In Galway
the Confraternity of the Holy Girdle was making full time, and in
Westport three priests are laying on day and night in a mission. A few
days ago they carried the Corpus Christi round the place, six hundred
children strewing flowers under the sacerdotal feet, and the crowds of
worshippers who flocked into the town necessitated the use of a tent,
from which the money-box was stolen. On Sunday last the bridge
convaynient to the chapel was covered with country folks who could not
get into the building, and a big stall with sacred images in plaster
of Paris and highly-coloured pictures in cheap frames was doing a
roaring trade. Barefooted women were hurrying to chapel to get
pictures blessed, or walking leisurely home with the sanctified
treasure under their shawls. A brace of scoffers on the bridge
explained the surging crowd, and advised instant application, that
evening being the last. "Get inside, wid a candle in yer fist, an' ye
can pray till yer teeth dhrop out iv yer head." This irreverence is
probably one of the accursed fruits of contact with the sacrilegious
Saxon. "The people here are cowardly, knavish, and ignorant," said an
Irishman twenty years resident in Westport. "They believe anything the
priests tell them, and they will do anything the priests may order or
even hint at. They would consider it an honour if the priests told
them to lie down that they might walk over them. Politically they are
entirely in the hands of the Roman Catholic clergy. They are totally
unable to understand or to grasp the meaning of the change now
proposed, which would place the country entirely at the mercy of the
clerical party. We see the result of popular election in the return of
Poor Law Guardians, who spend most of their time in calling each other
beggars and liars. Patronage under the Home Rule Bill would mean the
instalment of the relatives of priests in all the best offices. Once
we have an Irish Parliament, a man of capacity may leave the country
unless he have a priest for his uncle.

"We want a liberal measure of Local Government, and a final settlement
of the land question. The poor people are becoming poorer and poorer
through this eternal agitation which drives away wealth and capital,
and undermines the value of all Irish securities. Poor as we were, we
were much better off before the agitation commenced. The poor
themselves are becoming alive to the fact that continuous agitation
means continuous povert