for the Sacrament it forgets the
pauperization of the nation. It enforces chastity, but it winks at
murder; it demands money for masses for the souls of the dead, but it
leaves on one side the homes and bodies of the living; it breeds a
race of paupers to drag the country lower and lower into the depths of
poverty, and thinks it has done a meritorious work, and one that
calls for praise because of the paucity of numbers in the percentage
of illegitimate births. Thus in Ireland, where everything is set
askew, even morality has its drawbacks, and less individual virtue
would be a distinct national gain.

The Home Rule enthusiasts say all that is wanted to remedy these
ingrained defects is a Parliament; all that is wanted to make Irishmen
perfect and Ireland a paradise is a Parliament chosen by the people
and sitting in College Green. Human nature will then be changed, and
the lion and the lamb will lie down together. The Papist will love the
Protestant, and the moral of the story about those two Scotch
Presbyterian boys, whose presence at the Barrow House National School
so seriously disturbed both priest and people, is one that will read
quite the other way. All the bitter hatred poured out against England,
against Protestants, against the law and its administrators, will
cease so soon as Catholics come to the place of power and the
supremacy of England is at an end. The Church which burned Giordano
Bruno and is affronted because his memory has been honoured--which
placed the Quirinale under the ban of the lesser excommunication, and
withstood the national impulse towards freedom and unity as
represented by Garibaldi--the Church which has ever been on the side
of intolerance and tyranny will suddenly, in Ireland under Home Rule,
become beneficent, just, and liberal, and heretics will no longer herd
with the goats but will take their place among the sheep. If, as Mr.
Redmond says, it is the duty of Irishmen to make the Government of
England an impossibility, it will then be their pleasure to make her
alliance both close and easy. Ulster and Kerry will march shoulder to
shoulder, and Leaguers and Orangemen will form an unbroken phalanx of
orderly and law-abiding citizens. In a word the old Dragon will be
chained and the Millenium will come.

The prospect seems too good to be true. Were we to follow after it and
put the loyal Protestant minority into the power of the anti-imperial
Catholic majority in the hope of seeking