erated article you must
come to Galway, and especially to Barna. Look how she clings to it,
how she holds it to her breast, how reverentially she looks down on
it. Suppose she caught her foot on a stone, stumbled, and broke the
bottle! Horrid thought, involving (perhaps) eternal damnation, (unless
she were quickly absolved by the priest). There is piety for you! As a
good Catholic I am ashamed of myself when I think how little religion
(comparatively) there is in me. Education has been a curse. How happy
I should be if I had that old woman's simple, strong belief in the
virtues of holy water, especially when carried home in a well-washed
whiskey bottle. But, somehow, the more we Catholics know the less we
believe. We go regularly to mass, at any rate I do (my wife is very
devout), but I fear that Catholics have less and less faith in
proportion to their culture. But for the women Catholicism would not
hold its ground among the higher classes of Irishmen for so much as
five-and-twenty minutes."

It seems to me that the belief of uncultured Irishmen as to the
immense benefits to be derived from Home Rule is exactly on a par with
the belief of uncultured Irishwomen as to the immense benefits to be
derived from the sprinkling of holy water. No reasonable man, who has
carefully examined the subject, will for one moment assert that there
is a pin to choose between the two. The votes of these poor folks,
admitted by thousands to the electorate, have sent to Westminster the
hireling orators whose persistent clamour has turned a slippery
statesmen from the paths of patriotism and propriety, and whose
subterranean machinations--aided and abetted by men versed in
Jesuistic and Machiavellian strategy, and who believe that the end
justifies the means--threaten to undermine the British Empire, and to
involve the citizens of England in political and financial ruin. A
pretty pass for a respectable individual like John Bull. England to be
worked by the wire-pulling of a few under-bred, half-educated priests!
whose tincture of learning John himself has paid for--poor Bull, who
seems to pay for everything, and who would gladly have paid for
gentility, too, if the Maynooth professors could have injected the
commodity by means of a hypodermic syringe, or even by hydraulic
pressure. No use in attempting impossibilities. As well endeavour to
communicate good manners or gratitude to a Nationalist M.P.

My legal friend was full of matter, but