Ireland and the Home Rule Movement

To this Mr. Moore replied:—

In reply the Estates Commissioner wrote:—

The final letter was Mr. Moore's reply:—

The next step in this discreditable incident occurred [88]on July 23rd, on which day Mr. Moore denounced Mr. Bailey in the House of Commons for his partisanship towards the Nationalists, and gave a graphic picture of the private letter which Mr. Bailey had written to him to protest against his personal attacks. Mr. Redmond rose and asked that Mr. Russell should read to the House Mr. Moore's reply, and Mr. Russell thereupon read the second of the letters given above, upon which Mr. Balfour, regardless of his own share in the partial suppression of the Wyndham-MacDonnell dossier a few years before, demanded the production of the whole correspondence. This was done on July 26th, when Mr. Moore read the letters in the order given above. In his personal explanation he represented it as an extremely suspicious circumstance that Mr. Bailey had been seen in the Lobby in conversation with the Nationalists. "That may be legitimate," he said, "but I think it very undesirable," and in the very next breath he confessed that another of the Commissioners was a particular and personal friend of his own, to whom he would have shown the first letter from Mr. Bailey if it had not been marked private.

The comment of the Times—in which Mr. Moore as a rule finds an active admirer of his political methods—is interesting:—

"Mr. Bailey is a public servant entrusted with certain quasi-judicial functions. That a member of Parliament, whatever may be his opinions of the conduct of such an official, should inform him that he had been appointed 'to see fair play' between his colleagues, and that he had not seen it, and should couple this charge with a promise to press for an inquiry into the working of the department whenever there should be a change of Government, is indefensible."

The whole incident is worthy of attention as showing the atmosphere of suspicious hostility with which the Orange faction in Ireland surrounds every act even of Civil Servants and Executive Officers who are not [89]as active supporters of the ascendancy as they would wish.

Of further legislation dealing with the laws of tenure, the Town Tenants Act of 1906, which Mr. Balfour denounced as highway robbery, gives tenants in towns compensation for disturbance so as to prevent a landlord making a vexatious use of his rights. An attempt was made by the House of Lords to limit the compensation so paid to one year's rent, but the rejection of the amendment by the House of Commons was acquiesced in, and no such limitation exists in the Act.

With regard to the question of the agricultural labourers, the fact that the last Census Report discloses that there are in Ireland nearly 10,000 "houses" with one room and one window apiece, wretched cabins inhabited by about 40,000 people, the peat smoke from the fire in which escapes through a hole in the thatch, gives some idea of the miserable conditions existing in parts of the West of Ireland. Of the quarter of a million of cottages in the second class of the Census—those, that is, with from one to four doors and windows—a large number also no doubt are quite unfit for habitation, and do much in the way of leading to the asylum or to emigration. It is to secure the replacement of these by cheap sanitary and comfortable cottages that the Labourers' Acts, ever since the first of the series introduced by the Irish Party in 1883, have been passed. By them Boards of Guardians, and by the Local Government Act, Rural District Councils, may build such cottages. In 1905, 18,000 cottages had been built under existing Acts, and they are let to tenants at rents of from 10d. to 1s. a week, but the difficulty had always been to effect the improvements sufficiently rapidly owing to the costly and elaborate procedure which involved an appeal to the Privy Council and a heavy burden on the rates of a poverty-stricken community. The Act of 1906 has [90]simplified procedure by replacing the appeal to the Privy Council by an appeal to the Local Government Board, and that it was needful is seen from the fact that under Wyndham's Act only 25 cottages were built. It is hoped thereby to circumvent the apathy of District Councils, and their parsimony is to be appeased by the fact that the funds, which are largely derived from economics in the Irish Executive are advanced at a rate of interest, not as heretofore of 4-7/8 per cent., but, as in the case of land purchase advances, of 3-1/4 per cent., repayable in a period of 68-1/2 years. The urgency of the problem is obvious. The bearing of this state of affairs in rural housing on the fact that in 1904 two out of every thirteen deaths were due to tuberculosis shows that it is impossible to overestimate its importance, and I think that this condition of things, put side by side with the other economic facts with which I have dealt, are a sufficient reply to those who declare that conditions in Ireland would appear couleur de rose were they not seen through the jaundiced eyes of a discontented people.

If the catalogue of Acts of Parliament which have been found necessary to effect the transformation of the system of tenure in Ireland from the state in which it was forty years ago to that in which it is to-day is evidence of the pressing grievance under which the country has suffered; it is also proof that there cannot be legislation other than by shreds and patches on the part of a legislature which lacks sympathy for and knowledge of the country for which it is making laws.

The need for exceptional and separate legislation in Ireland has been admitted, and the system which existed in fact, obtained legal sanction only in 1881, to be in its turn swept away by further legislation which will have a deeper economic bearing on the future of the country than any other change since the relaxation of the Penal Laws. For the rest I cannot do better than quote, in this connection, the opinion of the most dispassionate critic of Ireland of recent years—Herr [91]Moritz Bonn. Speaking of the landlord who has sold his estate he says—"He has no further cause of friction with his former tenants, who now pay him no rent. He no longer regards himself as part of an English garrison. He will again become an Irish patriot. He no longer talks of the unity of the Empire, for Home Rule has few terrors for him now. He talks of 'Devolution,' of the concession of a kind of self-government for Ireland. He will struggle for a while against the designation Home Rule, because not so long ago he was declaring that he would die in the last ditch for the union of the three kingdoms, but he will soon be reconciled to it. It will not be very long till the former landlords, whose chief interests lie in Ireland, have become enthusiastic Nationalists."

It was James Anthony Froude who said that the absenteeism of her men of genius was a worse wrong to Ireland than the absenteeism of her landlords. This evil the Union accentuated by reducing Dublin from the seat of Government, which in the middle of the [93]eighteenth century had been the second only to London in size and importance, to the status of a provincial city from which were drawn the leaders of that liberal school of Protestantism the rise of which was the marked feature of Irish politics at the end of the eighteenth century.

The dividing line between parties in England has never been one of caste or of creed, still less of both combined. In the past the Whigs could claim as aristocratic and as exclusive a prestige as could the Tories. In point of wealth there was little to choose, and, most important of all, in respect of religion, though the minor clergy were very largely Tory and the Dissenters were allied to the Whigs, yet the Anglicanism of the great Whig families, and their appointments when in power to the Episcopal bench and to other places of preferment, saved the Church of England from being identified in toto with either party in the State.

In Ireland, unfortunately, the case was far different, for there property and the Established Church found themselves ranged side by side in the maintenance of their respective privileges against the democracy, which, as it happened, was Catholic, and which for many years after the Union did not recover from the long and demoralising persecution of the Penal Laws.

The aristocracy resisted emancipation, in spite of the fact that it was advocated by all the greatest statesmen and orators of two generations, and it did so quite as much because it was emancipation of the masses as because it was emancipation of the Catholics. The Church of Ireland at the same time dreaded the reform since it had the foresight to perceive that the outcome would be an attack upon her prerogatives and an assault upon her position. The anticipations of both were well founded. Nine years after the Emancipation Act, tithe, which an English Prime Minister had declared was as sacred as rent, was by Act of Parliament commuted into a rent-charge [94]no longer collected directly from the tenant, but paid by the landlord, who, however, compensated himself for its incidence on his shoulders by raising rents. Forty years later the Church Act was passed, and almost simultaneously was begun the assault on the land system which had given support to, and received it from, the Church Establishment.

I have heard it said by Englishmen who have watched the course of politics for some years that the jingling watchword which Lord Randolph Churchill coined for the Unionists twenty years ago, that Home Rule would spell Rome Rule, if used again to-day would to a very great extent fall flat. They have based this view, not on the assumption that Englishmen love Rome more, but rather upon the opinion that they care for all religions less, and that hence the appeal to bigotry would make less play.

The fact, however, remains that one meets men in England with every sympathy for Irish claims who shrink nevertheless from the advocacy of the principle of self-government through fear lest the Protestant minority should suffer. This fear for the rights of minorities serves always as the last ditch in which a losing cause entrenches itself, and timid souls have always been found who hesitate at the approach of every reform on the ground that the devil you know may turn out to be not so bad as the devil you do not know. The legislative history of the House of Lords during the last century, if examples of this were needed, would provide them in large numbers; and as to the question of whether it is better that the majority or the minority of a nation should be governed against its will, one need scarcely say which is the principle adopted in a normal system of Parliamentary government. The rapidity with which under Grattan's Parliament an emancipated Ireland ceased to be intolerant leads one to suspect that the bigotry of creeds which is attributed to us as a race is not a natural characteristic, but rather the outcome of external causes. This view [95]is borne out by the opinion of Lecky, who declared that the deliberate policy of English statesmen was "to dig a deep chasm between Catholics and Protestants," and if proof of the allegation is needed it is to be found in the fact that in the middle of the eighteenth century the Protestant Primate, Archbishop Boulter, wrote to Government concerning a certain proposal that "it united Protestants and Papists, and if that conciliation takes place, farewell to English influence in Ireland."

Under Grattan's Parliament Trinity College, Dublin, opened its doors, though not its endowments, to Catholics. In 1795 a petition from Maynooth, the lay college in which was not till twenty years later suppressed by Government for political reasons, was presented to the Irish House of Commons by Henry Grattan, protesting against the exclusion of Protestants from its halls. In the ranks of the Volunteers, who secured free trade in 1779 and Parliamentary Independence in 1782, Catholics and Protestants stood shoulder to shoulder, and the independent legislature, which was the outcome of their efforts, granted the franchise to the Catholics.

It was of course natural, when Catholics were excluded from Parliament, that the leaders of the people should have been members of the Protestant Church, but in view of the alleged bigotry at the present day of the mass of the Irish people it is surely significant that Isaac Butt and Parnell were both members of the Church of minority, that to take three of the fiercest opponents of the maintenance of the Union John Mitchell was a Unitarian, Thomas Davis an Episcopalian Protestant, and Joseph Biggar a Presbyterian. At this moment of the Nationalist Members of Parliament nine, or more than ten per cent., are Protestants, and one may well ask if the Orangemen have ever had a like proportion of Catholic members of their party, and à fortiori what would be thought of the suggestion that a member of that religion should [96]lead them in the House of Commons. The difficulty experienced in Great Britain by would-be candidates of either party in securing their adoption by local associations if they are Catholics is so common as to make the excessive bigotry alleged against the Irish Catholics, one-tenth of whose representatives are Protestants, appear very much exaggerated.

That bigotry exists among Catholics to some extent I should be the last, albeit regretfully, to deny, but I leave it to the reader to judge how far this is the result and the natural outcome of a policy the direct opposite of that pursued in Scotland, where shortly after the union of her Parliament with that of England, the Church of the majority of the people was for the sake of peace established and has remained in this privileged position ever since. In view of the use to which the "No Popery" cry has been put in its bearings on the Irish question, it is interesting to consider the relations of the English Government with the Catholic Church throughout the last century and to see how far it throws light on the justice and applicability of the taunt that Ireland is priest-ridden.

In 1814 the Catholics of England, in spite of the opposition of the Irish people, secured from Mgr. Quarantotti, the Vice-Prefect of the Propaganda in Rome, who was acting in the absence of Pope Pius VII., at that date still a prisoner in France, a letter declaring that in his judgment the Royal veto should be exercised on ecclesiastical appointments in Ireland. Under O'Connell's leadership, the bishops, clergy, and people of Ireland refused to submit to the decree, and there, in spite of the indignation of the English Catholics as a whole and of the Catholic aristocracy of Ireland, the proposal was allowed to drop, which would have virtually given a right of congé d'elire to the English ministry.

In 1782 Edmund Burke had written in his letter to a peer of Ireland on the Penal Laws—"Never were the members of a religious sect fit to appoint the pastors [97]of another. It is a good deal to suppose that even the present Castle would nominate bishops for the Irish Catholic Church with a religious regard for its welfare." If this was the case under Grattan's Parliament, its application thirty years later was very much more cogent. Behind the scenes, however, the wires continued to be pulled, as is seen by what Melbourne told Greville in 1835, after the latter had expressed the opinion that the sound course in Irish affairs was to open a negotiation with Rome.^[11] "He then told me ... that an application had been made to the Pope very lately (through Seymour) expressive of the particular wish of the British Government that he would not appoint MacHale to the vacant bishopric—anyone but him. But on this occasion the Pope made a shrewd observation. His Holiness said that he had remarked that no place of preferment of any value ever fell vacant in Ireland that he did not get an application from the British Government asking for the appointment. Lord Melbourne supposed that he was determined to show that he had the power of refusal and of opposing the wishes of the Government, and in reply to my questions he admitted that the Pope had generally conferred the appointment according to the wishes of the Government."

These facts must be borne in mind on the part of those by whom the admitted support given by the Whig Catholic "Castle Bishops" of the early part of the nineteenth century to the Government is urged as evidence of a consistent tendency on the part of the Church in Ireland, the political views of the prelates of which, so soon as in the second half of the nineteenth century Governmental lobbying ceased, were of an entirely different colour.

At a later date Greville returned to the topic and noted that^[12] "Palmerston said there was nothing to prevent our sending a minister to Rome; but they had not dared to do it on account of their supposed Popish tendencies. Peel might." [98] Melbourne was not alone among Prime Ministers of the time in his appeals to the Holy See. In 1844 the Government of Sir Robert Peel, when troubled with the manifestations of sympathy which O'Connell was arousing, made an appeal to Gregory XVI. to discourage the agitation, and three years later, when the Whigs under Lord John Russell were in office, Lord Minto, Lord Privy Seal, who was Palmerston's father-in-law, was sent to Rome in the autumn recess to secure the adherence of Pius IX., then in the first months of his Pontificate, to the same line of action, and to bring to the notice of His Holiness the conduct of the Irish priesthood in supporting O'Connell. The fact that neither Gregory XVI. nor Pio Nono made any response to these appeals lends point to the sardonic comment of Disraeli on the Minto mission—that he had gone to teach diplomacy to the countrymen of Machiavelli. The views of Palmerston, on the other hand, are to be seen from a letter addressed to Minto, which is extant, in which, with characteristic bluntness, the Foreign Secretary wrote that public opinion against the Irish priests at home was so exasperated that nothing would give English people more satisfaction than to see a few of them hanged.

"Can anything be more absurd," Greville had written concerning the relations which Melbourne revealed to him as subsisting between Downing Street and the Vatican, and the quotation is as appropriate to these later overtures. "Can anything be more absurd or anomalous than such relations as these? The law prohibits any intercourse with Rome, and the Government, whose business it is to enforce the law, establishes a regular, but underhand, intercourse through the medium of a diplomatic agent, whose character cannot be avowed, and the ministers of this Protestant kingdom are continually soliciting the Pope to confer appointments, the validity, even the existence, of which they do not recognise, while the Pope, who is the chief object of our abhorrence and dread, [99]good humouredly complies with all or nearly all their requests."

Two years after the Minto mission, and a few months before he succeeded to power in place of Peel, Lord John Russell told Charles Greville that the Government was "the greatest curse to Ireland," and he spoke of "their policy of first truckling to the Orangemen, insulting, and then making useless concessions to the Catholics, without firmness and justice."^[13] It is only fair to Lord John to say that in the following year he ordered a Bill to be drawn up to legalise intercourse with the Pope and to put an end to these repeated acts of præmunire on the part of Ministers of the Crown; for a large number of constitutional authorities believed that their action amounted to this offence, which has been defined as consisting of acts tending to introduce into the realm some foreign power, more particularly that of the Pope, to the diminution of the King's authority.

The Diplomatic Relations with the Court of Rome Bill was introduced and passed into law, with one important amendment which we shall have occasion to notice later, in 1848, less than two years after Peel's ministry had been succeeded by that of Russell. The grounds upon which its acceptance by Parliament was demanded were that the complications resulting from the revolutionary crisis throughout the Continent made it essential that the Foreign Office should be in a position, in dealing with the chancelleries of Europe, to obtain direct recognition, and as a result first-hand information, as to the attitude of the Holy See in any situations which might arise; and the acceptance by Parliament of the change of policy which the Bill was intended to effect, on the understanding that diplomatic negotiations should be confined to foreign affairs, may be seen in the words of Earl Fitzwilliam in the House of Lords. In his speech in support of the Bill he declared that "the very last subject upon which the Government should communicate with [100]the Court of Rome was that which had reference to relations which it should have with its own Roman Catholic subjects."^[14]

The Act was an enabling Act, and its proposals, like those as to concurrent endowment which Russell had made three years earlier, were forgotten in 1850, when, in the matter of the Ecclesiastical Titles Bill, the Prime Minister played the part which Leech immortalised as that of "the little boy who chalked up 'No Popery' and then ran away."

Even in the interval before this occurred the provisions of the Act were not put in force. No appointment pursuant to the statute was ever made, but its object was indirectly secured by the fact that a Secretary of Legation, nominally accredited to the Court of the Grand Duke of Tuscany, was kept in residence in Rome, where he served as a de facto Minister to the Vatican. This state of affairs was maintained until Lord Derby recalled Jervoise, who was then Secretary, from Rome, and from that date even this measure of diplomatic representation at the Vatican has ceased to exist.

The Bill of 1848, as we have seen, was directed to the establishment of relations with "the Court of Rome." An amendment on the part of the Bishop of Winchester, which was accepted and passed into law, substituted for these words the phrase "Sovereign of the Roman States," and in consequence, after the loss of the Temporal Power, the Act was repealed by the Statute Law Revision Act, 1875, so that the law was restored to that condition, in regard to this subject, in which it had been before Lord John Russell introduced the Act of 1848.

All this, it will be said, is ancient history, but the fact that it is fifty years old does not affect my point, which is this—that the maintenance of an unnatural polity can only be secured by means of a series of subterfuges such as these employed by Unionist Governments, both Whig and Tory, by which, while [101]sympathy was extended to Orangemen in the open, the Ministry endeavoured to twitch the red sleeves of the Roman Curia in the back stairs of the Vatican.

As Macaulay picturesquely put it, at any moment Exeter Hall might raise its war whoop and the Orangemen would begin to bray, and there was no choice, one must suppose, but that you should not let your right hand know what your left hand was doing.

In 1881 Mr. Gladstone appealed to Cardinal Newman to apprise the Pope of the violent speeches which were being delivered by certain priests in Ireland, for whose language he said he held the Pope, if informed of it, morally responsible, and he asked the English Cardinal for his assistance. To this Newman replied that the Pope was not supreme in political matters, his action as to whether a political party is censurable is not direct, and, moreover, it lay with the bishops to censure the clergy for their language if they thought it intemperate, and the interposition of the Holy See was not called for by the circumstances of the case.

The policy, however, which had been applied before was employed once more in another direction in the teeth of British sentiment if not of British law. A mortgage had been foreclosed on Parnell's estate, and the Irish newspapers having obtained knowledge of the fact raised a collection which became known as the Parnell Tribute, and which was headed by a subscription from the Archbishop of Cashel. If precedent were needed for this form of recognition of national services it was to be found in the grant of £50,000—which might, had he been willing, have been double that amount—which was made to Grattan by the emancipated Irish House of Commons, but more exact parallels perhaps are to be found in "O'Connel's Rent," which Greville described as "nobly paid and nobly earned," or in the great collection which marked the popular appreciation in Great Britain of Cobden's services in securing the repeal of the Corn Laws. [102]In the autumn of 1881, when the Parnell Tribute was initiated, the Land League agitation was in full swing in Ireland, and about the same time Mr. George Errington, an English Catholic Whig Member of Parliament, who was about to spend the winter in Rome, called on Lord Granville, the Foreign Secretary, and was given by him an introduction to the Cardinal Secretary of State. In this wise Mr. Errington went, in the phrase of the day, "to keep the Vatican in good humour," and if he was not the accredited representative of Her Brittanic Majesty—for that would have been illegal—at any rate he went with the sanction and under the ægis of the Foreign Office.

The upshot was a Papal rescript, signed by Cardinal Simeoni, the Prefect, and Mgr. Jacobini, the Secretary of the Sacred Congregation De Propagatione Fide, which condemned the Tribute owing to the Land League agitation.

"The collection called 'The Parnell Testimonial Fund,'" so ran the rescript, "cannot be approved, and consequently it cannot be tolerated that any ecclesiastic, much less a bishop, should take any part whatever in recommending or promoting it."

The bishops and clergy withdrew from any further action in connection with the Tribute Fund, but the laity gave the lie to the suggestion that they are under the thumb of their priests in matters which are not within the sphere of faith or morals. The rescript was promulgated in May, and at this time the subscription list amounted to less than £8,000. Within a month it had doubled, and by the end of the year it amounted to £37,000. The amount of the mortgage was £13,000. As Parnell, in a characteristically laconic way, put it in his evidence before the Commission, "The Irish people raised a collection for me to pay off the amount of a mortgage. The amount of the collection considerably exceeded the amount necessary." The retort of the country to the document "Qualecumque de Parnellio," had been, in the ph [103]rase then current, to "make Peter's pence into Parnell's pounds."

Two years after the Simeoni letter Mr. Errington was again in Rome, attempting this time to secure the exclusion from the successorship to Cardinal M'Cabe, of Dr. Walsh of Maynooth, as Archbishop of Dublin. A letter on the subject fell into the hands of the editor of United Ireland, who published it in his paper, and so in this way thwarted the objects of the second Errington mission. "If we want to hold Ireland by force," said Joseph Cowen, the Radical member for Newcastle, "let us do it ourselves; let us not call in the Pope, whom we are always attacking, to help us."

A further instance may be recounted of the manner in which the people of what is, after Spain, the most Catholic country in Europe, while submitting to the Pope implicitly in matters which are de fide, refused to take their cue in purely political matters from Rome.

The rejection of the Home Rule Bill and of the Land Bill of 1886, and the return of the Conservatives to power, led to a recrudescence of the land war, to which the hope of ameliorative legislation had temporarily put a truce. The Plan of Campaign, which was then launched—of which it has been said that no agrarian movement was ever so unstained by crime—was of the following nature:—The tenants of a locality were to form themselves into an association, each member of which was to proffer to the landlord or his agent a sum which was estimated by the general body as a fair rent for his holding. These sums, if refused by the landlord, were pooled and divided by the association for the maintenance of those tenants who were evicted.

The wheels were set in motion in Rome to obtain a ruling from the Holy Office as to whether such action was justifiable or not. Mgr. Persico, the head of the Oriental rite in the Propaganda, who had had much experience of English speaking people in the East, [104]was sent to Ireland in July, 1887, to investigate the question on the spot. In April, 1888, a rescript was issued by the Holy Office to the bishops of Ireland condemning the Plan of Campaign and boycotting on the ground that they were contrary to both natural justice and Christian charity. With the Decree was sent to the bishops a circular letter, signed by Cardinal Monaco, the Secretary of the Holy Office, which contained the following statement:—"The justice of the decision will be readily seen by anyone who applies his mind to consider that a rent agreed upon by mutual consent cannot, without violation of a contract, be diminished at the mere will of a tenant, especially when there are tribunals appointed for settling such controversies and reducing unjust rents within the bounds of equity after taking into account the causes which diminish the value of the land.... Finally, it is contrary to justice and to charity to persecute by a social interdict those who are satisfied to pay rents agreed upon, or those who, in the exercise of their right, take vacant lands."

The Tablet, the organ of English Catholicism, speaking of the decision, said that happily there was no suspicion of politics about it, and as to the letter of Cardinal Monaco la Valetta, it wrote—"It adds certain reasons which perhaps may have led the Congregation to answer as they have done, but these constitute no part of the official reply." The next step in this episode should be well pondered by those who accuse the Irish of a blind Ultramontanism. The bishops, with one exception, omitted to publish the rescript to their flocks, and the Archbishop of Cashel went so far as to send £50 to the funds of the Plan of Campaign. Parnell, referring publicly to the rescript as "a document from a distant country," declared that his Catholic colleagues must decide for themselves what action to take. Mr. Dillon contradicted the statements in Cardinal Monaco's letter to the effect that the contracts were voluntary or that the campaign fund of the [105]Land League had been collected by extortion. A meeting of forty Catholic members of Parliament assembled in Dublin, and in the Mansion House in that city signed a document denying the allegations about free contracts, fair rent, the Land Commission, and the rest, declared that the conclusions had been drawn from erroneous premises, and while asserting their complete obedience to the Holy See in spiritual matters, no less strongly repudiated the suggestion that Rome had any right to interfere in matters of a political nature. Mass meetings were held in the Phoenix Park in Dublin, and in Cork, which indorsed this position by popular vote. The Orangemen were delighted at the imminence of a schism, and the discomfiture of the Catholics under a decree, the result of internal division, was hailed with pleasure only by the enemies of the Church. In the event they were doomed to disappointment, for in the closing days of the year the Holy Father wrote a letter to the Archbishop of Dublin concerning his action, which had been "so sadly misunderstood," in which he wrote that "as to the counsels that we have given to the people of Ireland from time to time and our recent decree, we were moved in these things, not only by the consideration of what is conformable to truth and justice, but also by the desire of advancing your interests. For such is our affection for you that it does not suffer us to allow the cause in which Ireland is struggling to be weakened by the introduction of anything that could justly be brought in reproach against it."

In this manner was closed an incident which was expected by its foes to threaten the allegiance of Ireland, and with it that of more than half the Catholics in England, to the Holy See.

The Nationalist members at the Mansion House had flatly declared that the decree was an instrument of the unscrupulous enemies both of Ireland and of the Holy See. The Tablet, which declared that it [106] had been promulgated with full and intimate knowledge of all the circumstances, retorted—"As a matter of fact we believe that the English Government has taken no steps, direct or indirect, to obtain the pronouncement, which is based solely on the reports of Mgr. Persico and the documents and evidence which accompanied them." And it went on to add that Persico was expected to return to Ireland to watch the application of the decree.

Beyond this, until recently, nothing more was known except that it was remarked that negotiations between the Duke of Norfolk and the Vatican were broken off, and that the former left Rome suddenly for England without having an audience with the Pope, for which arrangements had been made. The forecast of the Tablet as to Mgr. Persico's return to Ireland to see that the terms of the decree were enforced and applied, was not correct. The responsibility for the decree was everywhere laid on his shoulders, and the Tablet for April 27th, 1889, records that an Address was presented to Mgr. Persico after his return to Rome "as an expression of respect, and in the fervent hope that his Excellency's mission might largely conduce to the glory of God, the increase of charity, and the restoration of peace and goodwill among men."

It is only in the last couple of years, with the publications of Persico's correspondence with Cardinal Manning,^[15] that the real facts of the case have been known. After spending six months in Ireland, the envoy was obliged, for reasons of health, to move to Devonshire in January, 1888. He had orders from Rome to remain in the British Islands, but further, so he told the Cardinal in his letter, "I must not reside in London so as to give not the least suspicion that I have anything to do with the British Government." As to the promulgation of the decree, it was done without his knowledge and, what is more, against his judgment. Having arrived [107]in Ireland in July, 1887, he had concluded his investigations by the middle of the month of December of that year. His requests that the mission might be terminated were met by the reply that it was to continue indefinitely, and he was told that if he wished, for reasons of health, to leave Ireland during the winter months he might do so, but that he must remain in the British Isles.

After the issue of the rescript he wrote to the English Cardinal in these words:—"It is known to your Eminence that I did not expect at all the said decree, that I was never so much surprised in my life as when I received the bare circular from Propaganda on the morning of the 28th ulto. And fancy, I received the bare circular, as I suppose every Irish bishop did, without a letter or a word of instruction or explanation. And what is more unaccountable to me, only the day before I had received a letter from the Secretary for the Extraordinary Ecclesiastical Affairs, telling me that nothing had been done about Irish affairs, and that my report and other letters were still nell casetta del Emo. Rampolla! And yet the whole world thinks and says that the Holy Office has acted on my report, and that the decree is based upon the same! Not only all the Roman correspondents but all the newspapers avec le Tablet en tête proclaim and report the same thing! I wish that my report and all my letters had been studied and seriously considered, and that action had been taken from the same! Above all, I had proposed and insisted upon it, that whatever was necessary to be done ought to be done with, and through, the bishops." Of this there is ample proof in the earlier letters, and the proposal which he made was that the four archbishops and one bishop for every province should be summoned to Rome to "prepare and settle things." Writing on the Feast of the Epiphany in 1888, he said to Manning:—"I agree fully with your Eminence that the true Nunciatura for England [108]and Ireland is the Episcopate. If the bishops do not know the state of the country they are not fit to be bishops. If they do, what more can una persona ufficiosa o ufficiale do for the Holy See?" And again—"I fully understand what your Eminence adds, the English people tolerate the Catholic Church as a spiritual body. The first sign of a political action on the Government would rekindle all the old fears, suspicions, and hostility. It is a great pity they do not realise this in Rome. And it is also a great pity that English Catholics do not understand all this. I am sure that His Holiness understands it well, but I share your fears that those about him may harass him with the fickle and vain glory that would accrue to the Holy See by having an accredited representative from England also."

It is impossible not to infer from this that the English Catholics were engaged in an attempt to secure diplomatic recognition by Great Britain of the Holy See, and that their anxiety to secure this was in some measure connected with their desire to override the feelings and opinions of the Irish Episcopate, but the overtures of Lord Salisbury were as fruitless as those of Russell forty years before.

The last letter from Mgr. Persico to the English Cardinal, which has been reprinted, reiterates the disclaimer of responsibility for the action of the Vatican, in these words:—

"I had no idea that anything had been done about Irish affairs much less thought that some questions had been referred to the Holy Office, and the first knowledge I had of the decree was on the morning of the 28th April, when I received the bare circular sent me by Propaganda. I must add that had I known of such a thing I would have felt it my duty to make proper representations to the Holy See."

In view of this it is interesting to read the naïve record in the Tablet of those who signed the address to Persico on the totally wrong assumption that he [109]and his report were the causa causans of the decree. "The signatures," says the Tablet, "comprise those of all the Catholic peers in Ireland (14 in number), four Privy Councillors, ten honourables, two Lords Lieutenants of counties, nineteen baronets, fifty-four deputy-lieutenants, two hundred and ninety-seven magistrates, and a large number of the learned and military professions." The remarkable thing about this memorial was the absence of the names of any clerics, regular or secular, parish priests or prelates.

There are in Ireland a great many more Protestant Nationalists than the English Press allows its readers to suspect, and it is one of these who, in a recent novel, declares in a wild hyperbole that if the bishops can secure the continuance of English Government for the next half century Ireland will have become the Church's property. No one, of course, with any sense of proportion takes seriously such a statement as this, but I allude to it as showing, in its extreme anti-clericalism, the same tendency, very much magnified, as I have observed to a great extent in the Protestant Nationalist as a class, who has not, as I believe, had time to eliminate the last taint of No Popery feeling in which for generations he and his forbears have been steeped. The existence of this anti-clerical spirit, and, what is more to the point, its expression with the proverbial tactlessness of the political convert, for such a one the Protestant Nationalist usually is, make it very essential that the Catholic clergy should walk warily and avoid giving any handle to their detractors, for in Ireland, and perhaps most of all in the Church in Ireland, there is need to use the prayer of the faithful Commons—"that the best possible construction be put on one's motives." How small is the basis for the allegation that the clergy are playing only for the Church's hand and are prepared to sacrifice for this end the welfare of the country is shown, I think, by the evidence which I have adduced. But in spite of their ill success in [110]the past there is a persistent notion on the part of both English parties that they can drag in ecclesiastical influence to redress the political balance in their favour. The exposure in the Life of Lord Randolph Churchill of the manner in which he proposed to Lord Salisbury to win over the Church to Unionism is an example of what I mean:—^[16]

"I have no objection to Sexton and Healy knowing the deliberate intention of the Government on the subject of Irish education, but it would not do for the letter or communication to be made public, for the effect of publicity on Lancashire would be unfortunate.... It is the bishops entirely to whom I look in future to mitigate or postpone the Home Rule onslaught. Let us only be enabled to occupy a year with the education question. By that time I am certain Parnell's party will have become seriously disintegrated. Personal jealousies, Government influences, Davitt and Fenian intrigues, will be at work upon the devoted band of eighty. The bishops, who in their hearts hate Parnell, and don't care a scrap for Home Rule, having safely acquired control of Irish education, will, according to my calculation, complete the rout. That is my policy, and I know it is sound and good, and the only possible Tory policy." And again he wrote—"My opinion is that if you approach the archbishops through proper channels, if you deal in friendly remonstrances and active assurances ... the tremendous force of the Catholic Church will gradually and insensibly come over to the side of the Tory Party."

All this, of course, is perfectly consistent with the views which in 1884 the leader of the Fourth Party had expressed when, speaking on the Franchise Bill, he declared his opinion that "the agricultural peasant is much more under the proper and legitimate influence of the Roman Catholic priesthood than the lower classes in the towns."^[17] But how is one to reconcile either of these declarations with his action in [111]1886, when, the tremendous force of the Catholic Church not having come over to the Tory side, he "decided to play the Orange card, which, please God, will prove a trump," and went, with his hands red from making overtures to what they considered the scarlet woman, to rally the Orangemen with the haunting jingle that Home Rule would be Rome Rule.

This was before the general election of 1886. Seven years later, when another election was approaching, he returned to the charge, this time in a letter to Lord Justice FitzGibbon:—"What is the great feature," he wrote, "of the political situation in Ireland now? The resurrection in great force of priestly domination in political matters. Now I would cool the ardour of these potentates for Mr. G. by at once offering them the largest concessions on education—primary, intermediate, and university—which justice and generosity could admit of. I would not give them everything before the general election, but I would give a good lot, and keep a good lot for the new Parliament. I do not think they could resist the bribe, and the soothing effect of such a policy on the Irish vote and attitude would be marked. Of course the concessions would have to be very large—almost as large as what the bishops have ever asked for, but preserving intact Trinity College. It would assume the material shape of a money subsidy."^[18]

I have set down without omissions and with nothing extenuate the data on which is based the indictment that the clergy have been, and are, anti-national, and I ask the reader to say whether the charge is unsupported or not. That overtures have again and again been made sub rosa to the clergy to wean them from the popular side is proved up to the hilt, but that in any single instance they have closed with the offers or been forced by the rigours of ecclesiastical discipline into compliance, appears to me not proven, as is also the imputation that the people have in any [112]degree departed from the lines of O'Connell's dictum—that we take our theology from Rome, but our politics we prefer of home manufacture. If the action of Cardinal Cullen with regard to the Tenant League in 1855 be adduced as an argument in favour of the proposition, it must be remembered that though as Primate his voice was preponderant and his policy was affected, in Dr. MacHale, the Archbishop of Tuam, an exponent of opposite views was to be found, and that it is on the lines laid down by MacHale, and not those advocated by Cullen, that the policy of the Catholic Church in Ireland has as a rule been based.

The clergy in the early part of the nineteenth century were brought up in foreign seminaries, where passive obedience to the established order was inculcated, and where, as was natural in such places, a horror of the Jacobinical principles of the French revolution created among them an antagonism to any violent agitation, which admittedly or not drew its inspiration from that source, but the names of Dr. Doyle of Kildare, of Dr. Duggan of Clonfert, of Dr. Croke of Cashel, of Dr. M'Cormick, to name only four, show how much support was given to the popular cause in Ireland by a considerable section of the higher clergy.

To Protestant Nationalists I would commend that expression of opinion of the greatest of their number—Edmund Burke—who, speaking of the religion of the mass of his countrymen, declared that in his opinion "it ought to be cherished as a good, though not the most preferable good if a choice was now to be made, and not tolerated as an inevitable evil. It is extraordinary that there should still be need to emphasise the fact that the Catholicism of Ireland is inevitable and that there is no hope of making the country abjure it—but this is the case."

Half a century ago, when proselytism was in full swing in a country weakened by famine, Protestants [113]were sanguine on this point. Sir Francis Head, in a volume which bears the very naïve title of "A Fortnight in Ireland," declared that within a couple of years there can exist no doubt whatever that the Protestant population of Ireland will form the majority, and Rev. A.R. Dallas, one of the leading proselytisers in the country, borrowing a Biblical metaphor, announced that "the walls of Irish Romanism had been circumvented again and again, and at the trumpet blast that sounded in the wailings of the famine they may be said to have fallen flat. This is the point of hope in Ireland's present crisis."

With the maintenance by the Church of her hold over the people governments have recognised the influence of the priests, and have tried to turn it to their own use by methods into which they have been afraid to let the light of day; and for the rest, with every trouble and every discontent, has arisen the parrot cry of cherchez le prêtre. Conscientious objections to certain forms of education are respected in England when they are emphasised by passive resistance. How many times have the same objections in Ireland been put down to clerical obscurantism? The priest in politics we have been told ad nauseam is the curse of Ireland, but clerical interference is not unknown in English villages, and one has heard of dissenting ministers whose hands are not quite unstained by the defilement of political partisanship. It is not the habit that makes the monk, and it is possible for sacerdotalism to be as rampant among the most rigid of dissenters as in Church itself. An example of the falsehoods which have at intervals to be nailed to the counter was the one which declared that under the compulsion of their priests a considerable part of the Irish electorate falsely declared themselves to be illiterate, so that the secrecy of the ballot might be avoided and their votes might be regulated by the clergy. On a comparison of the statistics of illiterate voters and the Census of illiteracy a similar proportion [114]was found to exist as that between the total number of voters and the whole population, in this way completely disproving the allegation.

A great deal of capital has of late been made of the alleged excessive church building in Ireland during the last few years. In the light of the fact that less than forty years have passed since the money of these same peasants for the expenditure of which so much concern is now expressed, was devoted to the maintenance of what Disraeli admitted to be an alien Church, it is a little surprising to hear this taunt from Englishmen and Protestants. Relieved, as the people have been only in the last generation, from this obligation it is not strange that the work of providing churches for their own worship should have been undertaken. The Catholic churches have in large measure been built by the contributions of successful emigrants, subscribed in many instances with the secondary object of providing work in building during times of distress. There are 2,400 Catholic and 1,500 Protestant churches in Ireland at the present moment, and there is one Episcopalian Protestant church for every 320 members of that creed and one Catholic church for every 1,368 Catholics.

Sir Horace Plunkett, who started this new fashion of attack by giving it the cachet of respectability in the first edition of "Ireland in the New Century," after declaring that he has "come to the conclusion that the immense power of the Irish Roman Catholic clergy has been singularly little abused," goes on to add in connection with the topic on which we are touching that "without a doubt a good many motives are unfortunately at work in the church-building movement which have but remote connection with religion." What is meant by this I cannot pretend to say. It seems to me unworthy of a gentleman in Sir Horace's position, and with his acknowledged good intentions to adopt an attitude [115]which can only be compared to that which Pope satirised in the lines:—