In this country, democracy is a political article of faith subscribed to by all three parties. It is a political platitude that the whole of the population of a country should bow to the will of the majority. Any attack made on this creed has been purely academic. The ‘rights’ of minorities have been asserted by lukewarm agitation for proportional representation or for the alternative vote, but the mathematical complexities of these methods of voting have left the bulk of the citizens of this country cold. Parliament already possesses three main parties—one with a right and a left wing, capable of splitting into two at any time—besides one representative of the Communists, one of the Prohibitionists, and one or two of the Co-operators. There is no general desire in this country for a multiplicity of parties, on the French model. The Britisher is politically a man of principle. He votes Conservative or Liberal on traditional principle, or Labour on class principle.

In An Enemy of the People Ibsen attempted to preach a sermon from the text ‘the majority is always wrong.’ At first sight his text appears demonstrably true. All the great crimes of the world, all’ the wars, all the executions of the martyrs, have been sanctioned by the majority. History is a record of mass errors of judgment, but its verdict is that the majority is always the tool of an unscrupulous minority. Still, the theory ‘Vox populi, vox Dei’ persists, just as it is popularly supposed that the Press expresses, rather than forms, public opinion.

It really is tyranny when a colonial Governor endeavours to push through his Legislative Assembly or even otherwise make statutory legal measures which deprive his subjects of certain commonly admitted rights. This is precisely what happened in Trinidad at the end of last year and at the beginning of this. The Governor, through his educational policy, decided to close the Assisted Training Schools for teachers, and compel the students, who intended to make teaching their profession, to be trained at the Government Training College. That is to say, he closed the Catholic Training College, and insisted that the Catholics who wished to become teachers should be trained only in the Government Training College.

There are three preliminary statements to be made about this proceeding before we deal with the matter itself of the Governor’s enactment:—

(1) The Catholic population of the islands of Trinidad and Tobago is at least one third of the whole population of these islands.

(2) The Government College has as its headmaster, and has had for many years, an admirable gentleman from Cambridge who has publicly and privately denounced the system of denominational schools.

(3) The curriculum of the College as printed by the Government under the date August, 1925, and with the specified approval of the Acting Director of Education, gives as the subject of the first year’s history lectures :

Some years ago a Russian stood in painful hesitation on the threshold of the Church. She had reached it after many dark years wasted away in vain endeavours to still the insatiable cravings of the soul and by artificial interests and excitements fill the emptiness of a life, in which God had no place.

The War and the fearful catastrophe, which had engulfed her country, partially opened this Russian’s eyes to the Truth, though as yet it was but a faint glimmer and in nowise the full light. The mind of the homeless exile was captivated by the powerful organisation of the Church Universal, the one stable Rock and haven of refuge, standing alone, proud and unshaken, amidst the hideous wreckage of the contemporary world. The mind had understood, but the heart remained untouched and the spiritual side was not yet revealed to her. Friendless and lonely, knowing nothing of the Catholic England, this Russian would have been lost if at this critical moment of her life a relative in Paris had not put her into touch with a French priest. A correspondence ensued.

For my sins I am condemned to read several papers every day. During the strike my normal supply of reading was cut off, and the only news beyond the usual crop of rumours was that sent out by the British Broadcasting Company and the strike items contained in the various news sheets.

As the strike and its effects constituted the one important topic of news, to the exclusion of the doings of the various notorious personages of no interest, it is probable that the strike news sheets came nearer than Fleet Street would care to admit to fulfilling the true function of a newspaper. When read in conjunction with the official ‘correctives’ and a due allowance for what could be found between the lines, a very fair estimate of the day’s news was available.

On the Tuesday after the settlement, one of my papers joyfully announced that it was able to supply ‘all the world’s news again’ ; on Wednesday another paper reflected that the strike had provided a lesson in ‘what can be done without at a pinch,’ and, remembering that for the period of the strike we had been without any of the usual scandal, crime, divorce, film-star vagaries, fashionable news and eccentricities of the dull people who seek publicity on the back pages, many people will agree.

Now that the newspapers block the letter-box and litter the mat once again, we are expected to rejoice that the indispensable daily printed sheet is once more with us, yet it is difficult to conjure up enthusiasm when the average daily is subject to analysis.

Thomas Hood, ‘true poet and true humorist,’ was born in The Poultry, London, in the tail-end of the eighteenth century. He died at Devonshire Lodge, Finchley Road, in the middle of the nineteenth. He lived, to be precise, from May 23rd, 1799, to May 3rd, 1845. I was a shortish, sickly life, and had to be beaten out, as it were, very thin to last for forty-six years.

On Hood’s birthday George III, aged sixty-one, and for the time being in his sober senses, rested after the levee of the day before. Queen Charlotte held a Drawing-room. News came that our noble allies, the Russians and Austrians, under Marshall Suwarrow and General Hohenzollern, had taken the best part of the Milanese from the French; that General Buonaparte had met with a check near Acre in consequence of which the Sultan had ordered a solemn thanksgiving in the seraglio; and that the Success frigate had fallen in with the French fleet passing the rock of Lisbon, and an engagement was hourly expected. On Hood’s birthday the second reading of a bill to restrict slavery was fiercely opposed by the Liverpool merchants in the Commons. Mr. Castlereagh and Mr. Ponsonby fought a duel near Dublin. Carriages waited at the Bull, Bishopsgate, to take the friends of Mr. J. Frere to the Norwich election to vote on the whole policy or impolicy of the war. A highwayman with crape on his face, mounted on a bay mare, stopped a post-chaise on Uxbridge Common.

During the reign of Alexander I the position of the Catholic Church in Russia was a peculiar one. Not only did the Government consider itself called to rule the Church, but also to safeguard the purity of her faith from any alien influence, including the Pope’s. Thus, in 1822, the Emperor decreed the expulsion from Russia of Fr. Lindl, Rector of the Church in Odessa, for ‘preaching a creed which was not in accordance with the dogmas of the Latin faith,’ but at the same time the Russian Ambassador Italinsky was admonished for accepting from the Vatican a confidential note, demanding Lindl’s expulsion.

The Russian Dominicans figured in another example of this solicitude of the Government for the Catholic Church. As we have seen previously, the Monastic Orders were compelled to participate in the cost of primary and higher education and other useful institutions, having, however, little to do with religious life. A Conference of representatives of the Catholic Church was convened by Chatzky, visitor of the schools of Volhynia, Podolia and Kiev, in Luck, on October 20th, 1803, at which the expenses of maintaining the schools in these provinces were divided amongst the Orders. The Dominicans had to support (a) one district school in Staro-Constantinov; (b) twenty primary schools; (c) three scholarships in the Vilna University for preparing teachers; (d) pay 1,000 zloty for the maintenance of the botanical garden; (e) maintain two metereological stations; (f) hand over to the Ministry of Public Education the foundation for the education of pupils in Rome; (g) print in their printing office in Luck a hundred books for the Volhynia secondary school, also give to the same school four copies of every book which had been published there.