One of the great questions of the day is disarmament, linked almost involuntarily though not of necessity with war debts and reparations. Appeals have been made for the nation to have the will to peace, and thus save the world from disaster. The ten years long discussions on disarmament have produced so far no very definite results. Nations still believe that without security no disarmament is possible. A pact to renounce war as a means of settling international disputes has been signed by all the leading nations of the world, and yet armaments increase, and preparations for a fresh war are being made, until today more money is being expended upon such preparations, and upon armaments, than was expended before 1914, when the storm broke over Europe and the world. Nations cry peace, when there is no peace in their hearts, as was frankly stated by the present Pope in his Encyclical of 1922.

Why is there no peace? Because jealousies, greed, fear and hatred are still in men’s minds, says the Pope. They have forgotten the moral laws that guide individuals and are equally applicable to nations. All the more need is there for a reaffirmation of the Law of Nations. Up to the Middle Ages men respected the Canon Law of the Church : they looked to the See of Peter as the exponent of the Moral Law, codified as it is on the Canon Law of the Church. That Law of Nations, which is, in itself, the embodiment of the Natural Law, implanted in men’s minds by the Creator, is a guide to men’s lives in their private dealings. Thou shalt not steal. Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.

One is somewhat at a loss to know whether the fact that so much is being written on the so-called ‘leakage’ question necessitates an apology for adding yet more, or affords an excuse for so doing. Acting on the latter hypothesis, I propose to hazard on paper a few thoughts on the subject, based mainly on experience gathered when giving Missions,

And to begin with I would ask the question : is the leakage—lamentable as all admit it to be—larger than we ought to expect? In this connection we should surely bear in mind two important factors—firstly, the great increase in our numbers during the last hundred years, together with the evident fact that we are no longer a secluded body, but mingle far more freely than of old with our non-Catholic neighbours; and, secondly, that the non-Catholic world round about us has altered almost beyond recognition so as to merit with some show of truth the epithet pagan so often applied to it. Not so long ago, in days which men of forty can easily recall, certain accepted Christian standards of morality and church-going were as vigorously maintained outside the Catholic Church as within. This no longer holds good, and the young Catholic, in moving outside his own Catholic circle, almost necessarily mingles with militant irreligion; militant because, though seldom avowedly such, to ignore religion is tantamount to proclaiming its futility.

Into an England where Faith was indigenous, Charity a common virtue, and Hope a sane, constructive effort, Caxton was admitted as a man with a wonderful new toy. He was, in fact, the pioneer of materialism, and the legacy we have inherited from him after more than four centuries, is the chaos of the modern world.

We live now, at best, in a maze of false optimism. Most men realise that something is wrong with the world; they know that Faith is a limited psychological phenomenon with a certain commercial value, that Charity is either a convincing gesture (also with a commercial value) or a weakness that encourages the lower classes, and that Hope is a pious wish that, in spite of Socialism, Mammon may come into his own; but ‘hard-headed business men’ and their satellites are the last people to face realities; self-preservation is the antithesis of soul-preservation, and the one is pleasing and lucrative, the other painful and exacting, so the issue is cloaked in the obscurity of ink which itself is the maggot that has bred our present corruption. Ink, according to the Oxford Dictionary, is a black liquid ejected by a cuttle-fish to assist its escape from a foe.

The return to Europe of Bishop Francis Steinmetz, Vicar Apostolic of Dahomey, after thirty-eight years in French West Africa, recalls a romance of missionary enterprise which is worth recording. He belongs to the Lyons Society of African Missions, founded by Mgr. Marion de Brésillac in 1856. The holy founder applied in the first instance for Dahomey, but was refused by Propaganda on account of its evil reputation. It was considered the most pernicious district of the West African Coast from the malignity of its climate and the barbarity of its population. Instead he was allotted Sierra Leone, itself a sufficiently difficult post, as events were to prove. It was only at a later period, after his death, that it was found practicable to attempt the evangelisation of Dahomey : that, therefore, Bishop Steinmetz has been able to rule his tropical diocese for twenty years or more, and return to Europe in full health and vigour, is eloquent testimony of the progress made in the Dark Continent.

Two Fellows of Oriel walked daily in the calm and classic ways of Oxford. They were bosom friends, and, men said, kindred spirits, burning and shining lights of their college, then the leading Oxford college in culture, studies, and famous names. The elder, tall, strenuous, robust, talked didactically, rather pompously, but with precision of thought and word. He was an author of text-books on Logic and on Rhetoric, and on the Johnsonian principle, that ‘who drives fat cattle should himself be fat,’ was a living embodiment of the science and the art of accurate thinking and correct phrasing. He was Richard Whately (1787-1863).

The delicate, pale youth by his side, another Fellow of Oriel, listened and learned from Whately—and learned with lasting profit to himself and to the men of all time, logic and rhetoric. Both were parsons, staunch Protestants. In their walks several times they met poor strolling Irishmen, ragged, hungry Papists, toilers from the fields, beggars, ballad singers. The dons were almost heedless, unobservant of the poor human clods, their religion, their country. If any seer or sybil had told those master-thinkers that one of them would become a bitter opponent of the faith and fortunes of Ireland, as a leader of politics and religion in the fateful isle, and that the other would after a forlorn expedition come to love Ireland and be a prince of her faith—both Richard Whately and John Henry Newman would have laughed, logical and rhetorical laughs. Yet Fate destined the Oriel men to drift, to part, and to live in Dublin, not under the same roof as at St. Alban’s Hall and at Oriel, but within five minutes’ walk of each other’s houses.

A peasant proprietor had two sons. The elder was impressed for military service and sent to America, where he had to remain for many years. On his return he found his father dead and his brother rich in the possession of all the family property. He went, therefore, to his brother’s house, and to his question, ‘Don’t you know me?’ he received for reply only a surly ‘No.’ When he humbly made himself known, his brother told him to go to the granary, and there in the loft he would find an old chest, which was all his father had left him in his will; and with that the uncouth brother turned on his heel and left him without further welcome.

Our traveller, therefore, went up to the loft and found there only an old worm-eaten chest. ‘What in the world,’ said he to himself, ‘can I do with this rotten old box? However, blessed be the will of God ! it will perhaps do to make a fire with,’ for it was winter and extremely cold. He, therefore, put it on his back and, returning to his lodgings, borrowed an axe, and, as he was chopping it up, he came on a piece of paper which was behind a secret sliding panel at the bottom. He took it up and, reading it, found it to be a receipt for a large sum of money deposited on loan by his father. On presentation the sum was given up to him, so that now he was rich.