment of -Catholics and removal of; the tatters of^the penal laws against Catholics that still disgrace" the British statute book. 'We csuinot, ' says the Chronicle, in the course pf an able and broadminded article, ' help expressing our regret that the great procession in connection with the Eucharistic Congress should have been interfered with by Government in so intolerant a fashion. The fact that a handful of extreme Protestants, calling into^their aid an obsolete law, should be able to impose their will upon the authorities proves that as yet religious toleration is by no means an assured thing in this country. We Jews, therefore, who have known what it is -to struggle for the barest shadow of indulgence all over the world, cannot be indifferent when we see the members of another faith treated in an unequal fashion. We trust that the bigots will not be allowed another opportunity of exercising their will, but that the law will speedily be amended so as to render religious freedom something more of a living reality in this " land of the free." ' The 'Popish Plot* The annual celebration of the ' Popish Plot ' in Australia and New Zealand is sick almost unto death. Even the habituds of the Saffron Sash lodges have in great part ceased to make any of the old fuss about it. They have, as a rule, no clear notion as to 1 Why we remember The fifth of November ' ; and most people who have read history — and not the sort of romance that contains much more of hysteria than of history — would be well pleased to let Ihe memory of those events drop to the bottom of the Well of Oblivion and remain there. The central villain in the drama was the infamous Titus Oates. Behind him stood his master in villainy, Scroggs. And between them they played many a diabolical prank before high heaven. A non-Catholic writer in Black-wood's Magazine belabors the pair with many a well-aimed blow. ' Never,' says he, ' were so many judicial murders committed in England within a few years' space. The King saw his loyal subjects go to the gallows, and was powerless to interfere even if he would. " I cannot pardon them," he said, " for I dare not." The origin of the plot, or rather the belief in the plot, is a mystery. We know no moro t;han that the English people, being mad, interrupted the course of justice, insisted that the_ judges should condemn every man brought before them suspected of papistry, and eagerly ' believed the stories of hired perjurers. Scroggs, a very scourge of Catholics, was a di unken scoundrel who did as he was told, and vastly preferred popularity or profit to 'justice. His minion, Oates, held England spell-bound. He cheerfully swore away the lives of honest men, and doing this hejjfon the perfect sympathy of the people. His success was due to courage and effrontery. There was no sound reason why his word should be taken by any just man. His career before he set up as an informer was as infamous as it had been cunning. The son of an Anabaptist, he had professed" many faiths and brought discredit upon all. Disloyalty was in his blood. His body was" as ill favored* as his mind. A low man, of an ill-cut, very short neck ; his mouth in the centre of his face. A compass there would sweep his nose, forehead and chin >\vithin the perimeter. He was one of whom it could be said : " Cave quos ipse Deus notaatf— Beware 'of those whom God has stamped." ♦ He had already been prose-/ cuted for perjury before he came forth as the champion of " Protestant tru!.h. 5> No Catholic would ever dare say suci things with the slightest hope of being believed.' Some * Bulls' A ' bull ' (of the Irish variety) has been described as, n mental no-thoroughfare. But many genuine . ' bulls ' contain a truth— but a truth that might advantageously have been otherwise expressed. Of such, for instance, jfc the example given by a New Zealand Sunday-school superintendent (as reported in ihe Dynedin Outlook) : 'In choosing his men, Gideon did not select those who . laid aside their arms and threw themselves down to drink ; he took those who watched with one eye and drank with the other.' The whicn contains a truth, but the truth is made'

to impinge, at one or more points, in a- contradiction that crumples it (in the region of the impact) into .a shape as droll or grotesque as that which the architectural jokers of the middle .ages gave .to their grinning gargoyles. The same remark applies to the" testimony of one Mrs.- Mary Sullivan, who (as reported by the Irish Weekly of September 26) recently appeared before 'the -Cork Police Court and gave a sad account of' her husband's delinquencies. The emphasis of his methods of ruling his household resulted (she explained) in her having to ' go to a hospital for alterations and repairs. 'We have been married for seventeen years,', she further explained. Whereupon^ the : magistrate reiflarked : ' If you have lived with him seventeen .years, why not live with him now?' ' Sure,'" replied she, 'if I was livin' with him up to this time, I'd be dead a/id buried long ago.' ' ,

The production of verbal ' bulls ' is, in the popular mind, particularly associated with Ireland. Its literary pastures have, no doubt, produced some splendid examples of this peculiar figure of speech. But such ' bulls ' are the monopoly of no country. The oratorical history of the British House of Commons is graced by many a literary gem of this form, of purest ray serene. Thus (to mention only the first few that occur to our memory), Mr. B. L. Cohen, M.P., told an opponent a few years ago that ' the sheet anchor of his (the opponent's) argument is not one which will be listened to by the mouth of this House.' About, the same time a prosy Scottish member was one night groping and droning and hum-hum-humming through a dreary speech that went wearily on for almost an hour. At its close he startled his hearers with this parting burst of eloquence : ' Sir, look at the great cities of antiquity ! Where are they now ? Some have perished so completely that it is extremely doubtful if^they ever existed.' The jewel was well worth waiting for, and the House rocked with laughter. ' I will now,' said another British legislator, ' repeat what I was about to say when the honorable member interrupted me.' ' The West Indies,' declared another, ' will now have a future, .which they never had in the past.' 'Ah ! ' exclaimed yet another, ' the honorable member opposite shakes his head at that; but he can't shake mine.' It was an Australian legislator who declared : ' The interests of employers - and employed are 'the same in nine cases out of ten — I will even say ninety-nine cases out of ten.' When Governor of New Zealand, Lord Ranfurly perpetrated a rather pretty ' bull ' at the opening of the Otago Jubilee Exhibition in Dunedin in 1898. In the course of his opening speech, he strongly urged the youth of the Colony to. ' put their shoulders to the wheel and roll the ball up-hill.' Later on, at a public reception at Napier, he " told the children present (in a somewhat similar strain) that ' if they put their shoulders to the wheel they would be sure to reach the top of the tree.' A compatriot of Lord Ranfurly 's, who was present, remarked, with a smile : ' Sure, it's an axl(ftree he means.' A few years later (in 1901) Mr. Hogg made this remark in the House of Representatives : ' I am glad to see that there are no absentees present.' And Mr. Haselden, in a on the Compulsory Taking of Land Bill, spoke of a woman who was the first man to carry a gun into the back-blocks in order to prevent her land from bgjjg, taken away.

In igoi, a committee in Manchester issued a circular in which it summarised Mr. Chamberlain's policy in South Africa in the following terms : ' Vexation, irritation, destroy all, and grab the rest.' Here are a few flowers of topsy-turvy- fancy culled, at random from the newspaper press : ' The gas-lamps, which at this time were not yet lighted, made the streets appear yet ■ darker.' * Death trod with rough hand, this tgnder blossom.' ' The new political current failed to take root in this district:" 5 Great authors ,have full many a 'time and oft "adorned their works with ' bulls ' that owe nothing- to slips of mere expression. Thus, Defoe makes Robinson Crusoe swim ashore' on his island, entirely divested of his clothing.^ which* he had left on the wreck), and yet carry with him pocketfuls of biscuits.' Anthony Trollope, in one of his novels, represents Andy Scott, as ' coming whistling up the streef~with a cigar in his mouth. ' It* would have • been interesting to have seen Trollope" essaying the task of simultaneously .smoking a cigar, and whistling' 1 (say) " a jig or strathspey. 'In one of his • works, . Thackeray makes Lady Kew die ; mo're- [■ over; he coffins and buries her, and dismisses her from the,.story. Forgetful of her extinction, • he serenely introduces her later on •' ~ into the working' of the plot of his tale. And did "not Wilkie Collins perform the feat of making the moon rise in the west? "TJhere are ' bulls ' and ' bulls '; but these are prize-takers in their "class.

Those Penal Laws ' It is permissible,' says Dom Oswald Hunter Blair, 0.5.8., in the Glasgow Observer of September z6 X ' to express the opinion that the energies of Catholics, and of all liberal-minded people who '• sympathise with them in this matter, .had much better be turned, '■ not against those who would enforce " obsolete or obsolescent " laws, but in the direction of sweeping from the statute book of England the last relics of the penal provisions which still disgrace it. * Catholics are still ineligible for some of the highest offices of State ; they are insulted by being forbidden to present to livings, while Jews, atlieists, even Buddhists and Mahomedans, have no such -disabilities ; they cannot bequeath property to Religious Orders of men, who have indeed no legal right to live or work in the United Kingdom at all ; and at every fresh accession of a monarch to the throne of an empire which includes millions of their co-religionists, they have to listen to publiclyuttered blasphemies against the deepest and dearest mysteries of their faith. The events of the past few weeks should spur on every Catholic to work by every constitutional means for the abolition of these final vestiges of a fcigoted and persecuting age.' * The same idea finds expression in the London Tablet of September 26. 'As long, ' it says, 'as the penal clauses of the Emancipation Act were treated by the Government and the police as obsolete, there was no disposition on the part of Catholics to quarrel with their presence on the statute book. Now that the Prime Minister has publicly referred to them as though they formed part of the living law of the country, the whole ■"situation is transformed. We have now an obvious and indeed an inevitable duty before us. We must take the field at once and never rest until we have won full liberty of public worship and the equality of all religions before the law. If in any instance the civil 'authorities are satisfied that, owing to the ignorance or brutality or bigotry of the neighborhood, a Catholic procession cannot be held without danger of disturbance, we shall of course, acquiesce. All we ask is for the fair treatment which is accorded to the members of every other religion, and the removal'^ of legal disabilities aimed only at Catholics. Let us be judged as the rest of our countiymen are judged, and we are content. ' A Wanganui War-whoop Somebody has defined hell as a place whe>"e people mind their own business. Some people— like, for instance, the late Paul Pry— would find this earth a place of torment if, by some stroke of fortune, they were prevented from putting their fingers into other people's pies Even in this advanced and enlightened Dominion there exists a Mo-Popery coterie— happily a small one— who have banded themselves together to ' reorganise ' Catholics along the lines of the penal laws by excluding them, as far as lies in their power, from every office and employment in the gift of the State and" of public bodies. On initiation, they, holding the Bible in their hands, take an oath or ' obligation,' bindine themselves (among other things) to do what lies in their power to exclude Catholics, as such, from parliamentary and municipal hfe The 'true blues' of the order cast longing looks at the condition of the British statute book before the passing of Catholic Emancipation, which was described as a • fatal error by the Victorian Standard, which, in its issue of April 30, xSo? described itself as ' the accredited organ of the [Orange] Instiution ,n Victoria.' Eve« in this dawn of the twentieth century, there is, to the brethren, a very real meaning in the old ascendancy motto o their order, which laid down, as a condition of the,r loyalty to the throne, the perpetual exclusion of Catholics -and of Dissenters of every brand-from the electors' roll, from Parhament, f.om the benches of justice, from the army and revenue, and from every branch arfld detail of the public service The present-day oath of die brethren is an effort to turn back the hand of time and to subject Catholics to the disabilities which they formerly extended to Dissenters of every faith. - * All this sufficiently explains an anonymous epistolary warwhoop which appeared in a. recent issue of the Wanganui Chronicle. Men do not put "on masks in order to tell the honest TT' ° r rv tO a , ° Cate fasr -P la y- or to champion 'honor-bright. And, as Disraeli once remarked, the normally constituted man can have only feelings of contempt: for the varlet who pelts you with mud as you. pass by, and then takes refuge behind a dustbin of anonvrmty. But one cannot expect open-faced or.straightforwaid " attack from those who carry on operations in the dark like ratsm a cellar. The Wanganui public were, for" instance, in!*, formed that the whole public service is swarming with Catholics." Nobody, of course, believes this story, and, least of all, those who

retail it on the eve of general elections. , The public will easily recall the unofficial census of religious beliefs of members of the public service made in 1901-2 by the N.Z. Tablet. The results, published in detail, man by man, and week by week, in the Tablet, sufficiently explain the universal repugnance to proof or investigation exhibited by those who spin this 'painful yarn.' For years, New South Wales fang — at election times, of course — with cries of the ' stuffing ' of the public service by Catholics. So great, indeed, was«the clamor that a committee of investigation was appointed by Parliament. "'The results, published in a Blue Book, are before us. They show that certain denominations were represented in the public service well in advance of their numerical proportion to the population of the Slate. The cream of the joke was this : that the particular denomination that headed all the others was precisely, -the one whose clergy (a few of them) had made the greatest clamor and hullabaloo about the overrunning of the service by ' Papjshes.' As a matter of fact, the Catholics were represented in the public service of New South Wales well below their numerical percentage of the population, but by no means so far below it as they are in the Dominion of New Zealand. In the matter of relative salaries, the disproportion is much greater in New South Wales, and vastly greater in New Zealand. Our detailed investigations throughout New Zealand gave us very solid reasons for the conviction that there is at least one particular denomination represented in the public service, both in persons and in salaries, well beyond its relative strength in the population. But that denomination is not the Catholic ; and we by no means .suggest that it has achieved this success (assuming' that our conviction is well grounded) by other than fair and honorable means. We have several times invited an official investigation into this recurrent electioneering story. We invite it once more. And once more we intimate our willingness to indicate lines of investigation into Orangeism in the public service that, if pursued, might, in our opinion, lead to interesting developments. So much by the way.

Here are a few shrieks from the Wanganui Chronicle which deserve the wider circulation of these columns as samples of the utter recklessness and ferocity of religious passion that exists in a small class in the Dominion : ' If matters go on as at present, we will ' (sic— there North-east Ulster spoke) ' have to fight in the near future for our liberties as our fathers did in the olden time. . . Rome is chief adviser to our Premier. His methods are Rome's methods. . . Every vote ca?t for the present Government is a vote against Protestant liberties, free speech, and a free press.' And so on and on. Comment on such hysteria would be a form of sacrilege. One can only look on and wonder, as one looks and wonders at his first sight of that strange survival of a past epoch, the moloch horridus of Western Australia— which is hideous to look on, but slow and harmless, despite its warlika appearance.