bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Poverty and the Workers
Authors: Walsh R. P. 
Published: July 2007

Readers of Labour, Life and Poverty by the Polish economist F. Zweig (Gollancz, 1948) will have met a strange aspect of working class lives. They will have met workers earning £5 per week and spending over 30s. of it on their own cigarettes, or men spending 30s. a week on drink. The general picture of the London worker described in this book is of a class saved from pauperism by council houses and social services only to return to pauperism by their spending habits.But how can it be otherwise? Our desires in these days are determined by so many factors that have one thing in common and that is that we should have more. The heroes on the films are never without a cigarette, never without a drink; they have no need to work, even when their ‘work’ is part of the background of the film. Money never restricts them, their women have beautiful clothes and their apartments are the last word in luxury. Our popular reading material follows the same line and helps to create, a desire for more and more. Our advertisers do the same. New desires are very often created and they have, in fact, become enshrined in American economics as part of an explaining away of depressions.So we workers want more money and when we get it we want more still so that we can ape these ideals held up to us by those who want our money. The whole idea of an ever increasing standard of life is promoted by those who benefit materially by our constant strivings to possess more and more money.
The Puritan Denial
Authors: O'Connell James 
Published: July 2007

The technical achievements and elaboration since the sixteenth century do not comprise the whole of modern capitalism. Capitalism has been much more than that; it has been an outlook on life with its own peculiar orientation and values. To endeavour to understand capitalism as a socio-economic form, therefore, it will be of help to look at the type of character which played a fundamental rôle in the capitalistic development. There is a vast literature on the relation between capitalism and Calvinism, especially in its Puritan form. The general question does not concern us here. What we shall consider is the Puritan character as it appeared in the middle seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In this way it will be possible for us to discern more clearly the temper from which the modern technical innovations sprung or by which they were exploited. The spirit that lies behind these new methods in many ways involves an asceticism as rigid and as austere as the older medieval one: but the goal is different, the ascesis is intramundane, while the reward is no longer invisible but very near and very tangible.When one examines the Puritan mentality at this period, that character with its intense energies and limited horizon, it reveals those features that have made possible the organisation of industry and wealth which has caught millions of human beings in its meshes during the course of the modern era; meshes more unbreakable than steel because they were spun of the fibre of emotionless hearts and held together by the unyielding rigidity of relentless human wills; meshes cast by men conscious of a purpose to be achieved and self-righteous in the pursuit of that purpose.
The Mystery of Gospel Poverty
Authors: Cardiff Ethelbert 
Published: July 2007

The morning of April 16th, 1209, witnessed in the square of St George in Assisi (now called the Piazza Santa Chiara) an incident most rare and strange in the history of men. Warned and expectant of good things, a great crowd of beggars and outcasts had assembled, and to them presently came two men bearing between them a deep, heavily-weighted sack filled to the top with money. With that large indiscriminateness that often accompanies Catholic charity they began to hand out right and left the contents of the sack. The method of distribution would have horrified a modern humanitarian. There was no personal interviewing or questioning, no assessment of alms-qualification, no means test. A careless and bountiful profusion characterised this very medieval gesture; and when the last coin had been given away and the last beggar satisfied, it was probably the literal truth that the only completely destitute persons in that crowded square were the two prodigal benefactors.The sack had contained in money the total worldly possessions of Bernard a Quintavalle, a very rich merchant of Assisi. Some little time before, he had gone one day with Francis to a small nearby church to pray and to seek God’s will in his regard and, opening the book of the Gospels which lay upon the altar, they had immediately come upon the words: ‘If thou wilt be perfect, sell all thou hast and give to the poor and thou shalt have treasure in heaven, and come follow me.’
Riches1
Authors: Bourdaloue Louis 
Published: July 2007

And it came to pass that the beggar died, and was carried by the angels into Abraham's bosom. The rich man died also, and was buried in hell…Of all conceptions which we can shape of the world—the world as profane, perverse, corrupt, and condemned by God—the truest, I think, is that offered by the Beloved Disciple when he tells us that All that is in the world is the lust of the eyes, the lust of the flesh, and the pride of life. Lust of the eyes, rousing in man an inward distaste for what he has, and making him crave and seek after what he lacks; pride of life, exalting a man above himself, instilling contempt for others, and causing forgetfulness of God; lust of the flesh, enslaving a man to his senses and luring astray his reason through the enticements of voluptuousness. These, St Augustine says, are the three plagues which have overspread the world and tainted the healthiest parts of it. Lust of the eyes the desire to have—the root of all evils and specially of injustice. Pride of life, a foe of charity which leads men even to godlessness. Lust of the flesh, the source and spring of impure pleasures and scandalous excesses. My brothers in Christ, it is my conviction that riches as misused by the world feed every one of these wretched lusts, and that the most general and natural cause of men’s injustice and pride and sensuality is that they are either rich or enamoured of riches.
Moving Population
Authors: Synnott Finbar 
Published: July 2007

The population of South Africa has been formed by a series of migrations, all of them, if we except the prehistoric wanderings of the Bushmen and Hottentots, within recent times. The Native Africans came down from the central lakes within recent ‘saga’ memory. Their genealogies do not, of course, give dates. But probably 400 years covers the main movement. Among them came the invading Dutch and British. Other European races and, in large numbers, the Jewish people followed. There is a considerable number of Greeks and Syrians who, especially the latter but even to some extent the former, occupy a borderline position on the edge of the South African concept of ‘European’. Into this mixture large numbers of Indians and Malays, and a small number of Chinese, were imported.It would take many thousand words to describe the mere categorisation of South African population, in which Natives, Coloureds, Asiatics and Europeans have each a separate position, and each their sub-divisions. So all that can be done for the purpose of this article, which is to give South African illustrations of the social-moral effects of movement of population, is to take certain special points of interest and let the many-sided background suggest itself in dealing with them.To begin with, South Africa has no deported populations, no physically crossed immigrants. The only people who might be so called are the Jews, who are in a sense involuntary immigrants wherever they are. But their condition in South Africa is not sufficiently different from elsewhere to be of special interest.
China's Population Problems
Authors: Zacharias H. C. E. 
Published: July 2007

The ‘numbering’ of people used to be resented in ancient times as presumptuous, unlucky and only meant as a means of further fiscal extortion. The taking of a census for purely scientific, demographic purposes is something quite modern and goes back to the ‘counting of heads’, required by democracy, practised for the first time in 1790 by the United States; Great Britain following suit with a first census in 1801. Subsequently most other countries have likewise introduced the system of a decennial census; but there are important exceptions still, the most serious one being that of China, which is quite innocent of any reliable nation-wide statistics of any sort.To say anything about China’s population one is therefore left to shrewd guesses, scientific approximations or a lively imagination. The Imperial Government ordered a census to be taken in 1895 and 1910, which yielded a total of 377 and 316 million inhabitants respectively. The Republic, if only on account of the endemic warfare which has bedevilled its existence from the very start, has had to content itself with ‘Post Office Estimates’, which in 1920 suggested 428 and in 1930 445 millions as China’s total population. Finally in 1932 the Government came out with a fiat declaring 475 millions to be the right figure; against which W. F. Wilcox of the American Statistical Association in its Journal for 1980 maintained that 342 millions was the most he could concede.C. P. Fitzgerald by a painstaking computation of cities actually occupied at different periods of Chinese history arrived at a grand total of 130 millions as China’s population under the T’ang Dynasty in 618 A.D. (China Journal of 1932).
The Fifth Etat in Germany
Authors: Meyer K. E. 
Published: July 2007

It is gradually becoming possible to assess the figures concerning the expulsion of Germans from the eastern parts of Europe, from Eastern Germany, Sudetenland, Hungary, Rumania, Jugoslavia and adjacent countries. Each new figure implies a larger, more extensive, more irreparable sum of human misery; and means, moreover, an accumulation of new problems in almost every field of human relations, the full size of which is quite obviously not yet realised anywhere.The latest figures are as follows. Those expelled number altogether about 11 millions, of whom approximately half, 5 1/2 millions, are Catholic. In the American Zone there are now 3 1/4 millions, in the British Zone 3 1/3 millions, in the Russian Zone 4 1/2 millions, and about 100,000 in the French Zone. It is assumed that about 3 million people died in consequence of the expulsion; these are not included in the above-mentioned total of 11 million. Out of a total of 4,500 Catholic priests who worked among these people only 2,500 are still alive. Only 15 per cent of those expelled had the opportunity of taking enough of their belongings with them in order to have a minimum of clothing, furniture and outfit of any type.
Lutherans, Please Refute!
Authors: Miller B. D. H. 
Published: July 2007

Symptomatic cures are rarely effective. Satisfactory treatment, medical or political, demands a knowledge of causes, as well as symptoms. So long as the cause is unknown, remedies are futile. Yet the Western Allies are striving to impose just such a symptomatic cure for Nazism, without ever investigating its causes; that, perhaps, is all political action can do. But to dismiss Nazism, in theory and practice, as a policy of anti-Semitism, concentration camps, imperialism, militarism and compulsory sterilisation, is not enough; all those abuses may be eradicated by A.M.G., but they are merely the symptoms, just as unemployment and degradation were merely the occasions, of Hitler’s revolution. The inherent disposition to Nazism will remain until its causes are diagnosed and treated. The writer believes this inherent disposition to come from tendencies engendered or encouraged by Luther, when he denied Natural Morality, and rejected the claims of the Church; without that rebellion, Nazism might never have occurred.I do not enjoy making such bold assertions;. I should be glad to see them disproved; but there is no virtue in concealing the truth. Let me not be misunderstood, however. No one would make Luther a champion of Dachau and Buchenwald; one might as readily accuse George Washington of defending the atomic bomb; but Luther suffered from having disciples. In fact, only a chemist can detect the affinity between coal and diamonds, but none the less it is there; so with Luther and the disposition to Nazism.
In Praise of Quakers
Authors: Edwards H. W. J. 
Published: July 2007

In the year 1924 the Society of Friends, which cherishes an ancient ‘testimony’ against the celebration of special days, waived its scruples to celebrate the birth of George Fox, who, if not exactly the founder, was the coherer of those wandering souls who became known as Quakers.About the time the Quakers [I must be forgiven if from time to time I call them Friends] are, if not celebrating, at least turning their minds to the tercentenary of their existence as a religious body. I believe also that other religious bodies, especially Christian bodies, will according to their capacity give thanks to God for the Quakers. Even that Christian body to which I have been given the grace to belong, that body without which there could not be in any sense a Christian body, very properly and without retracting in the slightest degree from her witness to herself as Christ’s one and undivided Church outside which there is no salvation, may rejoice.Strictly and narrowly the thing called Quakerism is a heresy and as such it must be condemned and detested. As a Catholic I abjure with all my heart and mind the heresy of Quakerism. Yet very few Quakers are heretics. They are not because very few have received the sacrament of baptism. Those who have received it are those who have joined the Society of Friends from some Christian group which gives valid baptism. Looking at the Society of Friends still in this narrow way, we may doubt whether it is, in fact, a Christian body at all.
An Old Controversy Recalled
Authors: Poynter J. W. 
Published: July 2007

In her admirable biography, Gilbert, Keith Chesterton, Maisie Ward dwelt at some length on a notable controversy in which her hero was engaged at the beginning of the present century. ‘He was still’, she says, ‘writing every Saturday in the Daily News. Publishers were disputing for each of his books. Yet he rushed into every religious controversy that was going on, because thereby he could clarify and develop his ideas. The most important of all these was the controversy with Blatchford, Editor of The Clarion, who had written a rationalist Credo, entitled God and My Neighbour. In 1903-4, he had the generosity and the wisdom to throw open The Clarion to the freest possible discussion of his views. The Christian attack was made by a group of which Chesterton was the outstanding figure, and was afterwards gathered into a paper volume called The Doubts of Democracy’.The writer of the present article read these sections of Miss Ward’s book with special interest, for he remembers vividly the controversy to which they refer, and thinks it may be useful to describe it in some detail, as it has lessons for our own times. He has also another reason for recalling it.At the end of the nineteenth and during the early years of the present century (in fact, up to the outbreak of the 1914-18 war), debates on religion held a high place in the attention of the reading part of our people.
The Unimportance of Property
Authors: Quinn Edward 
Published: July 2007

Any attempt to dissipate the confusion that reigns in Catholic circles on the subject of private property must be welcomed. Fr Drostan’s paper is to be welcomed also as a very notable clarification of the question and as an attractive preface to the major work which he may be persuaded to produce.Not the least disturbing feature of the situation is that it appears so simple to many. Remaining wholly on the plane of reason, we can show Communism to be false, first because it is atheistic—and the quinque viae can quickly be pressed into service to show the folly of atheism—and secondly because it rejects private property—which natural law alone upholds as a fundamental right. But the Communist is not convinced, and to quite faithful Christians it does not seem as if there were much respect for God or the basic human rights in the stronghold of liberty and capitalism. And when American bankers turn to the crucifix before accommodating their clients—at the usual rates—militant atheism, if not more sincere, seems to have a better understanding of the meaning of religion.Fr Drostan rejects this unholy simplicity and exposes the limitations of a largely hypothetical natural law. At the very opening of his paper he places the problem in its proper setting—where it is all too rarely placed: ‘private property is essentially and basically a theological question’.
Other Men's Thought
Authors: Nicholl D. 
Published: July 2007

Historians of philosophy have been notoriously unsuccessful in the past, either through hanging their own thoughts on other men’s pegs or through simply giving a list of the pegs; of the former error the supreme example may for long be Russell’s History of Western Philosophy, whilst the second failing is one which Laird found difficult to avoid within the limited space of his Home University volume on Recent Philosophy. It is all the more pleasing, then, to find that Fr Bochenski has written a history of European philosophy during the present century which presents the main lines of modern philosophers neatly and lucidly, yet makes it quite clear that the question of truth is one which the philosopher, whatever his capacity, may not neglect, and he himself unobtrusively indicates the direction in which solutions of the difficulties are to be sought. He proves himself such a stimulating guide to the thought of our own day that we can whole-heartedly express the hope of seeing the work translated into English in the near future.The characteristic notes of the book are neatness and precision. In his short preface Fr Bochenski points out with great modesty the shortcomings which are scarcely to be avoided in giving an account of other men’s thought, though his modesty does not prevent him from insisting that it is only a mark of respect towards another philosopher to offer criticisms of his work. To have expressed an essential truth so briefly is typical of the book.
The Conversion of England
Authors: Velarde R. 
Published: July 2007

The ‘Conversion of England’ presents itself to us both as a problem and a mystery, but for one reason or another we become so preoccupied with the problem that we overlook the mystery. Yet our very handling of the problem is bound to be influenced by our awareness of the mystery. It must be confessed also that the problem has hitherto received only intermittent attention, and that nothing like a strategy of conversion has yet been evolved. It is my contention that our tendency to date has been to view the question as a matter of immediate practical concern demanding immediate action; and there seems moreover to be a belief abroad that this is a problem which will yield like any other to persistence and the correct technique—backed always by the grace of God. Certainly we should be active if only intermittently, but have we any reason for believing that our usual methods of tackling this immense problem are likely to lead to improved results? I would submit that the inevitable sense of frustration which follows on our efforts is due to an insufficient consideration of the truth that the problem is not only a problem, but also a profound mystery. In its general lines the conversion of a great nation involves the mystery of God’s Providence, and his permission of evil. The classical justification for the existence of moral evil is that God draws from the evil a greater good; and when we look for the justification of the evil of heresy we can see in the history of the Church how it has resulted in the articulation and clarification of Christian truth.In its general lines the conversion of a great nation involves the mystery of God’s Providence, and his permission of evil. The classical justification for the existence of moral evil is that God draws from the evil a greater good; and when we look for the justification of the evil of heresy we can see in the history of the Church how it has resulted in the articulation and clarification of Christian truth.
The Catholic Philosophy of Education
Authors: Versfeld Marthinus 
Published: July 2007

I am going to define education simply as the process of making a man of a man, First, note that the thing is a process, that-is, something that takes time. In understanding any process the most important consideration is its end, and this we have said to be the perfection in his own kind of the person educated. We must notice further that any being of which it can be said that it is perfectible, in its own kind, can be perfect only in a relative and not in an absolute way. What is perfectible, even when perfect, will lack the perfection of having always been perfect. It will be perfect only in a particular kind, since what becomes must always be of a particular kind. God alone is perfect absolutely and hence the notion of education is not applicable to him, as it is to the pseudo-god of W. James. Further, what is perfect of its own kind or in a relative way, cannot be the sufficient reason for its own perfection. It must exist in view of that whose perfection is wholly contained in its own act of existence, that is in God. We may thus say that education is the process of making a man of a man because God is God. In other words, being a man makes no sense apart from God, being like whose perfection is the only perfection which a perfectible being can have.To know what education is, therefore, we must know something about what man is and in order to know what man is we must know something about what God is . . .
Whither Women?
Authors: Eden Helen Parry 
Published: July 2007

A woman must always remember that, she is a woman. She must dress like a woman, talk like a woman and walk like a woman. For the enrichment of her personal life, her personal happiness, she must observe the purely feminine attributes and feminine virtues. . . . We have neglected the special education which girls need to become good mothers and good wives and we must give it to them.—Olga Mishakova, Secretary General of the Russian Youth Organisation.It may well be that economic necessity makes a supply of female helots an inevitable part of our industrial life.—John Newsom, County Education Officer for Hertfordshire.All education is due for overhauling; and that of women, being least concerned with the vital needs of its victims, is justly answerable for the most uneasiness. Papal pronouncements having frequently dealt with the kindred points of heaven and home as the magnetic poles of civilisation, there is no need to reiterate the teaching of the Church on the subject. But because the integrity of the English home is to all intents and purposes a forlorn hope, and the English heaven strikes one as being unlikely of attainment without it, the reviewer proposes to survey two books, one American, one English, and neither of them Catholic, which exhibit a novel awareness of our danger and offer some practicable suggestions for averting it. In the brief space at her disposal, she has almost entirely ignored the unhelpful aspects of the books in question.