reland and
Great Britain. "On the contrary," he said, "I have seen with the
greatest satisfaction the growth of such good feeling towards England as
I never expected to witness, as the result of the visits here of English
public men, sympathising with the Irish tenants. I believe their visits
are opening the way to a real union of the Democracies of the two
countries, and to an alliance between them against the aristocratic
classes which depress both peoples." This alliance Father Keller
believed would be a sufficient guarantee against any religious contest
between the Catholics of Ireland and the Protestants of Great Britain.

"I was much astounded," he said, "the other day, to hear from an English
gentleman that he had met a Protestant clergyman who told him he really
believed that a persecution of the Protestants would follow the
establishment of Home Rule in Ireland. I begged him to consider that Mr.
Parnell was a Protestant, and I assured him Protestants would have
absolutely nothing to fear from Home Rule."

Reverting to his idea of re-distributing the Irish population through
Ireland, under changed conditions, social and economical, I asked him
how in Meath, for example, he would meet the difficulty of stocking with
cattle the peasant holdings of a new set of proprietors not owning
stock. He thought it would be easily met by advances of money from the
Treasury to the peasant proprietors, these advances to be repaid, with
interest, as in the case of Lady Burdett Coutts, and the advances made
by her to the fishermen now under the direction of Father Davis at
Baltimore.

I was struck by the resemblance of these views to the Irish policy
sketched for me by my Nationalist fellow-traveller of the other night
from London. "The evil that men do lives after them"--and when one
remembers how only a hundred years ago, and just after the establishment
of American Independence ought to have taught England a lesson, the
Irish House of Commons had to deal with the persistent determination of
the English manufacturers to fight the bogey of Irish competition by
protective duties in England against imports from Ireland, it is not
surprising that Irishmen who allow sentiment to get the upper hand of
sense should now think of playing a return game. England went in fear
then not only of Irish beasts and Irish butter, but of Irish woollens,
Irish cottons, Irish leather, Irish glass. Nay, absurd as it may now
seem, English ironmaste