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Show THE VEXATIONS THIS WORLD OF A Writer and Philosopher Asks, "What is the World Coming To?" Makes Various Predictions. By Robert Ellis Thompson in the Irish World. The twentieth century seems not likely to be behind any of its predecessors pred-ecessors in deeds of violence, assassinations, assassi-nations, and massacres. And the striking strik-ing fact is that these, with few exceptions, ex-ceptions, occur in nations calling themselves civilized and Christian. Only the unspeakable Turk and the Chinese Boxer have the will and the power to rival the performances of Christendom in this bad deportment. One might have expected that, after nineteen centuries of Christian influence, in-fluence, we would find great communities commu-nities in which life and person would be everywhere safe from violence, and all disagreements would be referred re-ferred to the peaceful arbitration of the law. But nowhere has that been attained which was hoped for and expected ex-pected by those who first embraced the Gospel. They predicted that "Christian society would be indeed "the City of God," from which violence vio-lence and wrong would disappear and earth would reflect the harmony . of heaven. The Golden Rule Contemptuously Ignored. Ig-nored. An overwhelming majority 0 our countrymen profess and call themselves them-selves Christians. No doubt the type of their Christianity, in many cases, leaves much to be desired. But they all profess to accept the Golden Rule as a law of life, and to regard the life of the Son of God as the perfect life the divine life. Yet the love of wealth has so estranged the rich and' poor that we almost everywhere see industrial classes in collision with each other, and ereat strikps lMiiimr to acts of inexcusable and criminal violence. We see vendettas, based on family feuds or political quarrels, reducing re-ducing whole communities to a condition con-dition of terrorism, which the law-seems law-seems unable to correct. We see black men, not convicted of any crime dragged from their prisons where they awaited the trial which our fathers fa-thers assured to every accused person, per-son, and put to a painful and lingering linger-ing death in the presence of women and children. And not only is the authority of law silent, but the public opinion of the country ts not roused to protest and resistance as it should be. We made far more ado last winter, when the diminution of the supply of coal threatened our comfort, than at violences vio-lences and outrages which can bring down on us the reprobation of mankind, man-kind, and which may bring upon us the just indignation of God. Abroad we have Bessarabia, Macedonia, Mace-donia, and now Servia, as centers of violence and outrage. All three are Slavonic soil, although the Bessara-bian Bessara-bian loves to talk of his descent from Trajan's Roman colonists, and the Macedonian to recall Philip and Alexander. Al-exander. In both countries the mass of the population is Slavic, and Servia does not claim anything else. The Slav Is the last branch of the Indo-Germanlc Indo-Germanlc stock, as the Celt was the first, to come under the influence of civilization; and his Christianization was still later and more imperfect. Napoleon's Prediction. It is less than a century since any Slavic people came to such a degree of liberty as enabled them to work out what Is in their character; and even under political liberty they are all embarrassed by the remainder of primitive communism which clings to their'family order and their industrial arrangements. They are peoples in the making, and, while such, they are not less than perilous to the more advanced civilizations in their neighborhood. neigh-borhood. This Napoleon saw when he predicted that Europe would be either republican or Cossack within a century. Russia Justified his apprehensions by the part she played as the repressor repress-or of liberty in Central Europe from FiUni 185L The one result of the Crimean war, amidst its many harms, was the obliteration of Rus-sian Rus-sian influence from Prussian and Austrian Aus-trian politics. It made possible the liberation of Hungary from the yoke the Hapburgs had placed upon her. !i hh ethre,powers sonQ forward to liberate Poland in that war aa Ped,b many at thQ time,' the world would have applauded that act Observations on Servia. Servia Is the rawest and crudest llTX0 IthascoS " age at critical moments, as in attack- Turkey in 1879 . when the new3 Bulgarian massacres the blood of its neoDle R,,t ti I worn ,ts odepenSo" (Concluded on Page '2.) " - l-,l,:.... " v -. r. w THE VEXATIONS CF THIS WORLD OF OURS, (Continued from Page 1.) fully ever since it was liberated from the Turkish yoke. Its government has been a scandal for corruption and inefficiency. Its industrial development develop-ment has been rather Asiatic than European, in spite of the introduction , of all such modern improvements as , locomotives and American reapers. It has disappointed the hopes of Its friends, and that especially in the failure fail-ure to establish the stability of rule. Two dynasties, sprung from the two "liberators" of the country, have contested con-tested the right to reign, each bidding for the support of outside powers, one leaning on Vienna and the other on St. Petersburg. The Murder of the King and Queen. The recent murder of the king and queen by an organized body of conspirators con-spirators is only the last chapter in a long and shameful story of intrigues, palace revolutions, squabbles between the two dynasties and quarrels with- : in each of them. It would need the 1 caustic pen of a Carlyle to do justice to the unsavory subject. The best that can be said for the recent murder mur-der is that things appear to have reached the lowest depth in the Belgrade Bel-grade palace before it occurred. A I foolish king had come under the in- I fluence of a wife older and more capable capa-ble than himself, but alleged to have been destitute of the womanly virtues, i The royal pair provoked a revolution . by the coup d'etat of a few months back, when the king proclaimed the practical abolition of the constitution and the assumption of absolute government gov-ernment That the people should rise against that usurpation was to be expected. But why not rise with the dignity which befits such resistance? Why not rise as did the English against Charles I? "The enemy of English liberty," says Macaulay, "was not stabbed in the back by men who fawned and flattered him to his face. He was defeated on fields of stricken strick-en battle, arraigned, tried, condemned condemn-ed and executed in the face of the civilized civ-ilized world." It is Well to" Disbelieve Repofte ! Against Russia Telegraphed From London. The world cries out for the punishment punish-ment of the murderers by the new king. But who can telL. how far he was an accomplice before the fact in their black deed? A suspicion of this seems to be entertained by the governments gov-ernments of Europe generally, as Is shown by their orders to their representatives repre-sentatives to withdraw from the capital capi-tal for a time. And it is whispered that the deed had the sanction of Russia, whose wishes will be more regarded by the new king than those of the Austrian empire. It is true that Russia has been taking a very lively interest in Servian matters, but it is well to disbelieve anything to the disadvantage dis-advantage of Russia which Is telegraphed' tele-graphed' us from either London or Vienna. Vi-enna. The newsmongers of both those cities are very much engagtd In blackening Russia at present. The Bessarabia Massacre. The massacre of the Jews in Bessarabia, Bes-sarabia, not by Russians, although within Russian territory, continues to agitate the Jewish world. It would be to our credit if the Christian world took half so much interest in the far more extensive massacres of Macedonians Mace-donians which have been perpetrated and are still happening under Turkish rule every week. Between the happenings hap-penings in Servia, and the indifference of the Christian powers, almost noth ing is now sam oi tnem. The attacks of the London Times on the Russian authorities, backed up by reports from Vienna, where the Jews control and even edit the newspapers, news-papers, have brought out a denial which deserves to be credited. It was gravely charged that the whole massacre mas-sacre was planned by the Russian minister of the interior, and that when he was importuned by the local authorities au-thorities for permission to stop the massacre in Bessarabia which would not apply equally to .a score of Russian Rus-sian cities, and in these there have been no disturbances. The minister declares it the very reverse of the truth. He telegraphed an injunction to put down the massacre by any use of force that might be necessary, although al-though he was not asked to do so by anybody. What Is the World Coming To? But what is the world coming to? What, especially, is the prospect of so much of it as calls itself Christian and civilized? Are we drifting back into pagan barbarism? The violent hatred of religion, which has taken possession of the French republic, and the equally violent hatred of that social so-cial order which has grown up under Christian influences among the poorer classes In France, Germany, Belgium and Italy, are ominous signs. Atheism, Athe-ism, anarchism and socialism of the revolutionary type are growing forces in Europe. The recent German elec- 1 tions, with the return of probably i twenty-seven Socialists to the Reichstag, Reich-stag, instead of the four who sat there last year, is not prophetic of peace. It means that the party which regards , with a positive hatred the institutions of our present social order have be- 1 come the ruling element in several of the German cities, and are spreading spread-ing their influence even among the ( farm laborers and the smaller cul- i c tivators. It means the possibility of a radical revolution before this generation gen-eration has passed away, In which Robespierre and Marat would be outdone, out-done, and the immaculate German army would probably "fraternize" with their brethren behind the barricades, barri-cades, as in France. But God reigns, and our hope for the liberty and the order of the world is in Him. He may permit much to happen that will dismay us at the time, but He will not forsake what He has established in the earth, and tne family, the nation and the Church are His work, not man's. |