Current Topics

New Zealand Tablet, 4 September 1913, Page 21

Current Topics

Bergson Henri Louis Bergson, whose Modernistic works nave, according to Thursday's,cables, been condemned by the Pope as embodying false theories and seeking to undermine fundamental truths, is 53 years old and at present Professor of Philosophy at the College of France. Among his books, which have given rise to much discussion, are Matter and Memory, Laughter, and an analysis of Evolution. Bergson has just returned from a lecturing tour in the United States but his vague and nebulous theories do not seem to have exactly taken America by storm. One western paper declared, with brutal bluntness, that the philosophy propounded by Bergson might be summed up in the line of the song, 'I don't know where I am going but I'm on my way.' . • \ ;; ' Proportional Representation Our esteemed and usually well-informed contemporary, the London Universe, in its issue of July 18 has the following 'While the House of Commons in England' is tinkering with* the electorate, New Zealand has made one more advance towards a stable and equitable method of exact proportional .representation. It tried the second ballot in 1908, but that system of bare majority representation has not proved satisfactory. It has now adopted the system of Proportional Representation, which Tasmania has proved to be admirably effective in giving a true and complete reflex in election of the mind of the country.' .'■[. ■> '■■'■'-'.-■' ' * ■.-'•'■-.' We are sorry to say that our contemporary's announcement is premature. Provision for a modified form of proportional representation in the election of members of the Legislative Council has indeed been included in the new Bill "for making our Upper House elective, which is now before Parliament; but there is at present little prospect of the Bill becoming law. Regarding proportional representation as a settled feature of our whole electoral system, New Zealand has, like many other countries, been talking very seriously about it but considering the overwhelming weight of evidence in favor of the reform the progress made by the movement is surprisingly slow. The Federation and Politics - As the outcome of Father O'Reilly's remarks at Bathurst, considerable discussion is taking place in Catholic circles in New South Wales as to the relation "of the Catholic Federation to politics and it is just as well, when the matter is on the tapis, that it should •be thoroughly threshed out and be done with. In the course of the discussion an exceedingly good point is made by a Mr. James Bilsborrow— is, we understand, a well-known citizen of Bathurst—in a letter addressed to the Sydney Freeman's Journal.' After referring to the provisions of the Federation constitution on the subject, Mr. Bilsborrow continues: ' I would maintain that the statement in the constitution as published should stand. Our objection to the education system is not political. It is something quite outside the pale of politics. To require the children of the country to be educated up to a certain standard of secular knowledge is undoubtedly the province of the Government and of politicians; but when they require the education to be of a certain religious or irreligious type they are going beyond their authority and are trespassing on the domain of religion and conscience. And if we Catholics, as a protest against this trespass, choose to set aside our political views and vote against a candidate who is in favor of a continuance of this usurpation of authority, our action cannot be described as political, for it is the very - opposite. We are refraining from politics' for conscience' sake. It has been said that if we go to the Government for help for our schools or institutions we thereby make the Federation political. If this argument were sound, then those ' country hos-

pitals and Schools 4 of Arts whose Government subsidies have been withheld or reduced, and whose committees are working to obtain these subsidies, * are political organisations. Quod est absurdum.' ' ' ' '.. ■■; :"'.';,;,':'';."'■ 7.. ~■"-"• ,■.-•"'-.''".-' * '■;"'""',''.'-• C; \'';-'■■";-. '■-- "-•-- -■■ r. The point that in making a stand on a question of religion and conscience Catholics, so far from making their organisation a political one, are deliberately abstaining ; from politics ; for conscience' sake, is well taken. It will be noted? that Mr. Bilsborrow takes the attitude, already adopted in these columns, that the \ position of the Federation is correctly expressed in the constitution. -. -' More 'Garlandism' Canon Garland does not improve upon further and closer acquaintance. He has now been almost twelve months in this country and the early impression formed by many as to his want of straightforwardness, and lack of the spirit of fairness and of manly courtesy which is { desirable in -the leader of an ostensibly religious movement has "• been more and more "confirmed. The latest New Zealand .citizen to find out by painful personal experience what manner of man the imported League organiser is is Mr. A. R. Atkinson, of Wellington; and he has set forth his estimate of Canon Garland and his methods with a plainness and vigor that are calculated • to make even the most pachydermatous squirm. Mr. Atkinson's experience arose out of a misreport in one of the Wellington papers of an utterance made by him as head of a recent deputation to the Premier on the Bible-in- ■ schools; question. He had said: ' The application of the cry, "Trust the people," to the right of a majority to oppress a minority in matters of religion involves a strange combination of politican cant and religious dogma'; and two out of the three Wellington papers had reported him with substantial correctness. The third, howeverthe Dominion— misreported the speaker as saying, ' It is singular that the forces' working for the Bible-in-schools movement are a mixture of religious bigotry and political cant.' A week later—but without in the interval taking the trouble- to so much as give Mr. Atkinson a ring on the telephone to ascertain whether he had been rightly reported or to ask which version of his remarks was the correct —Canon Garland seized upon the report in only one paper as against that given in the other two, and proceeded to denounce Mr. Atkinson from, the pulpit as imputing ' superstitious hypocrisy to the members of the Bible in State Schools League, and as using against the League ' exactly the same language as was used by the (British) slave-owners who were defending slavery in attacking those who were against it.' Mr. Atkinson promptly wrote to the press explaining that he had never made such a statement as that attributed to him, either to the Prime Minister or to anybody else, and that it did not represent anything that had ever entered his thoughts. Bishop Sprott, who had also commented on Mr. Atkinson's supposed utterance, at once accepted that gentleman's disclaimer. But not so Canon Garlandthat does not happen to be Canon Garland's way. ,' -<:-,:'■ ~ ---'v- ~';/,' ;? ' * ; j - After waiting some , days to give the League organiser the opportunity to do the obviously honorable thing, Mr. Atkinson addressed to the press An Open Letter to Canon Garland,'in which, without any beating about the bush, he states exactly what he thinks about that gentleman's action and methods. We print the whole of the letter- elsewhere in this issue, but we may fittingly reproduce the passage in which. he sums up his estimateand, as he suggests, the estimate of the people of Wellington generally—;' Garlandism.' '.But the cup,' he writes,• 'is not yet full. The last and crowning act in your glorious triumph of Christian strategy has still to be told. It was on Monday that the reports which you supplied to the papers enabled me to know what was laid to my charge, and the Post allowed me to blow it to pieces that evening. On the same day, Bishop Sprott was generous enough to say ;• that he accepted iriy contradiction-, yet font'■:days have

'been allowed to pass without a word from youthe proud engineer of the whole businessby way of ' •apology, withdrawal, . qualification, or explanation to the man you had wronged, or to the public you had enisled. The people of Wellington are amazed that a leader; in a great religious movement should thus show himself blind to what has hitherto been regarded in this country as one of the fundamental obligations of honorable controversy. You have come to us from Australia as the advocate of a special system of religious instruction. -As to the merits of that system public opinion in this country is much divided. But there.is, I think, something like unanimity among us that some of the controversial methods which you have brought with you might, with advantage, have been left on the V>ther side of the water.' It is significant to- note that the objectionable methods which Mr.. Atkinson denounces are precisely the methods of which Bishop Cleary, the Rev. : J. H. Mackenzie, and Mr. John Caughley have had to make such frequent and bitter complaint. ,;."•■;; • ■ : ••'. . . * -":■'■■■"■;'. ■ . -""■'' About the same time that Mr. Atkinson was uttering his strenuous protest against the methods of the League organiser as ' applied to his own case Mr. Caughley was drawing attention in the Wellington papers bo a fresh series of misstatements and misrepresentations' perpetrated by Canon Garland in connection with the attitude taken by the teachers. As our readers Will remember, the N.Z. Educational Institute, representing nearly 3000 teachers, at the annual conference held at New Plymouth by an overwhelming majority declared against the League's proposals. Addressing '.a meeting of the Women's Bible-in-Schools League at St. John's Schoolroom, Wellington, the day after his denunciation of Mr. Atkinson, Canon Garland re- . marked : 'ln regard to the opposition of the teaching profession it was evident that there were dissentients amongst them. It was quite true that a resolution against the Bible-in-Schools League had been passed at the conference of teachers held at New Plymouth, but, at this conference, a pamphletthe work of Bishop Cleary and Professor Mackenzie—opposing the Bible-in-schools movement, had been placed before each delegate. There was no one to supply delegates with the Bible-in-schools' side of the case. What was the value of an opinion expressed in such circumstances?' Mr. Caughley, who was president of the Institute at the time the conference was held, has not the slightest difficulty in demolishing Canon Garland's assertions : and his clear, concise, and comprehensive refutation of the bundle of misstatements perpetrated by the League representative is given in full in another column. It is well deserving of the attention of our readers. Dr. Gibb takes a HandAmongst those who commented on the utterance falsely attributed to Mr. Atkinson was the Bev. Dr. Gibb, who delivered a characteristic broadside, and one which may quite possibly get him into trouble. Amongst other things, he said: 'We are guilty, too, of political cant." It is indeed hard to tell exactly what our censor means by this, but it is at least an insinuation that Ave are in a political sense insincere, or, in still plainer terms, hypocrites. Think of it! ■ Mr. A. R. Atkinson, being the self-constituted judge, the ministers and people of the Anglican Church, the Presbyterian Church, the Methodist Church, and the Salvation Army are a shoddy set of knaves, destitute of honesty of purpose and purity of- intention. It is a poverty-stricken cause that requires, the use of slander. Curses, they say, come home to roost. In the long run the insults which are being hurled at us by the Atkinsons and Clearys of New Zealand will injure not us but them, and the side for which they stand. This they Will presently find to their cost.' • * * In the course of one of his letters to the press denying having uttered the statements attributed to ' him, Mr. Atkinson thus refers to Dr. Gibb's ebullition 'lt is quite unnecessary for me to deal in detail

"with argument and denunciation which I have already proved to be based upon a misconception, and I value my dignity too much to be tempted into retaliation. With Dr. Gibb's personal attentions^to myself I am constrained' from dealing by the further -eason that 1 have laid the matter before my solicitor, with a vi«w to having it tested in a court'of law.' _ ; - • The Grey by Election Our contemporary, the Otago Daily Times, whose editorial utterances are usually characterised by carefulness and accuracy, was betrayed into a strange lapse from its customary high standard in this respect in a leading article which it devoted on Monday of last week to the subject of the Grey by-election. The Daily Times, as everybody knows, is a strong Government paper; and in its espousal of Mr. Michel's cause, following the lead of a Hokitika correspondent to whose communication we gave publicity., in" these columns, itsuggested that the Tablet had been a little less than just to that gentleman in that it had imputed some degree of personal responsibility on his part for the deplorable tactics that had been employed. In support of its contention our contemporary quoted professedly from the Tablet the sentence, ' It will take him all lie knows to live down the bad blood and ill impression left by • this most unpleasant and embittered contestwhich sentence was a mere tag to a paragraph which made it perfectly clear that it was Mr. Michel's -supporters who had employed the tactics reprobated, the bad blood referred to being obviously the bad blood between. Catholic and Protestant—and also the further sentence, 'The taint attaching to him in this election is morally certain to follow him into other contests.'[The italics are ours.] The following, reply, addressed to the Editor of the Daily Times, appeared in Wednesday's issue of the paper, and sufficiently explains itself. " ' Sir,—l am quite content to leave the utterances of the Tablet, on this subject to speak for, themselves provided that those who discuss them do not tear sentences from their context, and provided also that the would-be critics do not, as you have done, flagrantly misquote the Tablet. I had said that the Tablet's censures in connection with the by-election were meant for a section of Mr. Michel's supporters, and for Mr. Michel only so far as he failed (up to the time of the first ballot) promptly to repudiate and dissociate himself from the tactics employed. Not content to let the matter go at that, you insist on suggesting that the Tablet did nevertheless impute to Mr. Michel some degree of personal complicity in, or personal responsibility for, the discreditable tactics made use of, and you prove your contention' by interpolating into an alleged quotation from the Tablet words which were never written by mo and which have never appeared in the Tablet. You quote the Tablet as saying: The taint attaching to him in this election is morally certain to follow him into Other contests.' The words in this sentence which suggest direct personal culpability or responsibility are the words 'attaching to him;' and these words were never written by me and do not occur in the Tablet article from which you profess to quote. They are an interpolation, for which you are solely responsible. Let me give the sentence as it appears in the Tablet of July 24 : 'Moreover the taint attaching to this election is morally certain to follow him into future (not, as you say, 'other') contests." Your (interpolation, giving a directly personal turn to a sentence from which a personal reference had. been carefully excluded, was, of course, inadvertent but what is to be said or thought of the accuracy of a writer who cannot even quote cori rectly words that are under his very eyes? • * ' ■>-- ■■ .. ' '. :-;■-'•'■■• - /And there is something more to be said. The remaining clause of the very sentence you quote makes it clear as noonday that no direct personal reflection on Mr. Michel was intended. Let me quote the sentence in. full: "Moreover, the taint attaching to this election is morally certain to follow him into future -contests, and the mistake made by his Grey supporters is likely to cost him dear." That puts the matter with

perfect clearness; and that has been the position taken all along' by the Tablet on the subject—that deplorable tactics were employed by a section of Mr. Michel's supporters, that the employment of these tactics gave an "unpleasant taint to the election/and that it will take Mr. Michelman of : ability, as the Tablet has admitted liim. to beall he knows to recover the ground lost to 'him by the worse than stupid action of his followers. You may or may not agree with my conclusion on the matter, but at least I am. free from the charge of personal injustice to Mr. Michel, particularly when, as in the last issue of - the Tablet, I frankly acknowledged that my previous personal knowledge of that gentleman •was not calculated to suggest that he was a bigoted person. Reverting to your own comments, I would say: When an influential daily first of all flagrantly misquotes the Tablet, then builds an erroneous conclusion on its own misquotation, and finally suppresses the half bf a sentence which would have made the Tablet position perfectly clear, the influential daily is not exactly "playing the game," and something in the nature of an apology to the Tablet would be a fitting and graceful conclusion to the business. I have only to add that the explanation of the other sentence to which you allude was already before you in the Tablet of August 21, from which you quote, and has been repeated, by implication, in the remarks above made. Y, ,•■'..-,-- '. * In' the Tablet of July 24, before the result of the second ballot was known, I remarked: "Sooner or later such tactics are certain to recoil upon the candidate who employs-them, or who fails to condemn them when they are being employed- by his supporters." That statement has been already partly verified, and it is in danger of receiving, still further illustration. For I have good reason for surmising that the Reform candidate for Grey at the general election will himself 'be a Catholic. How far the bad blood which has, been aroused between Catholic and Protestant in the Grey electorate is calculated to help him to win the seat for the Government, you yourself may be safely left to 'judge. am, etc., ' Editor N.Z. Tablet. 'August 26.' - * ■ ■ The following apology by the Editor of the Daily Times was appended in a footnote to the above letter: ' We regret the interpolation in one of the quotations from the Tablet of two words that did not appear in it. The interpolation was inadvertent,"as our correspondent courteously admits.'