ote that the Parnellites resent priestly
dictation.

Another interpolation anent "the Castle job." I thought to corner a
great Athlone politician by questions _re_ the recent moonlighting,
incendiarism, and attempted murders in Limerick and Clare. He said--

"All these things are concocted and paid for by the Tories of England.
The reason Balfour seemed to be so successful was simple enough when
you know the explanation. Balfour and his friends kept the
moonlighters and such like people going. They paid regular gangs of
marauders to disturb the country while the Liberals were in power.
When the Tories get in, these same gangs are paid to be quiet. Then
the Tories go about saying, 'Look at the order we can keep.' Every
shot fired in County Clare is paid for by the English Tories. Sure, I
have it from them that knows. Ye might talk for a month an' ye'd never
change my opinion. There's betther heads than mine to undershtand
these things, men that has the larnin', an' is the thrue frinds of
Ireland. When I hear them spake from the altar 'tis enough for me. I
lave it to them. Ye couldn't turn me in politics or religion, an' I
wouldn't listen to anybody but my insthructors since I was twelve
inches high." Well might Colonel Winter, who knows the speaker
above-mentioned, say to me, "He has read a good deal, but his reading
seems to have done him no good."

It is time I went back to Turlough's Tower and my phoenix priest who
was riled to hear his Bishop speak of the Dublin explosion as a
"Castle job." He claimed that "the clergy are unwilling instruments in
the hands of the Irish people, who are unconquerable even after seven
hundred years of English rule. The Irish priesthood is so powerful an
element of Irish life, not because it leads, but because it follows.
Powerful popular movements coerce the clergy, who are bound to join
the stream, or be for ever left behind. No doubt at all that, being
once in, they endeavour to direct the current of opinion in the course
most favourable to the Catholic religion. To do otherwise would be to
deny their profession, to be traitors to the Church. They did not
commence the agitation. The Church instinctively sticks to what is
established, and opposes violent revolutionary action. History will
bear me out. The clergy stamped out the Smith-O'Brien insurrection.
The Catholic clergy of the present day, mostly the sons of farmers,
are perhaps more ardently political than the clergy of a form