Current Topics

New Zealand Tablet, 29 July 1915, Page 21

Current Topics

What Might Have Been \ Mr. ' Moreton Frewen, the . well-known, though decidedly erratic ex-member of the British Parliament, shares the opinion of I»r. Charles W. Eliot, President Emeritus of Harvard University, that the United States will yet take definite sides with Britain in the present war. In a special cable despatch to the New York Sun, he is quoted as saying:. r Circumstances again will be stronger than the pacifists. America will have to come in. Her intervention will. shorten the war by months, perhaps even by years. Napoleon said that wars are won one-quarter by physical and threequarters by moral forces. Such an irresistible moral force will be the arrival of the United States. It will paralyze Germany. America is "colossally rich, and never was so rich as now. She can finance the munitions of all the weaker States and will be a big brother to every little State when the terms of the great peace are under discussion.' • - * •• .. ■ The utterance of "his bold . prophet is rather a vision of what might have been than of what will be, at least while the present regime continues. The 'Council of the Churches' says it is immoral, to bet, and we could not, of course, be guilty of perpetrating what is condemned by such, an impeccable .authority. But if it were permitted to us to wager that President Wilson would not declare war on anything or anybody—and least of all on Germany-we would-be.as certain of winning as Father Coffey, was when he made his historic but not very theological and anything, but risky ' bet.' America and Munition Orders In the meantime, so far as assisting with munitions is concerned, America is already;- to a considerable extent filling the role indicated by Mr. Frewen ; and as she is thereby incurring the resentment and hatred of the Teutons, she might really, in view of the Lusitania and Orduna incidents, just as well take a decided stand, at least to the extent of cutting herself diplomatically adrift from Germany. We cannot pretend to be other than thankful that the Allies have been able to fallback upon the United States to make good the grave shortage of munitions, but we cannot recognise in America's readiness to supply war material any act or attitude of special friendship towards Britain or the Allies. * The justification advanced by the peace-professing President, and even by the ultra-pacificist Mr. Bryan, is that, technically and legally, it would be an ' unneutral ■'- act to prohibit the sale of munitions to any of the belligerents; and America has made it perfectly clear that she would be just as ready and willing to supply Germany with war material if only it were possible for that country to take delivery of the goods. And so it comes about that while the President and ex-Secretary of State are proclaiming the most beautiful and lofty • peace principles and ideals, America is all the time doing extremely well out of the war, and her citizens are making immense sums out of the huge orders for munitions that are being placed in their country. So keen are these pushful commercialists. in their chase for the dollar that America is actually .running the risk of' imperilling her own munition supplies in order to win the wealth that is so temptingly dangled before her. According to Washington despatches published ~ in American papers, ordnance officials of the United ' States Army are faced with a serious problem because of the number of highly trained employees at Government arsenals who have gone to private arms and ammunitions factories since the European war began. These men have been offered extraordinary advances in pay by the holders of huge contracts with the belligerent Governments, and several commissioned officers, experts in ordnance manufacture, have also gone into private employment. The result has been to threaten

serious embarrassment in keeping. the ;American Army . properly supplied. Virtually the entire force of trained men. in the manufacture of other than small arms, ammunition and sporting rifles were in - Government employ when the war began. Several cases' of men who were being paid £1 a day by the Government and. were now offered as high as £IOOO a year, have been reported. It takes time to train machinists to the special work of gun and ammunition building, and the contracts with belligerent Governments called for speed. The Government men were needed to train new employees; and they appear to have responded in enor- ; mous numbers to the inducement held out to them. . * si y The following table, published in American papers of June 12, shows approximately the companies which have received the largest foreign war orders. The figures represent Wall Street estimates of the. value of • orders actually placed for war material:

The arrangements for payment of these huge orders vary, but in cases where the need for plant extension lias arisen—and these are very numerous—outright advances ranging all the way from 10 to 75 per cent, of the value of an order have been made. Altogether, for a nation whose President spends so much of his time uttering beautiful transcendental thoughts about ' the healing, elevating influence of peace,' America stands to do not at all badly out. of the war. War Office Blundering There can be little doubt that in the savage attacks which have been made upon him by the Harmsworth press—the Loudon Times and the Daily Mail —Lord Kitchener has been made, to a very large extent, the scapegoat for the unmitigated stupidity of the War Office; and it is the gilded nincompoops of this egregiously red tape department of British administration that should really have received the trouncing. The British Foreign Office is admittedly the most capable and the War Office is notoriously the most incompetent and inefficient international administrative body in all Europeor out of it. In point of all-round chuckleheadedness and infinite capacity for muddling, the ' British War Office is, without doubt, the ' dizzy limit.' The English are undoubtedly an easy - going, not to say phlegmatic people. If the War Office in any other country in the world had a record of bungling—and consequent: unnecessary sacrifice of life—such as can be laid to the charge of the English figure-heads,' there "would, be red riot and revolution, and a rude awakening for the swaggering nobodies who have been allowed so long to lord it, unchecked and unrestrained. Here are a few of their achievements, as noted by a correspondent of the London Globe. ' I know of 2000 tons of steel lying at the rolling mills for six weeks waiting for inspection, contractors absolutely ruined through having their money laid out. for material and being unable to get it inspected, -machines and men standing idle, incapable men in authority sending out specifications and drawings ; then after ; the contractor has made his gauges,

and. in some cases bought his material, the drawings are altered, specifications altered;, and even a different kind of material demanded. I can cite a case where,no less than three changes were made in drawing, while eleven different specifications were sent to the. contractor. ". The contract called for delivery within a given period of time. Ye gods, would you believe it, seven days after that specified time had expired the final amended specification arrived!' , .. . } * -■-.-.' '.. 1 .-. Mr. T. P. O'Connor, M.P., supplies a few further items, in a statement whose temperate and carefully restrained terms afford a sufficient guarantee of their truth. Now that one is free to speak, I hope Mr. Lloyd George will pay attention to some of the complaints which have been rife on this question of armaments. War is a time for rumors; and, therefore, one must be very careful in accepting any, statement that one hears. But I have heard some statements from so many quarters, and so many other members of Parliament have heard them, that it is necessary to call the attention of Mr. Lloyd George to them. The most frequent and insistent of these statements is that London is full of men, both from great English and great American factories, who declare their readiness and their ability to supply the Government with millions of shells of all kinds; that they have hitherto failed to get even a proper hearing for "their offers; that often their offers have remained unanswered, or been answered by a formal printed notice, and then were heard of no more. I think it right also to mention a complaint I have heard from more quarters than one—namely, that in these offers of shells men found themselves confronted with the necessity of going through a particular purchasing agent of the Government in the United States, and that this is a condition which some important American firms will not submit to.' All this fully bears out Sir Hiram Maxim's assertion that an adequate supply of the right sort of shells can be secured without serious difficulty if the undertaking is gone about in the proper way. That is Mr. Lloyd George's new task; and Mr. O'Connor, who is in a particularly good position to judge, is confident that the Minister of Munitions will speedily effect a changein the situation, and will mend or end the representatives of the great Circumlocution Office which has already so much to answer for. Sir Hiram Maxim Speaks The recently published autobiography of Sir Hiram Maxim reveals him as a man of abounding self-assur-ance and of an almost aggressive though delightfully unconscious egotism which greatly discounts the- value of his very confident dicta on religious and theological subjects. But when he speaks on explosives and other mechanico-scientific topics he is on ground which he has made specially his own. On these matters he speaks as one having authority, and he is entitled to be listened to with attention and respect. The great inventor and gun king has recently been giving his views on the subject of high explosives and poisonous gas, and his statements, carrying as they do the special weight attaching to the utterance of the expert, are both interesting and reassuring. He explains, in simple fashion, the composition of the principal explosives at present in use : and for the benefit of those of our readers who are scientifically inclined we quote the passage. 'lt appears that the old-fashioned black gunpowder has practically gone out of use in modern warfare. The German slow-burning brown powder that was used twenty-five years ago was chemically the same as black powder, but the charcoal was not burnt until it was jet black, and the nitrate of potash was not so finely ground as in the ordinary black powder, and it was this that caused it to be slow burning. The present explosives are principally tri-nitro-cellulose and nitro glycerine. The nitro glycerine and tri-nitro-cellulose, which is guncotton, can be mixed together, and these two, with a little vaseline added, is the smokeless powder of the British Army. Carbolic acid, which is made from coal tar, can, be nitrated the same as guncotton,

and £8 known as tri-nitrc-phenol, or-picric; acid. Picric acid; is modified* to ; some.extentwhen used as a bursting charge in projectiles if a small quantity of vaseline is mixed -with ft; it becomes i less • sensitive to shock, while t its disruptive effects: are .practically J the same.' And. then-he? gives 4 us a valuable and cheering ! assurance as to the prospect of "an, adequate supply of . the' muchdesiderated, high explosives. ' I have never been among those;.who. have taken a gloomy outlook of the gigantic war in which : this country is engaged : certainly: I do not -think i ! that; eventually the Germans will triumph over us owing to our. want of scientific skill and equips ment. Just now, we are hearing a good deal about the lack of _. : high explosives, but there as no. reason 'why there should be any deficiency, as-vast quantities can be readily made in England, and, in addition, to that, I have: knowledgein fact I am in touch with those whom,, for the nonce, I will call outsiders, who are both able and willing to furnish'any quantity that may be demanded. I repeat that there is no reason whatever why there, should be any task of high ea-jrfosives, though we might not get all our deliveries immediately, from foreign makers. But August would certainty be the latest date.* ■:,<■■- * ..,-.--•■ Sir Hiram then devotes his attention to the German use of asphyxiating gas, and declares definitely and emphatically that he has devised a completely successful method of countering the Germans' scheme. ' I do not believe that war by chemicals or poisons will be very long lived. It is quite true that chlorine in a, gaseous form mixed with air has proved very effective recently, but'this was because it was a surprise to us. It was something new, and we were not prepared for it. Chlorine in gaseous form is two and a half times as heavy as air, but in escaping from the receptacles in which it is contained it mixes with it at least five times its volume of air, and this, of course, reduces its specific gravity correspondingly, then, as it is .blown clown on the English trenches, it mixes with more air, and by the time it reaches our men there is at least twenty times as much air as chlorine ; but this mixture is quite strong enough to produce fatal results. Of course, when there is twenty or thirty times as much air as chlorine, the mixture is only" slightly heavier than the surrounding air, and it does not take much to dissipate it. And that is the last job I have been .working on. I have designed an apparatus that will dissipate these poisonous gases very cheaply and effectively, and it is being made at the present moment; but of course it would not do to divulge the system I employ. As this apparatus of mine will remove all the terrors of chlorine, it is safe to say that its use will be discontinued. The War Office is' receiving thousands of suggestions and systems from cranks who know nothing whatever of science or mechanics, and if they put me in the'category of cranks the apparatus will not appear.' It may be trusted that even the War Officeunspeakably stupid as it has shown itself to be —will -not assign Sir Hiram Maxim to the category of cranks without giving his project careful and thorough examination. i - ■> The Church-and-Bible Fiction The : usual Orange celebrations in memory of the glorious, pious, and immortal' William have come and gone, and the New Zealand public are, for the most part, in blissful ignorance of the fact that they have ever been held. At a time like the present, New Zealand citizens have something much more, serious to think about. The larger and more reputable dailies have been judiciously silent regarding these gatherings and the crazy utterances which form their characteristic feature.- Some of the journalistic smaller fry, however, gravelled for lack of decent reading matter and wanting in a sense of the fitness of things, have disfigured their columns and insulted their Catholic readers and subscribers by finding room for the " oratorical hysteria which does duty for a ' sermon on the occasion of this annual outbreak 1, of ..... cerebral trouble ;. in . * the Orange camp. s Included in : this ignoble company ;is the • Wai-

mat* Advertiser, which printa ■ a lengths rep%i of an address delivered vat Waimate 'a by "the Rev J HI. J: \ Liddell, a Methodist minister of Timaru.' It is worth noting, by the way, that these reverend = Orange worthies rarely have the courage to let off their 12th of July ; fireworks in their own > pulpits; they exchange churches for - the day, and thus avoid unpleasantness with their possibly indignant or disgusted congregations". Brother Liddell worked off a number of f ancient and vulgar falsehoods of which any Christian man, to say nothing of a Christian minister, to be heartily ashamed to make himself the mouthpiece; and he gave especial prominence to the old sing-song story which represents the Catholic Church as hostile to the Bible. He contended,' says the Waimate sheet's report, 'that the Papal Church, which boasted that it never changed, would, if given the power, again close the Bible, interpreting it to the common people in such a way as to serve its own purposes of taxation.' ■«.:.'.'■:■■ ■■, .•::-.■. There was a time when this old superstitionthat the Catholic Church forbids to her children the reading of the Sacred Scriptures—was widely believed. But ' The legendary tales that pleased of yore Can charm an understanding age no. more.' The course of historical study. and ' the schoolmaster abroad ' have combined to pole-axe. full many of. the 'legendary tales that pleased the bitter ,or uninstfucted fancy of a past day; and the clergyman who comes forward at this time. of day with this' moss-grown calumny, no matter in what particular church he may happen to be located, stamps himself at once as a representative of the intellectual * back-blocks.' We might say of it what Macaulay said of the story which connected Catholics with the starting of the Great Fire of London in 1666; that it has been ' abandoned by statesmen to aldermen, by aldermen to clergymen, by clergymen to old women, and by old women to Sir Harcourt Lees'who represents the gobemowhtrie or gaping credulity that finds an annual voice when the Boyne dog-star is in the ascendant. A perusal of Archbishop Carr's Church and the, Bible will give the popular reader an excellent idea of the extent to which Protestant writers and scholars of the first rank have themselves exposed the wicked folly of this ' legendary tale that pleased of yore'; and we have no intention of again going over ground which has been so often traversed in these columns. We content ourselves with merely bringing past refutations up to date by mentioning that at the very time the reverend orator was proclaiming this calumny we were engaged in reading the following item in the well-known paper, Home, printed and published in that city. ' The Pious Society of St. Jerome, established in Rome many years ago under the presidency of Mgr. Delia Chiesa, now Pope Benedict XV., for the diffusion of the New Testament among the people of Italy, in spite of war arid hard times has just issued another edition of many tens of thousands of copies of its volume containing the Four Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles. The original preface has been slightly changed, two letters of approval of Pius X. and Benedict XV. have been added, some few modifications have been made in the notes, and the new edition has been put on sale at three pence a copy. Many thousands of copies are, thanks to the benefactors of the Pious Society,' K eing distributed among the immense numbers of young men who are now under arms in Italy.' '-'■■'■' :.*■■ ■;.■<.:: ■/;:.■ ■ -... ■■■-. Under the circumstances it would seem to be, to put it . mildly, rather a ' stupid waste of energy for any real lover of the Bible to : be denouncing the Papal Church ' at a moment when that" Church is printing the Gospels by tens of thousands arid distributing them as fast and as far as possible amongst her people. It is also misdirected energy. ' The real enemy of the Bible is not the Catholic Church/which ' believes , arid acknowledges it as the inspired Word of God, but rather the so-called higher critics arid rationalising professors of divinity who deny, its infallibility, qnestion. in large measure , its 1 authenticity, and explain

I away.those cardinal arid fundamental doctrines which :. have been its especial glory, "arid which have given strength and consolation to the Christiana of all ages. These men are not the product or the property of the * Papal Church '; they are ; the lineal descendants of Luther and 'the religion 'made in Germany'; and they, are strongly represented ,in this Dominion, and in high places ' also, in the Church of which the Rev. R. J. Liddell is a minister. It is idle for ministers to be delivering lofty harangues about 'an open Bible,' when they themselves do not really believe the Bible. If the Rev. R. J. Liddell is really anxious to promote reverence for and belief in the Sacred Scriptures he will find plenty to do nearer home. It is always well to have your own door-step clean before you set out to lecture and correct the neighborhood.

Bethlehem Steel- ... ... =£30,000,000' General Electric ... 20,000,000 : Canadian Car and Foundry 16,000,000 Wesfcinghouse Electric 16,000,000; Du Pont Powder 15,000,000American Car and Foundry 8,000,000American Locomotive 7,000,000 Pressed Steel Car 5,000,000' Aetna ■ Explosives ... 4,000,000 : Colt’s Firearms 4,000,000 Crucible Steel ... ... - 4,000,000 E. W. Bliss 4,000,000" Hercules Powder ... 4,000,000 Studebaker Corporation ... 4,000,000 New York Air Brake 3,500,000 American Can 3,000,000 Baldwin Locomotive 3,000,000 Savage Arms 2,000,000 Winchester Arms ... 2,000,000