Pending a fuller investigation, the police office books were impounded,
and, as a result of the inquiry, several of the police were suspended.
Dowling was dismissed from his post as head constable of Liverpool, and
lost a retiring pension which, if all had been well with him, he would
have come in for a short time afterwards.

An amusing story is told of a Liverpool daily paper in those days. It
was struggling with adversity, and the manager, a worthy Scotsman, sat
in his office on Monday morning with the weekly statement before him,
showing increasing expense and decreasing revenue.

To him entered a Liverpool parson--very determined and very menacing. He
had asked for the editor, but that gentleman had not yet come down, and
the manager was the only person in authority visible, so he had to make
shift with him.

"I am here," the parson said, "as the mouthpiece of a large number of
people who are not satisfied with the attitude of the 'Liverpool ----'
on the great question of the hour--Whether Popery is to dominate our
liberties or are we to crush Popery?"

"Yes," said the manager, wearily, his mind still on the balance sheet.
"What do you complain of?"

"I wish to tell you, sir," said the parson, with impressive emphasis,
"that only this morning I have heard the belief expressed by merchants
on 'Change that the 'Liverpool ----' is actually in the pay of the Pope
of Rome!"

In a second a ray of light seemed to irradiate the gloom of the
manager's soul, as he contemplated in a flash of thought the untold
treasures of the Vatican--

"Man!" he exclaimed fervently, "I wish to Heaven it was!"

But the numerous exhibitions of bigotry stirred up in connection with
Lord John Russell's Ecclesiastical Titles Act were of trifling
consequence compared with the injury done to the Irish people arising
out of the same Act. For it led to the ruin of the Tenant Right
agitation in Ireland, in which the Irish people, Protestant as well as
Catholic, had been united as they had not been since 1798 and the days
of Grattan's Parliament.

For the Tenant League and the Irish Party in Parliament had in their
ranks some of the greatest rascals who had ever disgraced Irish
politics. These, while posing as the champions of Catholicity in
opposing Lord John Russell's bill, were simply working for their own
base ends, and were afterwards known and execrated as the Sadlier-Keogh
gang.

Their infamous betrayal of the Irish tenantry dashe