SERMON
PREACHED BY

MGR. THE BISHOP OF ORLEANS
ON BEHALF OF THE

POOR CATHOLICS OF IRELAND,
IN THE

CHURCH OF ST. ROCH, PARIS,
ON

THE FEAST OF THE ANNUNCIATION, 1861.

WITH A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR.
Sole Authorized Translation

DUBLIN:
JOHN F. FOWLER, 3 CROW STREET, DAME STREET.
1861.
ONE

SHILLING

AND

SIX

PENCE.

ENTERED AT STATIONERS' HALL.

JL09L

3mAE
INTRODUCTION.

and unanswerable as is the following discourse, no one
who had not the rare privilege of being present can estimate the
impression which it produced. During two hours and a-half the
" immense concourse", as the great prelate himself calls his auditory, was held spell-bound by his words. There is hardly an
emotion of the soul that he did not awaken—tender pity, admiration, horror, indignation, sympathy, succeeded each other throughout, according as the orator varied his subject. Strong men
were seen to shed tears; indeed, during portions of the sermon,
there was hardly a dry eye in the entire church.
Thrilling and sublime as he was in all, it is hard to say in what
he excelled. But had the sermon been delayed only another
fortnight, had the cries and shrieks of the widows and orphans,
and old, and sick a*nd dying and innocent of Glenveigh only
reached his ear as he unfolded the iniquities of Irish landlord
extermination—had ADAIR supplemented Palmer and Plunket—.
Glenveigh, Erris and Partry, the very stones of Paris would ring
with his appeal to high Heaven for justice. How would he not
then exclaim again and again, " Tant que durera cet affreux
etat de choses et le complet asservissement des Irlandais aux
Landlords qu' on ne me dise plus que les lois sont abrog^s que
les Irlandais sont emancipes — qu ils jouissent de toutes les
libertes—la liberte de vivre, 1'ont ils? NON !! !"*
He mounted the pulpit at three precisely, and descended after
half-past five. So eager were people to be present, that seats were
taken as early as ten o'clock. The church was crowded long
before the sermon commenced; and better than half an hour
previous, all the doors had to be closed, to prevent inevitable
accidents.
ELOQUENT

* Page 46,

6
There were present between 4,000 and 5,000 people, and twice
that number had to return home disappointed. Many have stated
that, being unable to come in time, and well kno\ying the crowds
that would attend, they remained at home altogether, despairing
of accommodation.
Many anecdotes are told as connected with the occasion. T h e
sermon being over, the quetueses, in proceeding to their respective
places, preceded by the Swiss, reached them not without difficulty. One of the ladies had considerable delay, owing to the
crowds that blocked up the passage- T h e people going out at
her door were quite at a loss what to<do with the offerings which
they held ready to give. In this position a lady seized her husband's hat, and held it out with the words, u O N NK SORT PAS",
thus improvising herself a queteuse, until the arrival of the noble
lady whose place she thus filled. People were seen to empty
their purses into the little collecting bags. Among the offerings
was found a small gold cross, to which was found attached part of
the chain, flung in by some lady who possibly forgot her purse,
or, after hearing the appeal, thought her offerings too scanty.
Never was a sermon more successful. T h e amount realized
exceeded £ 6 0 0 , but the moral effect is inestimable. Though the
illustrious preacher proclaimed that his " was not a political cause",
still his words have opened the eyes of Europe to the miserable
condition of Ireland under English rule. Let us fervently pray
that this opening may not be without fruit.
W i t h what dignity does he treat the " INQUIETE AGITATION",
with which his future words were protested against, denounced,
and commented u p o n !
Perhaps within the present century
nothing more ludicrous has been witnessed than that article in
the Morning Post, criticising every part of a sermon not uttered
or known for several days after, and that fatal letter of " the
lord Bishop", pronouncing every syllable of the sermon yet to be
preached an " edifice of lies".
Alluding to these strange anachronisms and foresights he merely
says, " Permettez moi de le dire j'ai ete etonne et j ' a i dii l'etre des
" bruits et des refutations etranges qu'on a envoyes par avance
" aux discours que je n'avais faits.
Qu'est ce dire et pourquoi
" toute cette inquiete agitation ? Avez vous, done, a craindre ?

7
"
A u moi de Novembre dernier par une pluie torrentielle
" et glacee dans les montagnes sauvages de Partry soixante neuf
" malheureux etaient jetes sur la grande route. J e n'examine
" pas si leurs refus d'aller aux ecoles Protestantes en fut la cause
44
On le nie aujourdhui; c'est l'affaire du Lord Eveque non la
" mienne. Pour moi quoique je n'aie la dessus aucun doute J e
"ne le contredis pas; J e le laisse avec ces parole^du Times: ' Ces
" evictions sont un honteux scandale et cet eveque aurais du
"mourir ou mendier a la porte'", etc.* N o ; the object and the
mission of the illustrious prelate was higher than to preach against
a man—he preached for Ireland, not against Lord Plunket. May
Ireland never forget his services or his words!
Incredible efforts were made tp prevent trie sermon. Private
intrigue exhausted itself. But in vain. T h e friends of the
cause were too powerful for the opposition. T h e dames queteuses
were the highest in France, as their names show; nor did they
spare any amount of trouble to insure every kind of success.
T h e y were
Madame la Duchesse d'Hamilton, Princesse de B a d e ;
Madame la Duchesse d'Estissac;
Madame la Duchesse de FitzJames;
Madame la Marquisse de la F e r t e ;
Madame la Marechale de MacMahon;
Madame l'Amirale Fourichon, nee MacLeod;
Madame la Comtesse de la Redorte;
Madame la Comtesse D u Chatel;
Madame la Princesse de Wittenstein.
Ireland owes them a debt of gratitude. Irish ladies should be
proud of their " sisters" in France,—Ireland, of hers,—all, of the
humane and illustrious prelate.
P . L.
P.S.—The translators have been assisted in their hurried work
by some kind and able friends.
* Vide p. 47=

LIFE
OV

MGR. D U P A N L O U P ,
BISHOP OF ORLEANS.

BY M. D E ST. A L B E .
TRANSLATED AND ABRIDGED

BY J. P. L.
FELIX ANTONY PHILIBERT DUPANLOUP was born on the 3rd of January,

1802, at St. Felix, a little village of the diocese of Chambery in Savoy.
His friends belonged to the respectable gentry of that country.
A fellow countryman of St. Francis de Sales and of Joseph de Maistre,
those two men of genius so eminently French in mind and genius, he seems
to unite in his admirable talents the mildness and sweetness of the one with
the force and grandeur of the other.
At an early age he gave proofs of a superior intellect, and received his first
lessons from one of his uncles, a venerable ecclesiastic, who recommended
his highly gifted pupil to be sent to prosecute his studies in Paris. Happy
counsel, which gave the Church a great bishop, and France one of the purest
and most illustrious of her citizens!
In 1810* he arrived in Paris, and entered into the sixth class in an excellent establishment, Rue du Regard.
He remained there a few years, following catechism at Saint Sulpice,
where the lectures given for that object were so much admired. He was as
usual remarked for his talents, and received prizes from the hands of the celebrated preacher M. Fayet, who then little thought the young pupil whom he
crowned, would occupy after him the episcopal See at Orleans with so much
eminence.
He then entered into the Seminary of St. Nicholas du Chardonnet, where
he obtained every year the most brilliant success. His success in that
establishment, where he had to contend with young men of remarkable
talent and destined to become celebrated, was truly wonderful. In a composition in Latin verse, the subject of which was a beautiful passage in
Chateaubriand's prose,—" There is a God, all nature proclaims it", etc., he
obtained, far above all his competitors, the first place. The value of his
version may be judged from a single line—
Omnia plena Deo, quis te Deus esse negabit.
* He was present at the solemn entrance of Marie Louise, and assisted the following year at the baptism of the King of Rome.
2

10
After having finished his studies in philosophy and theology af Saint
Sulpice, he was ordained priest by Mgr. Quelan at Saint Sulpice in 1825,
and was immediately attached to the parish of the Assumption, wherVhe
began his lectures for catechism, w^hich marked out his place among the
most distinguished clergymen of Paris.
After a short stay at St. Roch, where Mgr. Oliver became warmly attached to him, he was appointed director of St. Nicholas, and raised soon
after to the dignity of honorary Vicar-General.
In 1828 he was appointed to teach catechism to the princes of Orleans,
and in the beginning of the fatal year 1830, was made almoner of the
Dauphine.
The revolution of 1830 broke out. M. Dupanloup showed the greatest
respect and devotedness to the Bourbons, and witnessed their fall with feelings of regret and sorrow.
In 1834 Mgr. de Quelan founded the conferences at Notre Dame. M.
Dupanloup, on the 16th of February, 1834, began in the metropolitan church
that series of celebrated sermons which M. Lacordaire, M. Eavignan, and
M. Felix, were destined to continue with so much success, and which left
such imperishable souvenirs.
The reputation of the young priest, owing to all his success, became
more solid. He had been confessor of the Duke of Bordeaux when he'
left his cradle; he was chosen to console the Prince de Talleyrand on the
threshold of the tomb.
Cardinal Peri*gord, archbishop of Paris, had, when dying, ardently requested his successor to labour by all the means in his power towards the
conversion of his too famous nephew.
That conversion was the constant preoccupation of Mgr. de Quelan.
"Take my life, 0 my God!" the holy prelate often said, "but grant me
the salvation of his soul!" " I know", the old diplomatist used to say with
a smile, " that Monseigneur wants to gain my soul to offer it to the Cardinal".
The 17th of May, 1838, says a historian, in presence of the Abbe
Dupanloup, whom Providence had destined to be the faithful cooperator,
and even the direct instrument of this celebrated conversion, in presence
of several witnesses, among whom were M. Barante, M. Mole, M. Royer
Collard, and M. de St. Aulaire, the prince signed, at six o'clock in the morning, a retractation, and a letter to the Archbishop of Paris, enclosing that retractation to the Pope.
In speaking lately of this celebrated conversion, Mgr. Dupanloup said :—
" That of the four bishops who had the misfortune to forget their duties in
the hour of peril, the one who died last, and whose greater fall and celebrated existence cannot be forgotten, was also touched by the divine mercy
of God at his last hour. I received his last sigh", said the good bishop,
"and as it is known that before appearing before God, he had not waited
for that hour, but deplored his life, accusing the revolution, and deploring the
acts he committed when a bishop".
In the Seminary of St. Nicholas, M. Dupanloup achieved great things. His
system of education was admired and envied, and some of the most remark 2B

11
able men in France owe their celebrity to the education they received under
the worthy priest. Some difference, however, between Mgr. Affre and M.
Dupanloup, induced the latter to resign his functions.
Two years previously he had been appointed, in April, 1841, Professor
of Sacred Eloquence at the Sorbonne. One day, however, when speaking of
Voltaire, a discussion took place, followed by a regular battle among the
audience, and the Professor never appeared after in the chair.
Condemned to silence, he started for Rome, where he was received with the
greatest kindness. He was not received at that Vatican, which he had so
often and so eloquently defended by bis eloquence and with his pen, as an
ordinary visitor, and the Sovereign Pontiff gave him many proofs of his
affection. He happened to be at Rome at the time of the celebrated conversion of M. Ratisbonne, and it was he who was requested to pronounce a
sermon at the solemn baptism of the new convert, at which he assisted with
the court of Gregory the Sixteenth, the high clergy, and a great concourse
of foreigners.
On his way to Rome, M. Dupanloup always stopped at Turin, where
Charles Albert, who received him at his table, made him the most advantageous offers to remain in his native country; but M. Dupanloup declined,
preferring his active, laborious, and difficult existence at Paris.
In 1848, M. Dupanloup took the direction of the journal VAmi de la
Religion, and soon restored it to its former position, by series of articles
written with courage and talent; he defended also with great energy the
temporal power of the Pope.
In 1849, Mgr. Fayet, Bishop of Orleans, having died of cholera, M. Salvandy, then minister, the friend and admirer of M. Dupanloup, offered him
the see, wdiich he accepted much against his own will. In his farewell
sermon, in the Lent of 1849, at St. Sulpice, he said:—
" I appeal to Heaven as witness, that if ever there was a man who did
not aspire after the grandeur of this world or the splendour of the sacerdotal
dignity, it is he who now bows down before God".
On arriving at Orleans, his first care, after he had put the affairs of his
church into order, was to make the seminary of La Chapelle what it soon
became, one of the first schools in France.
The number of the pupils increased so much that in a short time after his
arrival he was obliged to devote a part of his own palace to them.
Such, if we may say so, is Mgr. Dupanloup in an intellectual point of
view; if we examine the noble feelings of his heart, we shall find him still
more admirable.
In 1856, the terrible inundation of the Loire swept away entire villages,
and laid waste an immense tract of fertile land, leaving the population
houseless and helpless.
Mgr. Dupanloup was then at Annecy, where he had gone to breathe his
natal air, and take a few weeks' rest from his laborious mission. The
moment the sad news reached him, he sent an order by telegraph to place
his palace at the disposal of the victims, to take them into it with their cattle,
and to have them fed.
He put his name down at the head of the subscription list for 6,000

12
francs, and set out at once to administer consolation in person to the afflicted.
Immediately on arriving, he preached a sermon in his cathedral for the
victims. To describe that admirable discourse would be impossible.
The whole country around was destroyed, and the inhabitants were
plunged into despair. The orator described their heart-rending misery
most eloquently; his voice thrilled with emotion, and his eyes were filled
with tears. The audience were so deeply affected at it that when the ladies
appointed to receive the offerings threw open their collections, among the
gold pieces and bank notes, a considerable number of bracelets, necklaces,
diamond rings, and jewels of every description were found, with chains
torn from the necks of the wearers under the emotion of the moment;
and among these spontaneous offerings, the pastoral ring, a large emerald,
offered to the good bishop by an illustrious personage, now given generously
by the pastor to the naked and suffering members of the flock.
The population of Orleans, however, refused to allow such a sacrifice, and
purchased the precious emerald, which they offered him in the name of the
entire city as a pious souvenir of gratitude and filial veneration.
What Eastern pearl—what gem of the New World can be compared to
that emerald!
But even such succour was insufficient in presence of such frightful disasters : it would have taken millions to give comfort to the victims. Some
months later, when the rigour of winter added to their misery, the heart of
the good pastor was again touched, and he turned his whole mind to find
out some means of coming to their assistance. A noble thought suggested
itself to his mind.
In 1854 when he went to Rome, Mgr. Dupanloup, wno has in the Christian world most illustrious friends, had received as a present from one of the
most eminent noble families in Italy, a splendid collection of antique cameos,
bracelets, necklaces, etc.—curious and precious objects at the same time—
a great part of which had been found in the ruins of Pompeii.
On his return to France, the venerable prelate having had them examined
in Paris, heard competent judges state that they were most valuable.
Finding the times so bad, and the price of all sorts of provisions so high,
the good bishop thought of his treasure in reserve, and he immediately confided to a commission of ladies his intention of organising a lottery in favour
of the poor victims, requesting the ladies to select a certain number of
objects in his precious collection.
The lottery was organised, and the poor families of Orleans had once more
to bless the hand from which they had already received so many favours.
It would be impossible to enumerate here all the good actions of Mgr.
d'Orleans: a volume would not suffice. We shall, therefore, after showing
with what zeal and devotedness he attends to his flock, say a few words
touching his attention to monuments and to things.
The Cathedral Church of Orleans had, besides its two " tours", a steeple,
built by Mansard, or after his design; but time had in two centuries bent it
down so much, that in the apprehension of an accident it was obliged to be
taken down. The sacrifice was a painful one, and the population of Orleans

13
saw with regret their cathedral stripped of such an ornament. * By a happy
inspiration, Mgr. Dupanloup proposed a popular subscription off one sou, adding in his letter, however, that a sou in gold or in silver would also be
received. " My lord", said the Mayor of Orleans to the Bishop, " one word
from you can save us our falling steeple". That word the prelate pronounced,^his proposition was successful, and, as all those that emanate from
him, it touched the soul of the people. Fifty thousand francs were collected ;
the steeple was raised up; and the traveller, as he passes in the train
through Touraine, can see it now sparkling in the blaze of the sun.
Notwithstanding the administration of his diocese, and the education of
the pupils of his seminary, Mgr. Dupanloup found time to preach frequently
in Paris or at Orleans, What noble language ! What admirable expressions have fallen from his lips in his Cathedral Church, of which no trace
unfortunately remains! How many admirable sermons lost, except for
those who have preserved in their minds the souvenir of them, and the fruit
of them in their hearts.
Two of his eloquent discourses have bean preserved—the panegyric of
Joan d'Arc, one of the finest specimens of modern eloquence, and the funeral
sermon of P. de Ravignan? which may be placed beside the greatest masterpieces of this style of composition.
Of his written works, the most important is his book on education, the
most remarkable on that subject written in our century.
Such important labours could not fail to attract the attention of the first
literary body in France. The French Academy, always desirous of having
for its members the great intellects of the present day, received him into
their body, and on the 9th November, 1854, he took his seat beside M. de
Montalembert and Count Mole, two men worthy of receiving him.
The day of his reception cannot be forgotten; it caused a sensation
throughout the entire kingdom.
"My feeble writings", said the Bishop in his speech on that memorable
occasion, " no one knows better than I do, did not deserve the honour of
your suffrage ; but in the warm manner in which you received me, I saw
only the wkh you had to cement again the ancient alliance of the Church
with literature, of the Episcopacy to the French Academy; happy in being
the humble link that joins that chain, which it might have been supposed had
been broken".
M. de Salvandy answered:—" It was, in truth, the Bishop we called to
join our body—the Bishop, respected and dear to the Church of France,
which he honoured by his zeal and his faith, by his example and doctrine;
who was always ready to combat as a soldier—no, rather as a pontiff—for
her cause; sometimes by forwarding the education of youth, sometimes by
sending our soldiers to Rome, to save from suicide the Eternal City, and
restitute her triple crown among nations; and, at the same time, we wished
to honour in you the disciple, the enthusiastic master, under whose direction
those noble studies which become the finest and most powerful instrument of
man, were carried to such perfection
But what have I to
tell an assembly who have just heard you speak ?"
Mgr. Dupanloup was silently labouring in his diocese when the late

14
events which agitated the Catholic world offered his devotedness and zeal a
new opportunity of defending the honour and liberty of the Church. The
hour is not yet come to describe that heroic struggle, which still continues
and attracts the attention of the world. It is not while the battle is raging
that the lives of the generals who combat are written.
" In centuries like ours, in which great characters and strong convictions
are rare—when personal interest is the mobile of nearly all, and when so
many seem vanquished by fear or chained down to fortune—Providence, as
a lesson to mankind, raises up in the midst of the combat, men, whose
heroic disinterestedness and invincible courage show the astonished world
what alone, and without any human interests, can achieve the noble aspirations of conscience and the vigorous stimulant of generous faith".
These eloquent lines, addressed by Mgr. Dupanloup to the Archbishop of
Fribourg, then persecuted, may be admirably applied to the situation, and to
the noble prelate who wrote them.
Perhaps a few words on the man himself would be interesting; we shall
therefore say something of his private life and habits:—
Mgr. Dupanloup has for many years back the habit of rising every
morning between four and five.
His prayers, his Mass, and his meditation occupy about an hour, after
which he takes in his study either a bowl of soup or a little chocolate. He
then sits down to his desk until noon, devoting those six hours to his literary or religious labours.
He breakfasts then with the priests most particularly attached to him.
Sober and easily pleased, he loses very little time at table, and the rest of the
day is devoted to the administration of the diocese, to correspondence, in
giving audiences, paying visits, and, in fact, in all the duties of his charge.
At seven, the dinner is served; after which the good prelate converses
with the guests, or receives a few strangers in walking up and down one of
the large halls of his palace, or in his garden in summer.
At nine he is always in his apartement. The word is rather pompous for
what it represents. His is composed of his study and a little room of the
most simple dimensions and appearance, which opens on the ground floor of
the palace gardens. His lavabo is placed on a small oak table; two plain
chairs, a little iron bedstead, similar to those in the dormitory of the seminary, a few soutannes hung up near the door, no rich furniture, no mirror,
no luxury of any kind, a plaster crucifix over &prie Dieu> form the interieur
of the Bossuet of contemporary France.
During the winter, Mgr. Dupanloup studies generally without a fire, and
very, often with the windows open. In summer, he may often be seen under
the shade of the trees of the park of La Chapelle, or in a retired arbour of
his garden, walking up and down with rapid strides. While thus walking,
or rather marching, he is always preparing something; for he stops now and
then, and with a pencil, carefully prepared at both extremities, he takes notes,
sketches the plan of his works, or fixes the salient points of his discourses.
Every moment of his life is precious: even when in his coach he dictates
notes to his secretary. In the railway carriage, where he has invariably
for companion a large red morocco portfolio full of papers—the one

15
that belonged to Talleyrand—he looks over his manuscripts and corrects
proofs.
There is, in fact, only one hour of the day during which Mgr. Dupanloup
does nothing—the hour after his dinner—-and that on the recommendation
of his physicians, and not to endanger his sight, which has been already
seriously affected.
His habit of walking is so remarkable, that the painter who made his portrait for the great seminary of St. Sulpice, being asked why he had represented
the bishop standing, instead of sitting in his episcopal chair, "Mgr. Dupanloup
sitting", replied the artist, " would not have been a portrait; no one should
have recognized him".
This constant labour and application nearly every year brings on weakness and bad health, which causes great affliction to the friends of the
prelate. The mountains of Savoy, his native country, almost invariably
bring him back to health, find he always returns from his native air with
strength to labour and to combat.
Esteemed and loved by all the eminent men in France, it may be said that
he is one of the purest representatives of the French episcopacy, and to him
in truth may be applied that beautiful verse of Ducis—
" L'accord d'un beau talent et d'un beau caractere".
Mgr. Dupanloup is essentially of his own time ; he constantly served the
cause of civilization, and to his honour it may be said that no one has with
more energy defended moral dignity and human liberty.
With none of the prejudices and intolerance of former times, which it is
too much the fashion to attribute to the clergy at present, he has been reproached for carrying his defence of the Church to a passionate excess ; but
his is the noble passion for virtue, the love of the Church and of society,
whose destinies are inseparable, and will remain, it is to be hoped, united in
the hands of God for the security of souls and the peace of the world.
Mgr. Dunpanloup is fifty-eight years of age.
He is of a middle size, and has a nervous and active constitution.
His forehead is large and high, his eyes blue, expressive, and at times
beam with feeling and veneration, although one of them, while it has all the
appearance of life, has become extinct for some time back, owing to his exexcessive labour.
His mouth is well formed, and a smile plays around it constantly, a smile,
however, which, in certain circumstances, can become ironical. Its grave
expression is still amiable and soft. His hair is nearly white, and he wears
is cut close and in a careless manner. His complexion is florid, and shows
a naturally strong constitution.
His dress is invariably a simple one ; there is no effort at elegance in it.
What strikes most in his person is his dignity, which, natural and not
affected, is expressive at the same time of mildness and greatness of soul,
and it is lit up with I know not what sort of intellectual ray of moral
superiority and sweetness, which is most striking and imposing.
It is impossible to express what artless simplicity and innocent abandon
there is in his manners towards those who live in his intimacy.

J6
They are captivated—I was going to say seduced—by his amiability, his
grace, and his wit; and even strangers, admitted into his presence, become
at once his admirers, and often his friends.
In conversation he is lively, interesting, and amiable, and never wanting in
tact and good taste; his language is full of imagery, varied and easy in its
expression, and so full of charm, that he could, if he chose, be as superior
in the salon as he is in the pulpit. His answers are often but an intelligent
and benevolent smile. He does not say yes and no like every one, and all
those who listen to him feel that he deserves attention and respect. His
nature is naturally a delicate and refined one, and any impropriety on the part
of others wounds him to the quick. He is never insensible to a generous
action, and to a noble expression emanating from the heart.
He is as active as he is laborious, and, as they were for Montaigne, his
books are most agreeable company, and his happiest hours are those which
are devoted to study—after those, however, which he passes kneeling at his
prie Dieu, for his piety is deep and ardent, like that of childhood—of that
childhood, which is " his first and last love", as he said with so much grace
and eloquence in his memorable discourse at his reception in the French
Academy.
Mgr. Dupanloup is a Doctor in Theology, a Roman Count, Assistant on
the Pontifical Throne, Knight of the Legion of Honour, and Commander of
the Order of Christ of Portugal, Member of the French Academy.
Such is a rapid sketch of the eminent man, whose noble attitude and intrepid courage form the admiration of the Christian world at this moment,
and whom Catholic France can present with pride to her friends and to her
enemies.
[The translator has left out some important details of local interest which,
however interesting for the French reader, would be less so for Irish readers].

SERMON.
" Ite, angeli veloces, ad gentem convulsom dilaceratam. ad gentem expectantem
et conculcatam".
" Go, ye swift angels, to a nation rent and torn in pieces—to a nation expecting
and trodden under foot"—Isai, xviii. 3.

L E T no one amongst you, my brethren, fear that I come here to
add another subject of irritation to the painful divisions which in
our days sadden all hearts.
N o ; I come here to plead the cause of the unfortunate, and not
to embitter your thoughts.
This cause is so just, so great, that I would plead it before my
adversaries themselves, if any I could have adversaries in such a
cause. I have none.
It is not a political cause; it is not even the cause of religion
which I am here to defend.
Eternal thanks be to God, and to the dignity of our nature, there
is here below a region more elevated than that of human politics:
it is the region in which every one with the heart of a man
respects loftiness and purity, misfortune, and the victims of unmerited outrage.
There are here below causes, if not greater, still more pressing
and imperative in their day, than even the most important religious
controversies.
Such is the cause I come to plead before y o u ; and I hesitate not
in saying that it is the cause of humanity, of civilization,, and one
that awakens the liveliest sympathies of the French people.
Therefore, you will perceive that even the indifferent interest
themselves profoundly in the question, and that is the explanation
of the present pious ardour and the motive power of this immense
concourse. Yes, dear Ireland, and I will repeat it with your great
poet:—
" The stranger shall hear thy lament on his plains;
The sigh of thy harp shall be sent o'er the deep,
Till thy masters themselves, as they rivet thy chains,
Shall pause at the song of their captive, and weep".*
. Truly, the nations of Europe, my brethren, and humanity itself,
have just reason to be proud of the Irish race. I know no people
around whom their patriotism, their pure morals, their courageous
faith, their unconquerable fidelity, their bravery, that ardour whose
object is conquest and civilization, their disinterestedness, their
* Thomas Moore. See Appendix, Note 1.

18
patient endurance of wrong, their poetry, their eloquence, and all
these noble qualities ever elevated—never cast down, exalted—and
crowned by misfortune—have thrown a halo more captivating and
more sorrowful.*
But I must add, if humanity glories in the Irish race, the misfortunes of Ireland have long been for her a cause of sadness and
affliction.
For, if there exists not a nobler nation, neither exists
there one more unfortunate. I except not even to-day that valued
northern nation whose name and whose grief have ever awakened
such deep sympathy in our land, and in whose case, I must still
hope, that, notwithstanding recent and bloody afflictions, an intelligent and generous sovereign will, at length, have the courage to
repair the injustice done to her and to raise her from her ruins.
Such is, then, my brethren, the illustrious, but oppressed, people
whose cause I plead before y o u ; such alone the titles by virtue of
which I claim to enlist your sympathy for her misfortunes.
Fear not, t h e n : I shall not enter into the political questions
which are debated between Ireland and her adversaries; nor into
the political changes, more or less necessary, which the various
parties in Ireland wish for, or do not; nor even into the question
of whether the future of that unfortunate country is not capable of
political amelioration. No, of all that not a word; to others than
me belongs the task of examining into and resolving these problems.
A s for myself, I have studied Ireland's history; I have seen her
sufferings, her virtues; I have listened from afar to the voice of
her distress; and from all sides, from her desolate hills, as from her
deserted shores, from the ports where thousands of her exiles embark for distant lands, there have come to me such heart-rending
and sorrowing wails of grief, that my whole soul has been moved,
and I could not refuse to such afflictions the feeble succour of my
voice and the accents of my heart to tell them to my country.
A blessing, then, on you, who, answering to my appeal, have
not refused to this great cause the aid of your charity in this holy
and solemn assembly. But if in my words you are not to look for
any political controversy, still less are you to look for any of the
gloss of eloquence; a simple and artless narrative alone becomes
such a subject.
Of facts, facts simply related, facts attested by history, by the
voice even of our separated brethren, by judicial investigation, by
great magistracies, by legislative acts, by statistics and official
reports, that is, by whatever is most authentic and most irrefutable,
—of such this discourse will consist.
In any case I will not commence without asking of God the help
* See Appendix, Note 2.

19
of His grace, and of Christian souls the aid of their prayers, in order
that from my lips may not fall one expression which would pain
those whom I wish to enlighten, as in my heart I harbour no feeling which could give them pain. A h ! I feel well assured of i t ;
there is not a man, whoever he may be, with whom, if a spark of
humanity still slumbers in his breast, and if my heart can influence
his, I am not sure to agree.
O G o d ! be Thou in my heart; and on my lips unction, charity,
and light; be in all hearts truth, compassion, and love. Ave Maria.
I.
W h a t shall I first say to you, brethren, of the Irish race, of its
high origin, of its antiquity, when as its first branch appears the
great Celtic race? W h a t shall I say to you of that evident relationship with ourselves, in which is still found something of that old
Gallic blood and of that valiant character of our sires ? . . .
It is evident that the races of the north and of the south mixed
here their blood and their different qualities to form a people
apart: expansive ardour and patient tenacity, fertile imagination
and unbending courage, veracity and constancy, love of solitude
and a passion for noble adventures.*
A h , no doubt, they have their defects: they know them, and reproach themselves with them, and do not at all times correct them.
Must they be pitied? or must they be praised for having preserved,
as we have done, that sort of eternal youth, that generous enthusiasm, which takes such pleasure in the souvenirs of the past and
the aspirations of the future, more than in the sad realities of the
present?! A h , I know it, that is always what has been the cause
of their weakness with that positive and cold people, to whom such
a cruel force keeps them united. Ah, no doubt, they are also improvident ; they give too easily the little they h a v e : it is one of their
maxims, that generosity never diminishes fortune. If this noble
maxim is the cause of their poverty, I have not the courage to reproach them with it. T h a t they have these defects and others still,
I agree; but at least, thanks to these defects and to their misfortunes,
I shall say with a contemporary author, in a celebrated review, at
least they are not vulgar.^ T h e y have preserved nobility of sentiment, and nobility of sentiment with piety of heart, is the finest
flower of the soul.
If faults they have, at least they are strangers to hypocrisy, to
injustice, above all to ingratitude.
W h o knows not that royal
civil list which in their poverty they voted to him who was the
king of their hearts? And when another king, George the Fourth,
* See Appendix, Note 3.

f Ibid., 4.

t Revue de Deux Monies,

20
visited that portion of his dominions for the first time, he found
himself there surrouuded by such sincere sympathies that he cried
out: " I t is amongst them that I have at last felt some joy in being
a king".
Noble and generous people! I, too, I feel my heart stirred and
all my sympathies awakened at thy n a m e !
" Green Erin", said an illustrious convert, " is a land ancient, and yet
young: ancient in her Christianity, young in her hopes of the future. A
nation which received grace before yet the Saxon had set his foot upon the
soil of England, and which has never suffered the sacred flame to be extinguished in her heart: a Church which comprises within its historic period
the birth and the fall of Canterbury and York—which Augustin and Paulinus
found at their coming, and which Pole and Fisher left behind them".*
A people religious and ardent, monastic and warlike, missionary
and civilizing—and when faith demanded that grand testimony of
love, a people of martyrs! Never more grand, according to the
strong expression of the sacred writings, than in that long death, or
rather that life ever dying, ever resisting: Grandis interitu ( E z e c ,
xxii. 6).
Nothing can be compared, I do not say with Ireland's charming
legends, but with her most authentic early histories, at a time when
all Europe being still plunged in barbarism, Ireland was already the
peaceful retreat of sanctity and of science, when into the cloisters
opened by St. Patrick (that young Gallo-Roman whom we sent her)
hastened in crowds the sons and daughters of the noblest chieftains
of Irish clans, showing the world that not only in the east and
under the ardour of an eastern sun, but even in the extremities of
western lands and in the depth of the mists of ocean, may bloom
and flourish the monastic life. W h a t shall I say of St. Brigid and
her virgin companions, and of that immortal fire, still kindled on her
fete day by the faithful Irishman, even upon the shores of Australia ? W h a t shall I say of Saint Luan, the founder, himself alone,
of a hundred monasteries, and of so many other holy abbots who succeeded h i m ?
T h e Thebaide alone has seen aught comparable to those marvellous foundations, those monastic cities, as they have been so well
named, of Bangor, of Clonfert, of Clonard, where more than three
thousand religious gave themselves up ardently to the cultivation
of literature, to the clearing of forests, to sacred psalmody, and to
the education of youth.
But what a marvellous t h i n g ! This monastic and contemplative
people bears also in its heart the sacred fire of the apostolate. I t
is the missionary people par excellence.
* P r . Newman, Catholic University Gazette, June 15, 1854.

21
I t is even from thence, from those cloistered retreats, from that
life of austerity which so powerfully tempers the soul for the apostolic life, that at the voice of Saint Columbanus and his intrepid
disciples, we see them hasten abroad into all countries, to propagate
the Gospel far and wide; to combat paganism, and to win over to
faith and to civilization a hundred barbarous nations.
Already they had braved the storms of the sea, evangelized the
Hebrides, the Highlands of Scotland, and Northumberland. Soon
we see them in Neustria, in Flanders, amongst the Austrians, the
Helvetians, the Rhoetians, in the two Burgundies. T h e y cross the
Rhine, they pitch their tents in Allemannia, Bavaria, all Germany
to the south of the Danube. T h e y penetrate into Spain, and are
met with even in the extremity of Italy and the Greater Greece.
W h e r e is it we do not track their steps ?
T h a t Gospel which they were missioned to carry into those vast
regions was, as it were, a consuming fire, which they could not
quench, and which continually kindled them to the apostolic task,
impelled them forward to preach the gospel to the infidels, to leanimate the Christians, crushed under barbarous invasions, to arouse
to nobleness degenerate souls, to raise up powerful races, intrepid
hearts, invincible at once to the passions of princes and to the rage
of the populace; to rekindle the extiuguished torch of arts and of
letters—to carry everywhere the light of science and of faith.
T h e y it was, we may repeat, with a contemporary historian above
suspicion—they it was who almost alone created the seventh century of the Church and of European civilization.*
A n d still, even at this day, they are continuing that grand work.
A t this hour, no nation, unless it be our own, furnishes to distant
missions—to the two Americas, to the Indies, to Australia, to
Oceanica—so many courageous bishops and priests.
Rome sends them forth, and at the voice of the successor of
Peter they go, these prompt and light-footed messengers, to bear
the glad tidings to all the waiting peoples.
A h ! no doubt, it is not their merchants, it is their missionaries,
that are found in all lands: the merchants are of another nation;
but the priests, the apostles, the peaceful conquerors, the true civilizers, are the Irish.
1 know not whether this noble vocation is appreciated as it ought
by those who, as a publicist lately wrote, are ready to sanction the
most revolting injustice for some yards of cotton or certain quintals
of coal: but it is appreciated, and that suffices, by such as hold in
esteem devotion to the two grandest things on this earth—the ministry of the truth, and the regeneration of souls. Such is the voca* See Appendix, Note 5.

22
tion of Ireland's sons: such, as one of themselves revealed to me, the
providential end and the divine meaning of their trials. Let me
indulge in this personal reminiscence—" They have for their mission to be nailed to the cross, and to suffer for the propagation of
the Gospel", said O'Connell to me in London, in 1839. But Ireland—I say it with a redoubled respect and tenderness towards
her—Ireland divides with another nation, she divides with France,
that glorious mission. Ireland and France ! behold the two apostolic nations, given by God to the Christian world for the sake of
the infidel world. Only, by a different and mysterious dispensation
of the Deity, while France has ever had it in her destiny to be prosperous and potent, Ireland has borne on her brow for ages only the
crown of her own sorrows. Yet by their common devotedness
these two daughters of the Catholic Church have always known
one another as sisters. The French priest has always loved the Irish
priest, and the Irish priest has ever found in France a second
country. We have always counted some of them in our ranks. It
was, O my brethren, it was an Irishman, the Abbe Edgworth, who
deprived us, French clergy, of the honour of accompanying Louis
the Sixteenth in the supreme hour, mounting with him the steps
of the bloody scaffold, and saying to him those immortal words—
" Son of St. Louis, ascend to Heaven".*
Apostolic people ! martyr people ! Yes, martyr, for they have
endured all for their faith—all. But what soul and spirit, what
energetic vitality must have been in that race, not to be utterly
crushed!
I do not recal the past: neither those sanguinary proscriptions,
nor those wholesale confiscations, nor those atrocious laws, the like
of which were never yet seen on Earth, not even under Diocletian;
those laws of which the celebrated Burke said: " It was a machine
of wise and elaborate contrivance, and as well fitted for the oppression, impoverishment, and degradation of the people, and the debasement in them of human nature itself, as ever proceeded from the
perverted ingenuity of man".f
Well, they resisted that fearful pressure: they have not been
ground to powder under that dreadful machinery. Their souls
have not been harmed. They have come forth from the trial, a
people ever generous, simple, and good. Their nationality still
* It is true that many French priests were ambitions of that honour, and in particular the Abbe Legris-Duval, of venerable and benignant memory, presented
himself to the revolutionary committee in the hope of obtaining the favour to be
admitted to the king. He even waited all night at the door of the committee, carrying next his heart in a consecrated vessel the Blessed Eucharist. But he did not
obtain what he asked: the Abbe Edgworth had anticipated him (See Appendix,
Note 6, the words of M. le Cardinal de Bausset on this subject).
t Burke's Works, vol. i., p. 560: Bohn; London.

23
subsists, along with the other features of their character, and if those
qualities of the Irish race be not of the kind which are measured,
counted, and too often sold, they are such as must be honoured
and venerated by all hearts that sympathise with whatever does
honour to humanity—the love of native soil, sincere and tender devotion to old habits and customs, ardent reverence for the past';
and all this heightened by poetic genius and eloquence, and that
charm of a feeling heart which permits nothing to lose its savour—
above all, that incredible faculty of suffering, without dying,
miseries without a name
All these qualities of their race, all these traits of their national
character, notwithstanding the oppression of ages, they have preserved them all.
Still better have they preserved, with a fidelity tried in the fire,
the faith of their fathers. Nothing has been able to detach them
from that: indomitable in suffering, they have been indomitable in
faith.
A n d yet before their eyes, a nation reputed so strong and so
firm, yielded miserably ! A h ! I cannot refrain from saying with
Bossuet: No, your character has not been so intractable, nor your
parliaments so proud and factious, you who have so often and in so
many different ways suffered your consciences to be brought under
the yoke ! Under H e n r y the Eighth, under Edward, under Mary,
under Elizabeth, under Cromwell. But while your faith thus went
wavering, the sport of winds or of kings, and whilst your different
masters made you bend at their pleasure, Ireland resisted. Neither
heresy nor schism could find place in h e r : her faith remained
virgin; and at this day the Church beholds not over all the extent
of the globe a nation more devoted from the bottom of its heart to
the grand Catholic unity, and to that holy Roman Church which
is its immoveable centre, and which a great doctor of the Gallican
Church terms the mother and mistress of all the Churches.*
Ireland has suffered everything—implacable oppression, anguish without end, famine, expatriation, death—-everything except apostacy.
N o ; I know of no fidelity more courageous, no faith more nobly
guarded and practised than that of the Irish people!
You who visit that noble land, enter into their churches, and see
the people at prayer—those poor men, those poor women, bent
down with their faces to the earth, and smiting their breasts;
where will you find a more vivid, a more touching image of adoration, of the deep humiliation of man in presence of God ? Can
you hear without emotion, at the moment of the elevation of the
sacred Host, their groans, and their prayers in an audible voice-for
* Appendix, Note 8.

24
their fathers, their mothers, their sons, their exiles, and their sick ?
And this so lively faith, it is not merely the faith of the populace;
their most renowned chiefs give them the example of it from sire
to son. Permit me to narrate to you a touching trait which a few
days since an Irishman recounted to me.
This Irishman was a great admirer of O'Connell, and went often
to listen to him in the House of Commons. One evening in
winter, in the month of February, there was a great debate in parliament, which was prolonged till two o'clock in the morning,
O'Connell spoke the last, and his speech lasted two hours. T h e
Irishman of whom I speak had heard it said that O'Connell was in
the habit of going to communion every Sunday and holyday, at the
six o'clock Mass, in one of the poor little Catholic chapels which
were then found in London; and he said to himself, " I have now
an excellent occasion to see whether he is so faithful to his religious duties". W i t h this thought he proceeded, in the midst of
terrible weather, to the little chapel; but his sadness was great at
finding there only some servants and poor labourers. However, he
said within himself that a day of such great fatigue, ending with a
long speech at so advanced a period of the night, was a sufficient
excuse. Soon, his eyes becoming accustomed to the obscurity of
the poor chapel, he perceived, leaning against a pillar, a man of
tall stature enveloped in a cloak. His heart told him who was that
man. A t the moment of the communion, O'Connell—it was h e —
divested himself of his cloak, went forward and kneeled down at
the holy table in the midst of his poor fellow-countrymen.
Behold, my brethren, the faith, the piety of the Irish, the highest
as well as the humblest.
I t is to this profound religious spirit
Ireland owes another of her glories: I mean the purity, the admirably preserved innocence of her morals.
There is one virtue, the daughter of faith, a virtue peculiar to
Christianity, so touching and so pure that it adorns with an inexpressible charm the aspect of y o u t h ; venerable also under the white
hairs of the old man, and which at every stage of life sets, as it were,
an aureola of honour and respect on the brow of the man who
possesses i t : if it reigns amongst a people, it clothes that people with
the force and the austere splendour of all manly virtues,—I speak
of purity of morals. This, I repeat it, is the glory of Ireland.
Near to her shores, then, is an isle, which, in days of old, in
better and more blessed times, men called The Isle of Saints; and
may that name one day be restored to i t ! As for Ireland, she was
called, and she still deserves her title, The Virgin Island.
There,
as in an inextinguishable focus, it has been well said by the last and
most illustrious historian of St. Columbanus—there still survives
along with orthodoxy the most intact, that admirable purity of

25
morals which no conqueror, no adversary, has ever been able either
to impugn, or to equal, or to corrupt. In ancient ages no proconsul
trod the soil of Ireland. Roman corruption, Roman orgies, never
blighted and tainted her. So, when Christianity was presented to
her, she had not, as a bulwark against it, the habit of vice and profligate morals. Ireland alone, perhaps, of all the countries upon
earth, was not baptized in the blood of martyrs
This glory, however, was not destined to be wanting to h e r ; but it was not till the
sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries that heresy demanded of her the grand testimony of her blood; and we know
with what heroism she gave that testimony.
Already in the twelfth century, an inhabitant of Wales, a rival
country, paid her this distinguished homage. H e said, " Amongst
the numerous virtues which distinguish Ireland, the prerogative of
chastity is in the first rank". Inter varias quibus pollet virtutes,
castitatis prerogative prceeminet atque prcecellit.*
And yet in our
days, strict and severe morals, traditions of honour and of purity,
are transmitted from generation to generation as the sacred patrimony of those impoverished families, as their blessed and inalienable wealth. There may still be found that generation spoken of
by Scripture, a chaste generation, casta generatto, in which are
cherished and guarded, along with self-respect, the honour of the
domestic fireside, the sanctity of the marriage-bed, the fair repute
of their own name, whatever that name may be, the dignify, the
honour, of father, of mother, of venerable forefathers. There, the
public registers attest that frailties are almost unknown ; and when
they are met with, they do not pass without atonement. A h ! my
brethren, the morals of a people are then indeed pure, the traditions of chastity are then indeed deeply rooted in a land, when
vice dares not show itself; when, on the rare occurrence of such an
unhappy case—but a few days ago this was witnessed—an aged
father and mother come to the church on the following Sunday,
to kneel down, taper in hand, before the altar, and audibly crave
pardon of God and man for the scandal which their child has given.
Ye poor Irish! yes, ye are poor, often very poor, and always unhappy ! but ye have preserved at least the truest honour, and are
exempt at least from those debasements and those vices which
wealth and prosperity seem to lead in their shameful train, and
which too often characterize nations proud of their success and
their opulence! Yes, I fear not to affirm, the Irish people is perhaps the most chaste on this Earth. On that soil of Ireland they
breathe I know not what fragrant atmosphere of virtue, which is
nowhere else found. But chastity, my brethren, is fertile in other
virtues; and this is the reason that in Ireland, more than in any
* Giraldus Cambrensis.

3

26
other nation, are produced multitudes of virgins and of priests*
thus it is that Ireland sends legions of missionaries into all regions
of the globe, and numerous swarms of holy women even into North
America, Australia, and all the vast colonies of England.
Religious and chaste, the Irish people is also valiant—a nation of
warriors; and it could not but be so; for piety and purity of morals,
those lofty virtues, whilst they inspire devotion, also inspire valour.
While licentiousness enervates nations, these virtues preserve in
them a generous blood and a vigour always young. From these
spring always the gallant races, the vigorous stocks, the robust nations of the Earth: such is Ireland. Wherever the Irish have fought,
their bravery was admired; and their military reputation makes
tnem equal to the best soldiers of the world: they are with justice
reputed the principal strength of the British army: and how often
have they turned they tide of victory ! It was an Irishman, Lord
Gough, who won the battle of Guzerat in 1849. An Irishman,
Lord Keane, led the English troops into Cabul, and planted the
English standard upon the walls of Ghuznee. The strongest mainstays of English domination in India at this day, the two Lawrences, are Irishmen. Sir Henry Pottinger, General Gillespie, and
other heroes of the Indian wars, were Irish. The Duke of Wellington was an Irishman: his brother, Marquess Wellesley, had been
Governor General of the British possessions in India, and no man
ever executed that great office with more valour and more glory,
Who is there that does not know how Sir Charles Napier (who
was not however an Irishman) gained the great battle of Meeanee
against the armies of Scinde ? He had but 3,000 soldiers, of whom
400 only were Europeans; but then It was an Irish regiment, and
from the county Tipperary. Beholding them from far off, sustaining single-handed all the brunt of battle, struggling with unshaken gallantry against countless hordes, then shortly after dashing
forward, overturning everything, scattering every thing before them,
he could not restrain himself from crying out: " Magnificent Tipperary !"
Many a time also they have fought by our side, under our banners; for I know not what ancient and potent sympathy has at all
times brought Ireland and France near. The Irish and the French
are indeed two sister nations; Catholics both, both of gay temperament, witty, and eloquent; but the one people, as I have said,
almost always fortunate, notwithstanding their faults, the other
almost always unhappy, in spite of their virtues. Howsoever that
may be, I know not how many battle-fields have seen the blood of
Ireland mingle with the blood of France.*
" In the long wars of Louis the Fourteenth", writes the Duke
* Appendix. Note 9.

27
St. Simon, " the Irish battalions performed prodigies of valour".*
" From the reports sent to the war office", says an Irish historian,
writing in 1763, " w e find that since the introduction of Irish
troops into France, in 1691, down to 1745, the year of the battle of
Fontenoy, more than 45,000 Irish died in the service of France".
Thus Louis the Fourteenth, whose name, in spite of fate, remains
" great", wished, in the enthusiasm of a just and royal gratitude, to
naturalise altogether the army of James the Second. " Our wish",
wrote he, u is, that the Irish enjoy the same rights with the French,
without having need of letters of naturalization".
And certainly Louis the Fourteenth judged aright. Who is
there that does not know what service they performed for us at the
famous battle of Fontenoy—how much they contributed to the
victory of that great day, and how they wrung from the vanquished
King of England, George the Second, that cry of tardy and barren
repentance, " Accursed be the laws that have deprived me of such
soldiers" ?
As to the King of France, he did not curse the Irish; and one
day—it was shortly after Fontenoy—(for it appears there were
some hot-headed characters, difficult to manage, as amongst our own
Zouaves—and indeed I know not whether any great thing can be
achieved without having by your side some of these same hotheads ; but whatever become of that theory, thus perhaps rashly
regarded, it appears that the Irish soldiers were not always perfectly
in good order:—Father Matthew had not yet converted them)—
one day, I say, M. d'Argenson came to complain of them to the
king: " Sire", said he, " that Irish brigade gives me more trouble
than all the rest of your army". " That is precisely", replied Louis
the Fifteenth, " what my enemies say of it".
And shall I say that they are still the same? Yes, and still
better. The same generous blood runs to-day in their veins; the
same valour still distinguishes Irish soldiery. What achievements
have they not done in the late Indian war! And but yesterday,
in the little Pontifical army, with what glory did not the Irish cover
themselves by their heroic resistance at Spoleto and at Ancona!
If I turn my eyes elsewhere throughout the armies of Europe, in
the North and the South, in Austria, in Spain, there still I find
renowned warriors of Ireland. And if I turn again to our own
dear and glorious army of France, you yourselves know some who,
at the present moment, are in its highest grades; and amongst them
one name, which will be reverberated for ever by the echoes of
Malakoff and of Magenta.
What can I say now of the patriotism of the Irish people—of
their love for the blessed land of their birth ?
* Memoirs iii., p. 275.
3 B

28
Amongst all those affections which Providence has enshrined in
the depths of man's heart, and which make the human soul throb
with a generous emotion, one of the noblest, as well as the most
powerful and unconquerable, is the love of country, of our natal
soil, of that earth which holds the bones of our fathers, and ought
also to receive our own. A n d amongst what people is that feeling
so vivid and imperishable as amongst the Irish? It is the honour
of that nation*—and I bow to it here with the homage of m y
heart—not its happiness, alas ! but its indefeasible honour—to be
passionately attached to its own unfortunate country, to carry engraved on the heart an ineffaceable image of that country, and
never to lose its recollection. But if it is for that nation the most
desolating of all her woes, it is also the most odious crime of her
masters, that Irishmen cannot escape the horrors of famine on the
soil which gave them birth, save by the misery of exile on foreign
shores. Ah ! when the poor Irishman, driven by hunger from his
country, embarks in those vast ships which are to bear him across
the great ocean to some far distant coasts; when he leaves, to see
it nevermore,-his own dear Ireland; when he bends on it a last
lingering look, what tears stream from his eyes, what sighs struggle
in his heart; and after all, what imperishable regrets, what a vivid
image of the far father-land ! Yet no, it is never far off from h i m :
it is there—always present in his heart. T h e Irishman ever has
one country. On the shores of America, in the forests of
Australia, on whatsoever coast, under whatsoever sky the waves
may have borne him, Ireland follows him everywhere. T h a t is
his first, his last love. H e has but one single thought, one sole
memory: Ireland, Ireland still and for ever.
Ireland! what do I say? She is sometimes there in reality
before their eyes; for in taking leave of her for ever, they often
take with them some small portions of their adored native earth!
Among the humble trunks -which contain their apparel, there is
one in which they carefully spread out a little of the soil of their
sad country—a tuft from their village sward—in order to try and
revive it near their cottage in one of the distant forests of America
or Australia, whither they go to die, in order to have the consolation of contemplating from time to time, and of showing to their
children, a portion of their beloved land.
A h ! there are some who have dared to say and to repeat of this
race, energetic and strong, but oppressed and condemned to servile
and unproductive toil, that its poverty and the miseries of its
native country were due to itself and to the idleness of the people.
Look at the Irishman in America, where his land is his own,
where his cottage is his own, where there is no threat of eviction
to paralyze his efforts, where he is sure of the fruits of his toil!

29
W h a t courage ! what constancy ! what energy ! A labourer leaving Gal way a year ago, was asked why he went into exile.*
" Oh", replied he, " there's no chance for the poor man in this
country". But when beyond the reach of their persecutors, when
their arms are n-o longer shackled, what courageous and fruitful
toil is theirs! T h e y are the best workmen of the New World, and
the irrefragable proof of it is the amount of their earnings. But
here again what nobleness! Yes, what becomes of what they
earn ?
O generous people! their earnings do they send yearly
to Ireland, to an aged father, to a poor mother, to brothers left
behind them, whom they have parted with in order to work in
distant lands, so as to be able to provide for their necessities better
than they could have done had they remained with them at home!
A n d are you aware what an amount these poor emigrants yearly
transmit to Ireland? You will scarcely believe it, and it is scarcely
credible. But our information we derive from an official report—
25,000,000 of francs. It is prodigious.f For my part I know
nothing on the Earth equal to it. W h a t then shall I say of the
condemnation to exile of such people, or how shall I characterize
the violent severing of the bonds which unite such hearts? Harmonious bard of Erin, noble Tom Moore, well may thy country
and her misfortunes be the theme of thy song! they are worthy
of all our pity, of all our tears, of all our respect! Yes, well mayest
thou say to thy E r i n :
" Remember thee ? yes, while there's life in this heart,
It shall never forget thee, all lorn as thou art,
More dear in thy sorrow, thy gloom, and thy showers,
Than the rest of the world in their sunniest hours.
Wert thou all that I wish thee, great, glorious, and free,
First flower of the earth, and first gem of the sea,
I might hail thee with prouder, with happier brow ;
But oh! could I love thee more deeply than now ?
No ; thy chains as they rankle, thy blood as it runs,
But make thee more painfully dear to thy sons, —
Whose hearts, like the young of the desert-bird's nest,
Drink love in each life-drop that flows from thy breast".
Yes, my brethren, these lines are beautiful; they excite emotion.
But there is something which appeals more strongly to my soul;
there is something far more eloquent to me than even these admirable lines; and that is, the poor little tuft from the village sward, the
* Galway Press, April, 1860.
f See the Report to Parliament, cited in the Transactions of the Relief Committee, Society of Friends, during the famine in Ireland; Dublin, 1852, p. 358.

30
small sod of earth carried across the deep to distant shores, and the
25,000,000 francs of their sweat, their toil, and their love, sent by
them to the old country.
II.
Well! brethren, those are the men who die of hunger!.
. . .
I have now, my brethren, to tell you of the misfortunes of Ireland. And what shall I say of them?
Is it a formidable accusation I am about to urge against a great
and illustrious nation? No; I am about to tell you the simple
truth with the most extreme simplicity; or, rather, it is not I who
will detail it to you; it is from my adversaries, if such I have, that
I shall take it.
I will invoke here no other than their own
testimony.
I spoke from myself when celebrating the qualities of that noble
Irish race. I was carried away, and have perhaps spoken at too
great length. . . . But on the question of her misfortunes I
will get the very men to speak, who from amongst her rulers have
lifted up in her cause the voice of conscience justly touched; and
I will do it in the name of her long ages of suffering, in which it is
impossible to deny a compassionate sympathy, in the name of
Europe, in the name of universal humanity, the sad and indignant
witness of her wrongs.
Who can complain of my words ? England surely cannot, since
those whom I bid speak to you are her greatest and most illustrious
citizens. But allow me to say that I have been astonished, and
justly so, at the strange rumours and refutations forwarded beforehand of a discourse which I had not uttered.*
What does this mean? and why all this fretful uneasiness? Have
you then so much to fear?
A h ! there is in this question but one real ground of fear, a thing
alike inevitable, sovereign, and inflexible; a thing which alone
really acquits men, or condemns them inexorably: it is truth.
What then is the truth regarding the wrongs of Ireland?
What happens and what do men suffer there yonder in that little
isle separated from us by the stormy ocean ?
The simple truth—the terrible truth—here it is.
That there is a people on the Earth whose life-blood, during
three centuries, has been running out drop by drop, who are dying
by slow degrees, in the horrid agony of misery and hunger, in the
face and at the hands of a mighty nation!
And this in Europe! in the full sun light of Christianity, and in
the middle of the nineteenth century ! Behold the truth !
* See Appendix, Note 10.

31
If it is not the truth, I accept, or rather I call for and court the
fullest contradiction. I will hand over to publicity, not only to the
publicity of this immense audience, but if possible to the publicity
of the whole world, every word which I am about to pronounce,
and will have this printed to-morrow. I shall be but too glad to
find well-founded contradictions. I n every detail in which I can
say I have been mistaken, I shall joyfully do so. T h e human conscience will be lightened of so much at least.
But if what I say—or rather what they themselves have said, be
the truth. W e l l ! let the rulers of Ireland know it—this truth can
no longer be silent—it can no longer be tolerated. I t is time, full
time, that the human conscience put an end to a spectacle which
it has been powerless to prevent.
I commence.
And before entering into the main points in the details, let me
present to you the unexceptionable testimony of the best informed
English writers.
" I ask whether there be upon Earth any Christian or civilized people so
beggarly, wretched, and destitute, as the common Irish, and if nevertheless
there is any other people whose wants may be more easily supplied from
home".
T h u s spoke, in 1734, an Anglican prelate, Berkely.*
T h a t to which the Anglican prelate bore testimony more than a
century ago, an illustrious warrior, the D u k e of Wellington, with
that accent of generous compassion which is the inheritance of true
valour, proclaimed in our own age in the English House of Commons. " There never was a country", he exclaims, " in which
poverty existed to so great a degree as in Irelandf."
W h a t must that misery be which could enable a bishop, a Catholic one it is true, the Right Rev. Dr. Doyle, Bishop of Kildare,
as a witness in the investigation ordered by the House of Commons, to say:—
" It is a frightful state of society ; and when it is considered, it fills me
with so much pain and horror, that I have frequently prayed to God, if it
were His will, rather to take me out of life than to leave me to witness such
evils"4
A writer in the Edinburgh Review, commenting on these words
of Dr. Doyle, added:—
" A thousand statements to the same effect might be produced, but unfortunately they are not necessary. The poverty and wretchedness of the Irish
people are too glaring and obvious to be called in question. They are admitted by every one who has ever been in Ireland, or conversed with an Irish
geutleman, or read a book having any reference to that country".§
* the Querist.

t Debates, May 17, 1830.
J Edinburgh Review, Dec. 1826.
§ Edinburgh Review, Dec. 1826.

32
And this misery of a rich and fertile country, this misery so heartrending that a prayer is addressed to Heaven for death rather than
witness it—what is the cause of i t ?
English writers themselves accuse the legislation which so long
weighed on the country. T h e avowed end of that legislation, as
well as the favourite dream of the English historian, Leland, who
acknowledges it, was the EXTIRPATION, that is to say, as he ex-

plains it, the extermination of the Irish race.* T h e greatest
English historian, perhaps the greatest writer that country has produced in our times, who was three times member of the administration, who twice sat as a cabinet minister, and who, as the reward
not less of his literary superiority than of the services he did for his
country, was made a peer of the realm so shortly before his death,
Lord Macaulay, makes use of this terrible expression: —
" The harshness of those odious laws was aggravated by a still more
odious administration; for, bad as the legislators were, the magistrates
were still worse", t
A n d at the beginning of his history Lord Macaulay, forecasting
his subject, thus expresses himself:—
" It will be seen how Ireland, crushed by the domination of race over
race, and of religion over religion, continued, it is true, a member, of the
realm, but a withered member, which all who fear and hate England point
to with a ringer of scorn".
Now listen to another testimony :
" Such jobbing, such profligacy—so much direct tyranny and oppression
—such an abuse of God's gifts—such a profanation of God's name for the
purposes of bigotry and party spirit, cannot be exceeded in the history of
civilized Europe, and will long remain a monument of infamy and shame to
England. . . . The great misfortune of Ireland is, that the mass of the
people have been given up for a century to a handful of Protestants, by
whom they have been treated as Helots, and subjected to every species of
persecution and disgrace". \
W h o wrote those lines? A n enemy of England or of Anglicanism? No. An Anglican canon of St. Paul's Cathedral, one of
the most distinguished writers in the Edinburgh Review, Sidney

Smith.
Then, relative to the frightful legislation which England hung
round the neck of Ireland, entering into details, the same Anglican
writer adds:—
The sufferings of the Catholics have been so loudly chanted in the very
streets, that it is almost needless to remind our readers that, during the reign
* Leland, iii. 166.
f Speeches of the Right Hon. J. B. Macaulay, M.P., corrected by himself: London; Longmans, 1854,
% Edinburgh Review, Nov. 1820.

33
of George the First and George the Second, the Irish Roman Catholics were
disabled from holding any civil or military office, from voting at elections,
from admission into corporations, from practising at law or physic. A
younger brother, in becoming Protestant, might deprive his elder brother of
his birthright; by the same process, he might force his father, under the
name of a liberal provision, to yield up to him a part of his landed property ;
and if an eldest son, he might, in the same way, reduce his father's feesimple to a life estate. A Papist was disabled from purchasing freehold
lands, and even from holding long leases . . . . And any person might
take his Catholic neighbour's horse by paying for it. If the child of a
Catholic father became a Protestant, he was taken away from his father, and
put into the hands of'a, Protestant relation.*
T o those who would object here: " But this old legislation has
been done away with", the same writer would answer with Lord
Macaulay: " Yes, but the spirit to which it gave birth still remains".
Above all its consequences, the deep and frightful wounds
which it has inflicted on this unfortunate country, are still there:
commerce, industry, agriculture have been, and that for ages,
smitten down by it. U p to 1699 Ireland had a foreign commerce
in the article of cloth, and sold her products cheaper than England. W h a t did the British parliament venture to propose ? I t
presented an address to William the Third, begging him to suppress this industry of Ireland.
" Wherefore we most humbly beseech your most sacred Majesty, that your
Majesty would be pleased, in the most public and effectual way that may be,
to declare to all your subjects of Ireland, that the growth and increase of
the woollen manufactures there has long been, and will be ever looked upon
with great jealousy by all your subjects of this kingdom, and if not timely
remedied, may occasion very strict laws totally to prohibit it and suppress
the same". The king answered that: " He would do all that in him lay to
discourage the woollen manufactures of Ireland".
A n d Soon afterwards acts were passed in the parliament, the object of which was to oblige the Irish to send their wool to E n g land to be manufactured in Yorkshire ;f and from that time forward
the English manufactured their cloth in peace, and sold what they
liked to foreigners and to the Irish.
I n truth there is but one word which could here qualify such
language, such acts, such laws ! T h a t word I will not utter.
W h a t shall I say on the navigation laws ? On the absolute prohibition of all direct commerce between Ireland and the colonies ?
No colonial product was allowed to enter Ireland before it had
unshipped in an English port.
* Edinburgh Review, Nov. 1820.
f These acts are cited in the Travels of Arthur Young.
duction of M. Gustave de Beaumont, third period, c. 1.

See the historical intro-

H
T h u s Dean Swift, writing on these laws, said:—
"The conveniency of ports and havens which nature hath bestowed so
liberally upon this kingdom, is of no more use to us than a beautiful prospect
to a man shut up in a dungeon".
These laws, I am aware, have since been repealed, because the
English no longer needed t h e m ; but when commerce and industry are thus stricken down, thus trodden out, who can deny that
they are for ages? W h e n the capital of industry, commercial
currents, privileges, arms, strength, have been carried elsewhere,
they are not brought back in a day. In order to achieve that, time
and prodigious efforts are necessary. Ireland is making these
efforts, but under what difficulties and what fetters! I n the meantime her population is perishing from misery.
W h a t shall I say of agriculture, what of landlordism, in Ireland ?
One only word.
Irish Catholics do not possess their country.
Under Elizabeth and Cromwell ten-elevenths of the Irish soil was
wrested from the Catholics, and divided among Protestants; hence
to-day this enormity, that English and Scotch Protestants, who
scarcely form a sixth of the population, are masters of seven-eighths
of the land.
A n d what kind of masters! T h e Times, the most considerable
journal in England, and perhaps in the world, not long ago, and
what is still more deserving of notice, since the repeal of the old
laws, the Times of the 27th February, 1847, said:—
" Property is there ruled with savage and tyrannical sway. The landlords
there exercise their rights with an irou hand, and neglect their duties with a
brazen effrontery".
I t is the I'imes which further said:—
"But we must see this misery nearer: we must enter into some
details".
M. Gustave de Beaumont.—Old age, infirmity, sickness, every
weakness was condemned to perish. I am not here reduced to
the necessity of taking vain oratorical precautions; I have not to
fear the mention of proper names. Well, then, there is in France
an honourable man, M. Gustave de Beaumont, the friend, and one
might say the brother, of the illustrious M. de Tocqueville, who
visited Ireland in 1835, and wrote an important work on that
country.
T o whoever knows the character of M. de Beaumont, his testimony is beyond suspicion. Here is the description which he has
left us of an Irish parish, the parish of Newport-Pratt, in the
County Mayo (Connaught) :
"Among 11,751 inhabitants of this parish, there are 9,538 whose only
bed is straw and grass (this straw and grass are not even thrown upon a

35
bed, as 7,531 lie on the ground). Among 206 persons who compose the
little village of Derrylaken (one of the hamlets of the parish), only 39
possess a shelter for the night, the rest perish from cold as much as from
hunger. I found in the course of my visits 12 persons who, for want of
food, had not broken their fast at mid-day".
H o w is the Irishman housed? I have recourse again to the
testimony of M. de Beaumont :
" As to their houses, figure to yourselves four dry mud walls, which the
rain soon reduces to its primitive state; for a roof a slight thatch, or a few
rolls of turf; for a chimney, a hole roughly made in the roof, and most frequently the door of the cabin, the sole egress for the smoke ; for furniture,
when there is any, a few rough straw chairs, one only bed, made up usually
of grass and straw, for the whole family. At the hearth, around a slender
fire are seen huddled together half-naked children: in the middle of them an
unclean pig, the only inhabitant of the place at his ease, and his presence is
a sign of comparatively easy circumstances; in the cabin where he dwells
not, the poverty is extreme".
This dwelling, note it well, my brethren, this dwelling, adds M.
Gustave de Beaumont, " is very wretched . . . and yet it is
not that of the poor; the habitation just described is that of the
Irish tenant".
T h a t is what M. de Beaumont saw with his own eyes, and travellers, who last year visited Ireland, saw there the same misery.*
A n d now, how is the Irish peasant clothed? I quote for you
what wTas written two years ago by a Protestant paper; and bear in
mind, my brethren, I am not speaking of any distant period, I am
citing contemporary statements.
" There are in Donegal about 4,000 adults of both sexes obliged to go
always barefooted in snow. . . . A pregnant woman and old people are there
in danger of perishing from cold. You rarely meet a man who has a cotton
shirt".
1 lay before your eyes these harrowing details in their
rigour, because fafter all that is the simple fact of the matter.
W e r e I to confect periods for you, where would be the use ? Is
it not the privation of these objects (material), indeed, but of primary necessity, which constitutes the positive and frightful misery

of life ?t
" It is then rare to find in the County qf Donegal a man wearing a shirt.
Often the same clothes serve for two. When one goes out the other remains
* See Appendix, Note 11.
f Who is not aware of the celebrity of Irish rags ? An Irish lady told me a few days
back that these rags bore no resemblance to rags worn elsewhere. M. J. de Lasterye, that they were rags of every shape, every colour—the cast-offs of the universe,
and of which Ireland bought far more than fifteen millions' worth from France
alone. What reflection does not this suggest on the odious laws relative to the
manufo tore of jploth in Ireland!

36
at home. But the distress of the women is still greater, if possible. There
are several hundreds of families, in which five or six grown females have
between them only one gown in which to walk out".
A h ! my brethren, the world's stage is pleasant enough for u s !
W e have everything in abundance; I indeed as well as you, for in
fact, although the resources of a bishop are indigence itself in presence of all the calls of the different works he is bound to support,
I want for nothing.
. . And we talk here quietly and at our
ease of these frightful privations !
But what shall I say of those who are enduring them ? In truth,
in presence of such destitution one gives way to the regret of seeing
the saddening luxury in which we have all more or less come
hither. A h ! at least let us give to this destitute and unfortunate
people—let us give, I say, of our riches, whatever they b e ; or
rather of our poverty, for one is ever poor in presence of such an
extremity of misery holding out to us its hand.
I n fine, how is the Irish peasant fed? H e never eats meat
except on Christmas day, if then he is able to get any.*
T h e y are perpetually condemned to live on nothing but potatoes.
But why? Does Ireland produce nothing else? On the contrary,
Ireland is a fertile country. No one is ignorant of the fact, that
she could easily support twenty-five millions of inhabitants ;t b u t
the produce of Ireland is exported into England
T h e ordinary
exportations, according to the Blue Book of 1856, quoted by
the Edinburgh Review, amount to the sum of twenty millions
sterling. Of this figure 15,000,000 come from the exportation of
butter, cattle, wheat, and eggs, which the poor Irish cultivator
never uses for his personal wants, and which are sold simply to pay
the landlord.
As for themselves, they feed upon lumpers, or bad potatoes,^
with which in certain districts they mix a certain sea-weed. A n d
w h y ? It is fearful to relate; to form a more considerable mass
in the stomach, and so delay, by the difficulty of digestion, the
hour of approaching hunger. I wanted to see this weed. I sent
for some: 1 tasted it in order to know exactly what I should say
about it. Why, gracious goodness! you have seen yourselves, in
your elegant journeys to the sea-baths at Dieppe, that kind of marine alga? which the surge washes on to the strand, and which your
children pick up for their amusement: that is what the Irishman
boils down and mingles with his bad potatoes for his nourishment.
* See Appendix, Note 12.
t M. Gustave de Beaumont. Joseph Kay, Social Condition and Education of the
People, l. 309. U. Leonce de Lavergne, Essai sur Veconomie rural, See Appendix
Note 13.
% See Appendix, Note 14.

37
a
T h e famines, moreover, are annual there. They begin in the
month of April, the time at which the last year's potato sprouts and
gets bad, and continue till the end of August, that is, until the new
crop is ripe v *.
T h e D u k e of Wellington himself has said:—

" 1" held a high situation in Ireland thirty years ago, and I must say that
from that time to this, there scarcely elapsed a single year in which government has not at certain periods of it entertained the most serious apprehensions of actual famine".—House of Lords, May 21, 1835.
A n d when this means of subsistence completely fails, then the
famines are frightful, and the country literally dies of hunger.
Again, it is not I who advance these statements. Here is what the
commissioners of the poor-laws stated in 1835, in a report made by
them to the English government. T h e y expressly stated that in
Ireland " there were two millions three hundred and twenty-five
thousand persons exposed to die of hunger".
After that, let those who will tell me that in 1829 a certain
political liberty was restored to them. Doubtless; and I thank
God for i t ! But was that enough ? N o ; a thousand times no !
Candidly, to talk to them, in the midst of their frightful miseries, of
political liberty, is nothing but a mockery. I n fact, what is that
liberty to them in the depth of their distress* if not, as has been
said, the liberty to die of hunger? W a s it anything else in 1835
for two millions of Irishmen? And did not the famine of'46 and
'47 surpass even the greatest horrors which up to that time had
been witnessed?
God alone will ever know the extent of the suffering, the mourning, and the wails, in those poor Irish cabins during those two
years.
" Those alone", cries Captain Mann, " who have lived there in the midst
of this horrid misery can form a conception of it". " As for me", adds this
brave sailor, u I frequently recall it as a frightful dream".'f
Well, my brethren, at the present day, the whole of the west of
Ireland is in the same suffering. Let it not be said, in order to
escape the duty of compassion, that these evils are past. A short
time ago, the illustrious Archbishop of Tuam, Dr. MacHale, wrote
to Lord Palmerston:
. " Not only do all these evils subsist in all their rigour, but they are even
aggravated, and during the last three years not a single legislative act has
been passed to root out the evil, or to abate its violence (15th November,
±858)1—Tu®m-Herald, 19 th November".
* M. De Beaumont. Joseph Kay, The Social Condition of the People, i. 309.
M. Leonce de Larergne, Essai sur Veconomie rurale.
t Captain Mann's Narrative.

38
I n a letter dated the month of October, also addressed to that
prime minister, the same bishop said that:
"Thepoor Irish are subjected to incessant extermination, and never was
their condition more precarious".
A n d on the 16th of January, 1861, the Mayor of Drogheda, presiding at a charity meeting, spoke in the saddest terms of the
frightful proportions which the misery had attained, both in the
city and in the suburbs:
" The worst amount of destitution is at present prevailing in towns and
suburbs".
A n d we have all read that recital of the scenes which two months
ago terrified the city of Limerick; and only yesterday I re-perused
a letter written to me from a village adjacent to that unfortunate
town.
L e t me again insist upon it, my brethren, I am not here to amuse
you with empty rhetoric; I do not offer you vain talk, but facts,
and the facts alone speak for themselves. A people is crushed by
prolonged suffering! A people is struggling every year in the
gripe of famine, and implores our h e l p ! W h a t is our d u t y ? I
can do nothing but put before your eyes this misery, and say to you,
Come and behold; veni et vide ! as the Gospel says. Behold and
contemplate, yourselves, that people in despair, without a bed,
without a shelter, naked and starving ! I ask you then, can justice
and charity suffer such a state of things ?
N o ; loudly n o ; it is impossible, radically impossible!
I repeat it again, the details which I have still to give you, and
which alone can enable you to appreciate the depth of this matter,
shall not come from m e ; that which I am about to present to you
is nothing more or less than the letters of the Society of Friends,
who had formed a body to go and assist Ireland.
P r a y do not lose sight of i t ; they are not Catholics, but Quakers,
who are going to speak to you.
Mr. William Forster, one of those gentlemen, wrote at the date
of the 25th of January, 1847 :*
"After leaving two bags of meal for distribution to the most pressing cases
(one in each island), Lord Sligo's agent kindly sent us in his boat to Cleggan,
the nearest point to Clifden.
" Having heard an alarming account of this village, I had ordered two bags
of meal fo meet me, not liking to go there entirely unprovided with help, and
knowing that I should find no store. The distress was appalling, far beyond my power of description: I was quickly surrounded by a mob of men
and women, more like^famished dogs than fellow creatures, whose figures,
looks, and cries all showed that they were suffering the ravening agony of
hunger. It was late, almost dark, and I felt it was useless to attempt to
contend with particular cases amid such a mass of misery; but I went into

39
two or three of the cabins. In one, there were two emaciated men lying at full
length on the damp floor, in their ragged clothes, too weak to move,—
actually worn down to skin and bone. In another, a young man lay ill of
dysentery; his mother had pawned everything, even his shoes, to keep him
alive; and I never shall forget the resigned uncomplaining tone with which
he told me that all the medicine he wanted was food".
Another Quaker, Mr. William Bennett, wrote at the date of
the 13th March, 1847:*
" W e entered a cabin. Stretched in one dark corner, scarcely visible
from the smoke and rags that covered them, were three children huddled
together, lying there because they were too weak to rise, pale and ghastly,
their little limbs, on removing a portion of the filthy covering, perfectly
emaciated, eyes sunk, voice gone, and evidently in the last stage of actual
starvation. Crouched over the turf embers was another form, wild and all
but naked, scarcely human in appearance. It stirred not, nor noticed us.
On some straw, soddened upon the ground, moaning piteously, was a shrivelled old woman, imploring us to give her something,—baring her limbs
partly, to show how the skin hung loose from the bones, as soon as she
attracted our attention. Above her, on something like a ledge, was a young
woman, with sunken cheeks,—a mother I have no doubt,—who scarcely
raised her eyes in answer to our inquiries, but pressed her hand upon her
forehead with a look of unutterable anguish and despair".
A n d Mr. W . Bennett adds, " Everywhere the same scenes presented themselves'1.
A h ! my brethren, Dante sang of old the tortures of Ugolino in
the castle of hunger. W o u l d it not require the presence of the
great poet again amongst us to retrace the unexplored horrors of
the poor Irish cabins ? But n o ; we need neither poets nor poetry.
W e need truth, charity, and justice! A n d the poor, whose cause
I plead before you, need bread!
M y brethren, I neither ask you to excuse all the details which
I read to you, nor all that I say to you. N o ; I know you too well
to fear that such details may weary you. Must not these sad
realities be spoken out ? Must not such misery be made known ?
A h ! were Ireland to believe that she was forgotten by the world
at large, that no one minded her sufferings, her tears would fall still
more bitter by far!
Let me proceed. . . . Another Quaker writes:—t
" In several parts of the country whole families have been carried off by
hunger or fever, or by both.
" The survivors were like walking skeletons; the men stamped with the
livid mark of hunger; the children crying with pain; the women in some of
the cabins too weak to stand. When there before, I had seen cows at almost
every cabin, and there were, besides, many sheep and pigs owned in the vil~
* Transactions of the Committee of the Society of Friends, p. 156.
t Ibid., p. 163.

40
lage. But now all the sheep were gone; all the cows, all the poultry killed ;
only one pig left; the very dogs which had barked at me before had disappeared".
Another of these gentlemen—and here, my brethren, I discover
in the very depth of their fearful sufferings the virtue of this noble
people, and their keen sense of honour,—another Quaker writes:—
" Although I saw many dead and dying, and witnessed harrowing scenes
of disease and want, I observed very few funerals".
A n d w h y ? Hear the soul-touching reason,
" They generally occur early in the morning, the relations being ashamed
of the necessity of hurrying the departed to their last resting place with
scanty attendance and often without coffins".
Another, in fine, for I cannot quote them all, writes:—
" According as we proceeded, our astonishment was not to see men dying?
but to see them live, I have not the slightest doubt that in any other country
the mortality would have been far greater, and that many lives were prolonged, and perhaps saved, by the long noviciate of sufferings in which the
Irish peasant has been reared, and by that admirable and touching charity
which makes him share his last mouthful with his neighbour suffering from
hunger".
I confess, gentlemen, that for myself I love to fling my whole
heart into the cause. Here I have not heart enough to admire the
patience and resignation of this people, and to sympathise as they
deserve in the wrongs which they endure.
B u t here is the most fearful feature of all in this whole affair. I
could never have believed it. But my authority is official statistics.
I have told you that the rule is to export the produce of Ireland
to the English market. But, during the two years of the terrible
famine, have not the wheat, and meat, and every alimentary produce
been shipped off to England ?—Yes.
A n d to what amount did these exports reach during that famine ?
— T o hundreds of millions of francs each year !*
A h ! I can well understand how the Times, in the face of such
horrors, in an outburst of frankness and of shame, exclaimed: " T h e
people of England have most foolishly and culpably connived at a
national iniquity". " Without going farther back than the union,
and speaking merely of half a century, it had been notorious that
all that time Ireland was the victim of unexampled social crimes.
.
. T h e entire people of Ireland is degraded by the spectacle
of those who go abouf begging, and of those who die notoriously
of hunger. England stupidly connived at this national iniquity !"
Famine', my brethren, is a scourge as deadly as"the plague, .and
thus is the fact established of a frightful depopulation in Ireland.
* See Appendix, Note 15.

41
Within the space of a few years, out of eight millions that peopled
that land, two millions have been swept away. Here are the official figures, taken from a Protestant j o u r n a l : — " T h e population of
Ireland was, in 1841, about 8,175,124; and, in 1851, about
6,551,970. It is believed, that at the present day, it has come
down to 5,988,000".*
0 my G o d ! Well do I know, no matter what I say, no matter
what I will, that out of all these facts, which I put before you in
their simple truth, there rises up a terrible accusation^ But,inevitable as it is, it is not I who flings this accusation. It is the truth.
For me, I simply state here the facts. But if truth is an accuser,
and the most formidable of all accusers, well, let rulers listen, and
let them blot out at length the scandal which for so long a time is a
disgrace to a great nation, an outrage to humanity.
Let this
shocking misery of a people have an end. It is high time. Let
it cease peacefully, legally, by justice tardily rendered, and tardily
bestowed by an atoning government; but in the name of God and
man, let it have an end.
1 know there are those who say: " B u t this depopulation was
necessary, and improves the condition of those who remain; and
Ireland is in effect suffering less to-day". I have already told you,
and I will soon again show you, what she is suffering at the moment I am addressing you.
But to those who would console
themselves by such a reflection, I have but one answer to make,—
that which an Irish advocate made when the same argument was
urged in his presence. It was while dining at a restaurant in
D u b l i n : " Quite true", said he, " your reasoning is unexceptionable. As if I should say—there are six of us now at this
table—let us put four out of doors; our fare will be then more
abundant".t
For me, I leave the system to God, the reasoners to their conscience, if any they have, and the principles which they advocate
to the horror of the human race.
Let us then proceed, and coming down to our own times, let us
see if Ireland is this day more happy.
T e n years after the great famine, on the 4th April, 1856, Lord
Palmerston uttered, in the House of Commons, those memorable
words: " Every member of parliament must know that for a long
series of years Ireland has been the victim of the misgovernment
of this country"4
* Figures given by Mr. Donnelly, Registrar- General, in his last statistics. In the
absence of a general census, they possess nearly the authority of official returns.
f See Appendix, Note 16.
% No doubt, during the dreadful famine, England—and it would be unjust not to
mention it—sent relief and money to Ireland; but, acknowledging to the fullest
extent, as it is right to do, what she has now done, if we go back to a former epoch

4

42
A n d in 1857, the Most Rev. Dr. Cullen, Archbishop of Dublin,
again wrote to one of the principal ministers of the Queen of
England:—
" In our cities, and even here in Dublin, we live in the midst of scenes of
misery which could hardly be equalled even in a country just ravaged by
fire and sword. If your Lordship would visit any of the lanes of Dublin,
your heart would freeze with horror at the spectacle of the sufferings which
would present themselves".
A n d on the 6th of October last (1860), the Poor-law Commissioners issued the following circular:—
"The Commissioners have to inform the guardians of poorhouses that
the potatoes are rotting in several districts. This circumstance, added to
the apprehension of a scarcity of turf in other localities, gives occasion to
fear an increase of suffering. The extent of that suffering it is impossible
to determine beforehand".
W e l l ! what was the state of affairs a year ago in those parts of
Ireland, which are visited periodically by famine, and which last
spring has tried with more than ordinary severity ?
A t Killarney, in the county of K e r r y :
'.' The labourers, destitute of fire, of clothes, of food, were driven in
crowds into the workhouses".*
I n the barony of Erris, parish of Belmullet, county of M a y o :
and to other famines, we shall find that observations were then made on this subject
which it is impossible not to take into account now.
In 1817, the famine was equally terrible. In many counties of Ireland they ate
wild herbs. In 1822, the famine was still more terrible. Sir John Newport, of
Waterford, member of the House of Commons, mentioned one parish where fifteen
persons had already died of hunger, twenty-two were in a dying state, and one
hundred and twenty had fever caused by famine He spoke of another parish
where the priest had administered extreme unction to all the men, women, and
children who were there, and who were all in articulo mortis.
Cobbett, in his commentary, on this debate, makes these observations :
" Money, it seems, is wanted in Ireland. Now people do not eat money. No,
but the money will buy them something to eat. What! the food is there, then.
Pray observe this, reader. Pray observe this, and let the parties get out of the
concern if they can. T H E FOOD IS THERE. And we know that THE FOOD IS
THERE ; for since this famine has been declared in Parliament, thousands of quarters
of corn have been imported every week from Ireland to England".—Register, July,
1822.
Indignation caused by similar considerations prompted a great Bishop in America
to use the following words :
" I hear it said", exclaimed the eloquent Bishop of New York, the Most Rev. Dr.
John Hughes, u I hear it said, that the famine in Ireland is a mysterious visitation
of Divine Providence. No, no; when famine is sent by God, it is caused by an
absolute failure of the means of subsistence, and it is well known, how, this year
in Ireland there has been a failure of potatoes only, and the soil has yielded its
ordinary products, by means of which, though perishing herself, she has paid her
annual tribute".
It is enough to give a glance over the official almanacs of 1846 and 1847, to find
the details of those exports of corn, of cattle, of butter, which never ceased at the
time when, in Munster and Connaught, entire families were dying of famine-fever.
* April, 1860.

43
" Of the seventy thousand inhabitants of that barony, ten thousand are
enduring the cruel pangs of hunger. How many families in this district
are reduced to live on no other sustenance than boiled turnips without salt,
and not enough even of those? The state of this poor county cannot be
described".
T h e parish priest himself wrote to me a short time since, that
without the assistance of public charity the people would die on
the highway.*
T h e poor inhabitants of Claddagh, near Gal way, to the number
of three thousand, are at the moment in which I speak to you in
extreme distress. All the Irish journals bear witness to the fact.t
A n equal amount of misery is in Donegal.
Ciaddagh ! Donegal! E r r i s ! what names for those who know
Ireland ! and what memories do they recal!
Quite recently in that unhappy country the administration found
it necessary to adopt extraordinary measures, in order to save the
poor who thronged the public roads from dying of hunger; and
the intervention of an armed force was found necessary to prevent
the tumults into which the exasperated population would have
been driven.
I now, therefore, exhibit to you, my brethren, wounds bleeding at this very hour, and it is for these impoverished districts
above all that I implore your pity and your aid. But why speak
of particular examples ? is it not a fact well known to all the world
that in the west and north-west of Ireland famine is the permanent
and normal condition, at least during the winter months?
Such is, at this very hour, the state of those districts of Ireland,
" where", as Mr. Bright said in the House of Commons, on the 6th
July, 1854, " no one can travel without feeling that some enormous
crime has been committed by the government to which the inhabitants of these regions are subject". " T h e greatest social crime",
says the Times.
My God ! Once more and for the last time, I declare I wish not
to wound or to irritate any one. I pray God to remove all bitterness, not from my heart, where none exists, but from my lips,
where some might perhaps be found. But, for these last eight days,
during which I have made a particular study of the misfortunes of
Ireland, in order to detail them to you, I have felt within myself
a new and immense compassion for that noble and unfortunate
country, and, at the same time, an oppression of spirit in presence of
such miseries. A n d who, having the heart of a man in his bosom,
would not experience the same sentiments ? A h ! this people
* Same date. Only for a general subscription, this barony of Erris would have
lost as many people as in 1847.
f January, 1861, see reports of the meetings held at Galway on the subject.
4 B

44
stretch out their hands to England and to the world, and in a distress to which no other is comparable, in anguish such as has never
been known, they ask that which it is not possible to refuse to a
people, to a man, not liberty,—let those who live enjoy political
liberty,—but those who are dying ask for life, life, shelter, a roof of
some sort, a garment, bread, bread I
III.
I have said enough about this lamentable misery. I must add a
word, one only, on another frightful wound of Ireland—Eviction.
I n the month of November, 1859, two members of the English parliament, Mr. Maguire and the O'Donoghue, described it to the Lord
Lieutenant of Ireland, in the following terms:—
" The great mass of the tenants of our country have no legal title to the
land they cultivate, and despite old ties and the most endearing recollections,
they may be driven.from it as easily as the flocks that graze upon its pastures'*
In a public letter of the Right Rev. Dr. Keane, Bishop of Cloy ne,
of 15th April, 1860, on the then state of Ireland, I read:—
" According to the law now in force, all improvements of whatever kind
they may be, and although entirely due to the labour and pecuniary advances of the tenants, become in case of eviction the property of the landlord'.
. A n d the bishop cites the very words of a judge, who in some
recent cases of odious eviction, feeling himself fettered by the law,
declared that he was forced " to administer injustice'V*
W i t h that u hand of iron and front of brass", of which the
Times spoke, the landlords, when they please, sweep their lands
clear of the poor Catholics.
There is a regular force of constablesf which public indignation
has branded with the name of the Crowbar Brigade, and which
the first magistrate of the county, the high sheriff, has always the
right to call out for executions of this sort ; and do you wish to
know how they proceed ? This band is often called on to assist with
a strong hand in the execution of the sentence of eviction, and whilst
bayonets restrain a despairing population, the commander enters
the poor cabin, drives out the inmates, gives the signal, and in a
few moments doors, windows, if there be any, walls, roof, all are
demolished by blows of iron crowbars J
* Mr. Smith, Master of the Rolls. The Bill of 1860, which settles the relations of
landlord and tenant, gives, it is true, to the latter, in certain cases, a right to compensation: but there are so many forms to be gone through, that for the majority
of tenants, this bill will not alter in the least the present state of things. This is
the unanimous opinion of the most enlightened and impartial men of those even
who openly support English policy.
t See Appendix, Note 17.
| These scenes of destruction were renewed some months ago (in Nov. 1860),

45
Do you know how many cabins were thus destroyed in Ireland
in ten years, from 1841 to 1851, according to official statistics?—
270,000!
A n d in one single year, the year 1849, how many families were
evicted and thrown out upon the road?—50,000 !*
How much such a system impoverishes and oppresses Ireland, I
leave to the following figures and facts to show:—
According to official statistics, published in D u b l i n — I quote
again from the Right Reverend Dr. K e a n e — " T h e average value
of agricultural produce, not including cattle, from 1851 to 1857,
amounted to the sum of about fifty millions of pounds sterling.
Now, to take the most moderate valuation, and not to estimate at
more than one-fifth of this sum the annual loss which agriculture
sustains from the present law?, the loss that Ireland has sustained
in six years amounts to eleven millions of pounds sterling" [two
hundred and seventy-five millions of francs].
So much for the impoverishment of the country. Now for its
oppression. T h e 22nd October, 1859 (the period is not remote),
an Irish newspaper, the Connaught Patriot, contained the sad list
of the tenants that a member of parliament had evicted from his
property. For what cause ? For the crime of an independent exercise of the elective franchise. For it must be said in praise of
the immortal O'Connell, one of the greatest services he rendered to
his country was, to give it a political conscience, which is the reason
that for forty years, despite the threat of eviction hanging over
their heads, the Irish people have voted with independence. A n d
listen, gentlemen, to the language of an Irishwoman, whose name
I will record, Bridget Prunty—sublime language, which I hold up
to the admiration of freemen of all countries. H e r husband, intimidated, was about to sacrifice to the future welfare of his children his rights and duties as a citizen and a Catholic. " No", said
his wife, " think of your soul and of liberty".
T h e y evict, therefore, for political reasons; they evict for economic reasons of all kinds; they evict on religious grounds; they
evict without any reason at all. No doubt the law, since the war
of American independence, no longer imposes on landlords the
formal obligation of oppressing tenants, but it leaves them completely at their mercy.
But you will say, if the condition of tenants is such as I describe,
so uncertain and so hard, the arbitrary power of landlords so absolute,
w h y dispute and struggle for land in Ireland? why do not the Irish
adopt some other mode of life? Very well: but I ask you what
in the district of Mount Partry, county Mayo, to the universal scandal of the entire
Press, English and Protestant.
* The social condition and education of the people.—1850, i., 315.

46
other mode? I have already told you commerce and manufactures
have been extinguished in Ireland, and the mass of the people are
of necessity agricultural. To beg, to die of hunger, or to endure
as farmers all the tyranny of the landlords, such is their inevitable
condition—they do endure it.
T h e details of this tyranny would be dreadful. I spare you the
recital of them. I have before my eyes words and facts absolutely
incredible. I will cite to you but one only:—
" One clay a tenant came to complain to his landlord (the name of the
landlord is now before my eyes, but I will not mention it) that his exactions
hf\d reduced him to the last stage of misery. ' You might as well', he said,
4
cut off my head at once as treat me so\ The landlord replied, ' I won't
cut off your head, but I'll shave you as close as possible'".*
I do not mean to say here " ab uno disce omnes", but I ask is it
possible to find a parallel to an arbitrary law like this, which
delivers up unhappy tenants, bound hand and foot, into the power
of a master ?
As long as this frightful state of things, and the complete subjection of the Irish to their landlords continues, let me be no
longer told that the laws are abolished; that the Irish are emancipated; that they enjoy all the liberties of England. In truth, the
first of all liberties, liberty to live, they have none. No.
And, as to liberty of conscience, they have it also without doubt;
but in reality, what takes* place in these " Workhouses", where
hunger crowds together the poor Irish people ?t It is the bishop I
have just quoted, who tells us the fact. u T h e Catholic children $ in
the workhouses of England are subjected to the influences of a
proselytism which does not even take the trouble of having itself
concealed". And if a landlord wishes to banish from his lands the
tenant who does not send his children to the Protestant school, is it
not a fact that he has the right as well as the will to do so? Is it
a fact that he never puts this right into execution? I could not
read without the deepest emotion of my soul, a word spoken in all
the sincerity of his heart by a poor Irish peasant:
" ihey asked me", said he, in judicial evidence, " would I send my children to this school. I said I would not. Some time after I got a notice to
put me out of my laud. Then I sent my children to school: I was afraid,
for I had a long, weak family ; but I soon took them from school. After
that, a bit I eat did not do n e good, as I knew 1 had been acting con.rary
to my conscience and to God'\§
W h a t oppression does not this one word reveal in the mouth of
* " I won't cut off your head, my boy, but I'll shave you as close as possible".
f Vide authorities in notes.
X And the nine-tenths of these children belong to Irish families who have emigrated to England to seek employment.
§ Depositions of John Prendergast, tenant in Partry, at the assizes in Gal way, in
August, 1860. Appendix, Note 19.

47
a poor father driven by hunger to a weakness which he cannot
forgive in himself! It was his lot to die either of hunger or of
remorse; he chose the hunger for himself and his children. Well,
at least, if the bodies are to die, the souls shall live!
I n the month of November last, amidst torrents of rain and sleet,
in the wild mountains of Partly, sixty-nine unfortunate beings
wrere flung headlong on the high road. I do not now discuss the
question whether or not their refusal to go to the Protestant school
was the cause of their eviction. I t is denied this day; it is the
affair of the lord bishop, not mine. As to myself, though I have no
doubt whatsoever on the subject, I will not mind to give it a contradiction.
I close the matter with these words of the Times:
" These evictions are a hideous scandal, and this bishop should
rather die, or fling himself on the charity of his diocese, than be
guilty of such a crime".* I take the naked fact of these sixtynine persons being flung adrift, without fire or homestead, in the
depth of winter. Among them there were an old man of eighty
years of age and a woman of seventy four. T h e old couple were
inconsolable, and broke out into groans and lamentations. " A h !'
exclaimed the poor woman, " behold me, three score and fourteen
years, now without a place of shelter in the world, who never yet
harmed mortal, and that often sheltered the houseless and poor—
what have I done to merit this fate?"
T h e old man,—listen,
gentlemen to this word, and see what amount of sublime faith there
is in the heart of those poor Irish,—-the old man replies: " Peace,
agra, the passion and death of Christ was more than this". Whatever may be said of all these things, " No", cries out Macaulay,
u
no artifice can blot out the stigma of persecution which disgraces
the Established Church".
" I do not", said he, "speak in anger, or with a view to excite anger; I
do not speak with rhetorical exaggeration: I express with calmness and
deliberation, in the only proper terms, an opinion which I formed many
years gone by, and confirmed by all my observations and reflections, and
which I am ready to support with argument, when I say that, of all the institutions ivhich exist in the civilized world, the Established Church in Ireland
seems to me the most absurd
Nowhere does the church of a small
minority enjoy such privileges
In this country alone we see a society
of 8,000,000 of men supporting a church of 800,000.f
Sydney Smith expresses himself in terms still more forcible :—
fc<
It can safely be said that such an abuse is not to be met with in all
Europe, in all Asia, in all the known parts of Africa, nor in all we have heard
said of Timbuctoo"4
Still a little further, gentlemen: it is not I who says all this. It
is Englishmen and English Protestants who have revealed them to
* The Morning Star has expressed itself with no less force of language,
t Speeches of the Right Hon. T. B. Macaulay, 1854, p. 380.
% Works of Sidney Smith, London, 1854, Vol, iii. p. 531.

48
the universe: a proof that neither national feeling nor religious prejudices can stifle in honest bosoms the cry of an outraged conscience.
But peace to "the Established Church. Peace to all the intolerance, all the oppressions, all the remnants of olden tyranny ?
which, despite of concessions, tardy indeed, still subsist; and
against which Ireland, by the voice of her representatives and her
bishops,* never ceases to protest, and shall not for ever protest in
vain, I trust, for the honour of England. I merely say that there
are in Ireland the deepest depths of misery; nor is it without reason they have been called the deepest depths of despair. It is the
very expression employed by an English statesman, whom I have
not the honour to know, but to whom, were it in my power, I
would stretch forth from this very pulpit across the sea the hand of
gratitude, to thank him for his courage in defending desperate and
insulted causes. It is Lord Normanby, who, while governor of
Ireland, proclaimed to the statesmen of his country, addressing them
on the wrongs which he had witnessed, and before which he sadly
felt his own impotence: " You are more powerful for evil than I am
for good. 1 have there met with the depths of despair', whither a
friendly voice could no longer penetrate"/)*
A n d have we not seen, just a moment ago, by the letters of these
charitable Quakers, to what depression of soul and "body these unfortunate creatures are reduced? I n the extremity of their woes,
they lose even the power of speech—they sink and swoon away.
W h e n you enter their cabins you find them unable to move their
head. Often even they shut out and bolt their doors in order to
die away quietly, alone and unseen.
Picture to yourselves, gentlemen, these unfortunates in their
lonely mountains, bending under the weight of calamity, casting a
last glimpse at the sun, and then shutting themselves up to die!
In truth, when I try to realise to myself the life and the death of
a poor Irish peasant, methinks that any death ought to appear
sweet to him after such a life: for in reality, what is that life? A n
uninterrupted succession of sufferings. For him they begin in the
cradle, and end in the grave. I say in the cradle; but to speak truly,
cradle there is none. T h e Irish babe is nurtured with a milk, the
product of a dietary unwholesome, insufficient, and agitated by the
anxieties and privations of its mother. It is brought up in a smoky
* On the 5th August, 1859, in a Pastoral, the four Archbishops and twentyfour Bishops have solemnly protested against the actual system of mixed education ; against the poor-law administration, and the manner in which the poor are
treated in the workhouses, as well in spiritual as in temporal affairs; in fine,
against the system of legal evictions, which sweeps off the face of Ireland, its rural
population, and obliges it either to be carried into the workhouses, or to fly to
America.
f Speech of the Earl of Mulgrave on the state of Ireland in the House of Lords,
Monday, 24th November, 1837.

49
sheering, hardly sufficient to protect him against the rain and wind.
There does he pass the days of his childhood—spoiled potatoes
replace his mother's milk, and rags the heat of her maternal bosom.
W i t h youth comes toil, which increases with more advanced age,
and hardly suffices to pay the rent and keep death by hunger from
the door. T h e abode, if not demolished by the croivhar brigade,
is the same mud cabin, the chimney of which is a hole in the roof,
and the window, a hole in the wall. For garments, he has the
coarsest patches of rags; for furniture, if there is any, some
wretched straw or wooden chairs; for food, lumpers and water;
for a bed, some straw and an excuse of covering; his labour ever
at the mercy of the landlord; for enemies, the landlord, the taxgatherer, and the law; for comfort, it is true, his wife, his children, and the village priest; his only hope in the future, God.
Behold how millions of men are born, live, and die in Ireland;
happy all the time if only they can live there, and are not obliged
to emigrate in order not to die of hunger: for emigration is
exile with all its sad perils. And there is the definitive, unquestionable, standing fact I I again repeat, and shall repeat it without
tiring: let people say what they will of the liberties achieved'and
the benefits of the union to a great country, wThile this fact lasts to
the extent that it does, while emigration continues to depopulate
Ireland, as it does to-day, I cannot believe but in misery and
death in that country. Ireland is not a country in which there is
a surplus population (on la population deborde); it is an ascertained fact, that it can support more than thrice its inhabitants.
Still, there is the fact glaring, irresistible, the Irishman emigrates
or dies of hunger. T h e Irishman emigrates; and in what proportion ? Here again I simply cite for you figures, and official figures
also.
According to the papers published by the Edinburgh
Review,
in nine months only of the year 1847, 270,000 Irish landed in
Liverpool for self-expatriation; and the same .Review adds, still
according to the same documents, that among those alone who
emigrated from Ireland to Canada in the course of this year, 9,634
died during the voyage, or while the ships were in quarantine.
E v e n in these latter years, from 1851 to 1857, a period of six
years, the emigration from Ireland has been about 752,891, or
11,777 a month, or 375 each day ! T h e four-fifths of these emigrants are from the age of fifteen to forty-five years. u It is, then"
as a Dublin journal observed, " the marrow and the blood of
Ireland that goes to the foreign land". Should emigration continue in the same ratio—and why should it not, as long as the
cause of it remains?—we might calculate to a nicety the year, the
month, the day, when there would no longer be found in Ireland
a resident of the Celtic race, and when the favourite dream of

50
Queen Elizabeth's counsellors, those of James the First, and of
Cromwell, would be completely realized. T h e Times might well
say, that shortly " the Catholic Celt would be as rare in Connemara as the Red Indian in Massachusetts".
H a d the population of Ireland increased during the last twenty
years (1841—1861) in the same ratio as in the twenty years
previous (1821—1841), it would exceed at the present day the
number of ten million inhabitants. Now, according to official
returns, it is under six millions. We may, then, estimate the real
Joss which Ireland has suffered in men as over four millions. And
there are writers who have the hardihood to speak to us of the
increasing prosperity of Ireland !
For me, I hardly dare trust myself to speak out here my entire
thought; but if it be true that one becomes attached to his country
even by the very woes which he endures, when I waft myself in
spirit to Dublin and to Cork, and figure to myself the heart-rending scenes that mark the departure of those immense vessels that
bear away millions of those unfortunate beings, I cannot but think
that Ireland is the most afflicted country in the world, and the
quays of Cork and Dublin the spots on the Earth where there are
shed most tears. And, if I must say it in a word,—it is not I who
say so, it is still an English economist, John Stuart Mill, whose
revolted conscience spoke out:
" When the inhabitants of a country quit it en masse, because they cannot live there, is not the government of that country judged and condemned ?"*
And since there is so much talk at the present day about reforms, I shall only add one word,—ought we not in truth reform
ourselves? A h ! were the unheard-of woes that daily decimate unfortunate Ireland, and cast forth by the hundreds of thousands her
children from her bosom, only perpetrated, not during three centuries, but for a single day, in the States of the Pope— could we
only lay a finger even on a few of the revolting iniquities that still
weigh at this present moment on this Catholic land subject to your
rule, what accusations would you not raise to the very heavens in
your parliament and in your press! N o ; as long as you will not
remove this beam from your own eye, you will not either possess
free vision or any right to pronounce on the infirmities of your
neighbours.—Ejice primum trabem de oculo tuo.
IV.
I pause, gentlemen. I have prolonged too much this sorrowful
appeal. Forgive me for all I have just been saying: may God forgive
* J o h n Stuart Mill's Political

Economy.

51
me for all I have not said. For I must repeat it in concluding:—
H o w often have I not kept mastery over my tongue ! Perhaps you
may have thought me rather warm (vif); but were you to know all
I know, and all that I smother in my souvenirs and in the depths of
my soul, you might yourselves bear me this testimony—that I have
been moderate, aye, and with an extreme moderation. A h ! had I
not been moderate! Had I said all that, perhaps, I should have
said. Had I not restrained both my heart and my voice * * But
no. In this discourse 1 have only aimed at two ends—to enlighten
those who need to know all about this lamentable question; to
awaken conscience; to appeal to justice; and to instil into every
heart a feeling of compassion for Ireland, which may at least approximate to its griefs.
I require at this moment, after so many and so sorrowful details, to give my thoughts another direction, and to raise up my
own spirits and yours, and to furnish you, in terminating this discourse, with all the sentiments that have inspired it; all the
motions that have decided me in mounting this pulpit to-day; all
the wishes that I bring with me into it; and in fine, all the hopes
that I here feel springing up in my heart, as son of the Church and
of France, as Catholic and as bishop.
And, first of all, I have sought out in these English papers impartial proofs. Well, in closing this painful recital, I am bound to
pay homage to the impartiality even of those against whom I have
been enabled to say so many things, but which have been said by
themselves. Yete ! it is fair to proclaim it. No nation in the world
unveils her evils with a Irankness equal to that of England.
She
has a horror of that official sell-laudatory tone which is the established style of the administrative documents of other countries—of
that peculiar kind of flattering falsehood which it is the established
rule to affect where the truth of facts should be found unalterable,
even though it were to alter everywhere else. All that we know
of the evils of England, it is herself, it is her Government that
proclaims it aloud. This Government is, so to speak, only a perpetual inquiry. Repentance is not far distant from so sincere a
confession. May it show itself at length !
I shall also say it: the economical excuses or pretexts for a
portion of the facts which England avows against herself, and which
I deplore, have not escaped my observation. To enter into a few
details: I know that in Ireland many a ruin stands in the place of
a house; that holdings too small to be worked up with profit, have
been amalgamated into farms more productive and more extensive;
that even many poor Irish families, by dint of perseverance, privation, and labour, have succeeded in realising a decent competency.
Still, let me I>e permitted to say it, we should not confine ourselves
to viewing Ireland through the windows of a chateau, or be content

52
with judging of it, as men are often content to do, from the cottages
in the neighbourhood of Dublin. It is impossible we should forget
that recent letter of the very Archbishop of Dublin, lately addressing himself to the prime minister of England, and comparing his
country to a land devastated with fire and sword.
I know, likewise, that by a bold act of legislation, encumbered
properties have been redeemed or sold off at the hammer; that
lighter cesses, larger farms, more healthy dwellings, would, after
some years, be a progress and. a revolution which science would
approve. But, in all good faith, are these slow ameliorations,
which benefit only so very few, all that is required ? No. There
are here deeply-set evils which science alone can can never reach.
Is it not science that tells me that death and exile have established an equilibrium between them and their means of support?
A h ! undoubtedly I would wish for the equilibrium, and I pray
for it with all my heart; but I demand that it be established by
means entirely different from exile and death. Science, be it what
it may, can never freeze my heart; nor can I either see or recount
with tranquillity all those things.
Be it well understood, there is in the heart and the bosom
of a priest and a bishop something more than in the figures of
science. I n the account of battles, let others be for the victorious
and triumphant; I am whole and entire for the wounded and dying.
My place, allow me to say, is at the ambulance. Neither do
laurels console me for the blood shed in the battle-field, nor do
reasonings reconcile me to the cries of hunger and despair. I see
those who are banished—I hear the cry of those that are outraged
— I gather the tears—I stretch out my hand to the poor and
desolate. I am not a savant, an economist. I am a minister of
Jesus Christ. Leave me entirely to my ministry, and, if I shock
your theories, be not scandalized by my compassions. You shall
reason to-morrow; but men suffer—men weep—men are hungry
—men are dying to-day. 1 even hold forth my hand to those who
reason, for those who weep. I do not blame science, but I feel pity.
Science, I shall leave thee to theorise; but leave me to act, to speak,
to intercede for those who suffer; leave me to infuse into the
hearts of all, in favour of Ireland, pity, tender compassion, active
charity, which alone can excel and assure thy blessings.
Allow
me to send to Ireland, if not the millions which are not in my
hands, at least the sympathies, the tendernesses, which every Christian heart feels for this unfortunate land.
Yes, dear Ireland—noble, Catholic soil—old land of saints—
country rich in virtues and in sorrows—native land of faith, of
honour, of courage—I am happy to say it of thee, the world
regards thee with respect and love. I t wails in thy misfortunes;
it admires thy constancy; you hold as your own every noble heart.

53
A h ! poor and unfortunate country! for thee I can do nothing;
but, at least, I can say that thy name makes my heart beat with
an ineffable emotion.
Thou art nigh as dear to me as my native
land. A h ! would that my accents could cross the seas, and reach
thee, and not only thee, but all thy children in every land where
exile may have flung them—in the forests of Australia, or at the
foot of the Rocky Mountains, or in the islands of the mighty
ocean, to tell them all my love, to bring them a consolation and an
encouragement, and, at the same time, a hope. Yes, gentlemen, a
h o p e ! and by this word I wish to console your hearts also that I
have saddened so much ! Yes, I hope a future more favourable
for Ireland; and already do I think I see in the distant horizon
signs that portend better times and prophesy a deliverance.
A n d , first of all, is not this impartiality of writers who think
with freedom, of the first men in England, unfolding thus the truth,
a first happy sign, a first return to justice? W h e n I hear arising
from amid the very ranks of Ireland's oppressors, voices to plead
her cause,—when I behold her masters beginning to blush for
their long iniquity towards her, and let fail from their hands, by
little and little, the chains with which they had so long weighed her
down,—I say justice at length makes her appearance. She shall
come, she shail soon come, altogether. T h e conscience of the
human race calls out for her; that conscience, we may betimes
believe, which, as the Roman historian has said, men have thought
to extinguish, conscientiam generis liumani arbitrantur se posse extwguere; but, in spite of fate, cometh the day when she awakes allpowerful and invincible.
I here have hopes still higher again. A n entirely new order of
things, a vast horizon opens up before my eyes. Yes; while saddened by the woes of this hapless nation, and not knowing the
hidden ways of Providence, I raise my looks towards Heaven to
seek there a light in my sadness, 1 perceive I know not what
mysterious rays, which dissipate the clouds and send me a light of
consolation. T h e hand of misery is heavy on that poor land; but
those whom God tries the most—the Scripture reveals to us these
exalted secrets of the Divine dispensations towards individuals and
towards peoples—are not those whom H e loves the least; and those
who bravely bear the trial, do not bear it for ever, nor without fruit,
nor without glory. No. Ireland is not an accursed land. It is a
land tried in the ordeal, but which did not yield in the trial, which,
in its misfortunes, preserves its faith, its genius, its virtues; and
hence have its sufferings not been without fruit. God has granted
it the honour, so rare and so pure, of trials so fruitful! Must we
not see here the design of God? Of this light of Catholic faith,
which in the very face of Protestant England, Ireland continued to
preserve so brilliant, irritated intolerance has said: " I shall extin-

54
guish thee—I shall extinguish thee for ever in the tomb of thy
children". A n d l o ! that from this little isle intolerance itself has
caused to spring up a divine light on two immense continents, America and Australia, studded this day with Catholic Churches, reared
by the emigrants from Ireland,* W h o can tell the future of these
Churches: O depth which our poor eyes cannot fathom, but from
which arises, however, a light which restores and consoles m e !
A h ! when man has thus cooperated with the designs of God, when
he has displayed such unflinching honour, he may well be repaid
for his sufferings; but the day approaches which never fails to
come, when they enter at last into glory. " Nonne hsec oportuit
pati Christum, et ita intrare in gloriam suam".t Yes, the holy days
on which we enter bring before my eyes this image: like Christ
scourged, crucified, lying in the tomb,—thus doth Ireland appear
to me. Christ remained three days in His sepulchre, then H e
arose. Ireland! thy three days have been three centuries; but the
third century is fast closing.
W h a t is required for this awakening—for this resurrection of a
people? Let England wish it, and this resurrection is accomplished. Can she continue to withhold that wish?
E n g l a n d ! I cannot end this discourse without addressing myself
directly to her. Proud, free, and great nation ! Far from me be the
thought of offering thee insult! Far from me the vile pleasure of
maliciously seeking to trumpet the faults of one of the most potent
societies put together by the hand of man ! But it is because thou
art powerful for good, that I reproach thee with not doing it as you
ought—because thou art fertile in all kinds of grandeur, I grieve to
see thee endure on thy front, with Henry the Eighth, a stain of
mire, and on thy hands, in Ireland, a stain of blood! Because the
human race stands up to do honour to thy genius, I am pained to
see thee endure that sighs and moans and maledictions and cries of
despair should so often mingle with this concert of thy glory.
E n g l a n d ! favoured nation, who hast succeeded in reconciling
monarchy with liberty, traditions with progress, privileges with
natural r i g h t ! Powerful nation, who peoplest the earth, rulest the
ocean, commandest the respect of E u r o p e ! Skilful nation, inventing, applying, reforming, extending, enriching, and, until now,
preserving so many blessings; sharing with France the first rank
in every form of activity, science, industry, agriculture, commerce!
Christian nation, in spite of thy sad errors, who lovest justice,
abolishest slavery, protectest from afar the humblest of thy children !
Well, to so many great qualities, add yet one more; to so many
virtues, add yet another virtue!
And, once more, take not offence at my words. Do people
address remonstrances to the King of Dahomey ? Would they
'* See Appendix, Note 21.

f Luke, xxiv. 2(1.

00

think him worthy of them? No, we thus accuse those only whom
we esteem.
But, land of justice, of liberty, and of wealth, wilt thou drag after
thee for ever, wilt thou for ever trample under foot, a race odiously
ill treated, unjustly enslaved, cruelly impoverished?
N o ; this incongruity, this opprobrium, this iniquity, as thy most
illustrious sons themselves call it, will not eternally rise up against
thee before the nations. It will cease, it will cease at last; and
when it has ceased—when beneficence, generous sympathy, just
laws, and an equitable administration, have caused Ireland to bloom
again, thou wilt only be the stronger, the more glorious; the prosperity of Ireland will be added to thine own, and another too—the
only one that lasts, the only one that secures all others—the prosperity of justice. Thou readest the Scriptures; meditate upon
this word, Justitia elevat gentes—justice elevates nations; but when
nations tread justice under foot, outraged justice rises again and
revenges herself, and a day comes when iniquity renders them
miserable, and ruins them for ever, strong as they may be—Miseros
autem facit populos peccatum.
May this day never come for thee,
such is my most earnest prayer.
Such are my wishes for Ireland and for E n g l a n d ; but I should
desire something more for England and for the worldw
Allow me, my brethren, here to pour forth my whole soul before
y o u ; let me unbosom to you my inmost thoughts.
Yes, I long for another reparation, another act of justice, another
reconciliation yet more noble and more fruitful!
There is upon the brow of free England another stain, and upon
the lips of all nations another accusation. T h a t stain I would fain
see effaced; that accusation I would fain see disappear. There are
two names that I cannot separate, neither in my thoughts nor in
this discourse—Rome and Ireland.
I t is the unalterable attachment of Ireland to the Catholic faith
and to the holy Roman Church, that has been for this generous
nation the source of her long afflictions; and it must be said that
bitter ill-will and inexorable animosity against Rome and the Apostolic See are still rife in England; and hence all those,unconquerable prejudices, all those odious accusations, which are hurled
against the Catholic Church and her Pontiff. W e l l ! I, a bishop of
this Catholic Church,—I would hold out to-day to England an invitation to peace in the name of liberty and justice. N o ; the time
has gone by for these prejudices, these passions of another age, for
this unjust, unmerited rancour, without grounds, without any real
motives, impolitic even, and as often opposed to the true interests
as to the honour of the English people.
T h e hour will come when they must vanish; for truth cannot
be eternally eclipsed. Yes, the hour will come, but let it not de-

56
lay ! Is there not in this hostility, which separates two great influences that seem made for one another, too much bitterness and
pain, not to cause them to feel a -longing for pacification, and
finally to suggest kinder thoughts, peaceful words, and bring about
a generous and welcome reconciliation ?
Yes, the hour has come to understand one another, and to argue
no longer with passion and bitterness, but with quiet confidence
and mutual respect.
I shall, therefore, say to the English, when they have mastered
themselves and their prejudices: Reflect, in the calm of your consciences, how strange were the prejudices which you have hitherto
obeyed, and how glorious it would be for you to do justice at last,
both to Ireland and to that Church who was your mother in the
faith. In good truth, is Catholicism opposed to a single one of
England's institutions, to her prosperity, to her love of liberty?
Read over the pages of Lord Macaulay I In your two houses of
parliament, at your bar, in your armies or your fleets, wherever a
field is open to patriotism, to valour, to intellect, look, and tell us if
Catholics serve their country worse than others! W h y should an
English.Catholic not be as faithful to his country as others? For
my part, I cannot discover the shadow of a reason.
I have long sought in vain for the wrongs of the Papacy towards
England, for the grounds of the mistrust with which she regards it.
W h a t have the passions of Henry the Eighth, or of Elizabeth, to do
with our age? In what has Rome directly, or indirectly, crossed
the policy, or injured the interests of the English people? Well,
would it then be too much to ask of the English to show at least
to the august head of the Catholic Church the deference that they
refuse to no one else upon Earth ? You may not have the happiness to acknowledge in the Pontiff the successor of the Prince of the
Apostles, the vicar of Christ upon E a r t h ; but at least respect in the
sovereign his virtues, his misfortunes, his unarmed old age, his
weakness. Understand at least that the rights of an ancient and
venerable sovereignty, the unanimous sentiments of the Catholic
world, the prayers and the sorrows of Ireland, the most honoured
recollections of your own history, and I shall add the very trials,
the bitter portion which has befallen the gentle and holy Pontiff,
and finally the indescribable grace that suffering lends to virtue,
recommend him to your justice, your generosity, and your respect.
I t was a great misfortune for herself and for the Church, when
England severed the time-honoured tie which bound her to unity
W h e n Bossuet looked upon the cradle of the English Church, and
recalled its glorious past, he could not believe that the days of
delusion would last for ever, and that so learned a nation would
ever remain blinded by error.
H e hoped and longed for the day
when England would return from her wanderings. I n these hopes

57
and in these longings I join with all my heart. Yes, already I
behold the dawn of this blessed day. Not to speak of the eminent
members of her learned universities, whom, according to the prediction of Bossuet, their respect for the Fathers, their earnest and
unioearied researches on antiquity, have brought back to the doctrines
of the first ages, how many other great minds, though still attached
to Anglicanism, protest against the inveterate and ungrateful animosity with which England has pursued the Roman Church, and
speak of that Church in kindly and even grateful accents ! H o w
many other great minds, although still attached to Anglicanism,
protest against that inveterate and ungrateful hatred with which
England has pursued the Roman Church,' and speak of that Church
with feelings calmed down, and even in accents of reason!
T h e reconciliation would be the more happy, as the separation
was sad. W h e n two great powers at war cease from the conflict,
they each become greater in peace; in their noble and extended
sphere they freely develope their resources. T h e most precious
resources—the most noble gifts of humanity—all that is high and
fruitful within them, then finds for their development wide and
noble fields, where no obstacle can arrest their progress.
A n d what gain to the world, that quarrels only grow more
bitter—that hatreds continue to the end (seterniseni)--that
reconciliations (rapprochements) are never to take place?
But eternal disunions between noble peoples is but a civil war in
the bosom of humanity. Alas ! victories are as dear to the victors
as to the vanquished!
Viewing poor human nature as it is, we well know what, in
their turn, both victors and vanquished proved themselves to be.
England, alas! has known it better than any other nation. But
is it not high time such things should cease ?
Truly, at a time when so many links and so many fresh relations tend to bring men together everywhere, is not the moment
at hand to accomplish the reconciliation of hearts and souls? W e
make commercial treaties: we shall soon perhaps have treaties of
navigation. Would it not be still better to strike a new and a
grand treaty of faith and of charity for the propagation of the
Gospel throughout the Earth ?
May our fervent aspirations and our prayers hasten the hour of
Providence!
Christ on the cross prayed for those who had crucified Him.
Irishmen, Catholics of all countries, let us offer up our fervent
prayers for England.
V.
O G o d ! were this great nation to return at length to unity,
what a glory for herself! W h a t a happiness for the world! T h e

58
great standard of Christian unity, how well would it suit the hand
of England to raise it aloft, and her vessels to carry it across every
sea, into all the lands the most distant in the world.
0 my brethren of England, I say to you with emotion and with
love, and with these words I terminate this discourse: Were your
prejudices (preventions) only to cease — were your eyes to open to
the light—were your hearts able to grow calm in the sweetness of
the Gospel, in returning to the truth, you had returned to justice.
T h e past, blotted out, would only add lustre to your glory: you
would bring to silence those millions of voices that never cease to
raise against you formidable accusations, and delight in reproaching you with your selfishness. You would no longer have Ireland
as a thorn in your side
It would be no longer pointed out to you
as an eternal reproach and a shame. You would then be weighed
in the scales of Europe with a weight more just and more powerful. O God ! what could you not then do for the peace of the
world! and what could you not do at this moment for the peace of
Italy ! Yes: France and you—what could you not effect, if, just
at last towards the power the most friendly to this unfortunate
country, and the most necessary to its real independence, you
sought with us to rescue the Italian cause from the oppression of
a fatal party, which at once throws Italy out of its proper paths,
and agitates Europe to its deepest depths!
But what do I say? and shall I here allow my soul to indulge
in the hopes and longing musings of an illusion that I love? Shall
it be given us one day to see these wishes realised? As for me, I
hope lor it fondly;- and, after the lapse of two centuries, I love to
adopt the generous and distant prevision of B o s s u e t : — " I dare
believe, and I see wise men concur in this sentiment, that the days
of blindness are running out, and that it is time for light to return".*
My brethren, you will unite in these wishes as in those we have
just formed for Ireland.
1 thank you, in the name of this beautiful and unfortunate
country, for the sympathy which you have come here to-day to
manifest towards it by this immense concourse, and by the pious
and charitable donations which, in a moment, you mean to drop
from your hands and your hearts. I am proud at being able to
plead, although ever so imperfectly, alas! a cause so dear and
sacred, and at having pleaded it before you. A n d my heart shall
feel a lively gratitude towards the goodness of God, if His penetrating grace, while it distils like a beneficent dew the gifts of your
charity on the poor Irish, can bring to all Ireland an aid greater
and more lasting, by at length bringing a great nation to the resolve
of entering on the paths of compassion and of justice. Amen.
* See Appendix, Note 26.

APPENDIX.
Note 1.
REMEMBER THE GLORIES OF BRIEN THE BRAVE.

Mononia! when nature embellish'd the tint
Of thy fields and thy mountains so fair,
Did she ever intend that a tyrant should print
The footstep of slavery there ?
No ! Freedom, whose smile we shall never resign,
Go, tell our invaders, the Danes,
That 'tis sweeter to bleed for an age at thy shrine,
Than to sleep but a moment in chains!
Forget not our wounded companions, who stood
In the day of distress by our side;
While the moss of the valley grew red with their blood,
They stirr'd not, but conquer'd and died!
The sun that now blesses our arms with his light,
Saw them fall upon Ossory's plain;—
Oh ! let him not blush, when he leaves us to-night,
To find that they fell there in vain!
THE MINSTREL BOY.

The minstrel boy to the war is gone,
In the ranks of death you'll find him;
His father's sword he has girded on,
And his wild harp slung behind him.—
"Land of song!" said the warrior-bard,
" Tho' all the world betrays thee,
One sword, at least, thy rights shall guard,
One faithful harp shall praise thee!"
The minstrel fell!—but the foeman's chain
Could not bring his proud soul under;
The harp he lov'd ne'er spoke again,
For he tore its chords asunder ;
And said, " No chains shall sully thee,
Thou soul of love and bravery !
Thy songs were made for the pure and free .
•
They shall never sound in slavery !"
OH ! BLAME NOT THE BARD.

Oh ! blame not the bard, if he flies to the bowers
Where Pleasure lies, carelessly smiling at Fame ;
He was born for much more, and in happier hours
His soul might have burn'd with a holier flame,

60
The string, that now languishes loose o'er the lyre,
Might have bent a proud bow to the warrior's dart.
And the lip, which now breathes but the song of desire^
Might have pour'd the full tide of a patriot's heart I
But alas for his country!—her pride is gone by,
And that spirit is broken, which never would bend ;
O'er the ruin her children in secret must sigh,
For 'tis treason to love her, and death to defend.
Unpriz'd are her sons, 'till they've learn'd to betray;
Undistinguished they live, if they shame not their sires;
And the torch that would light them thro' dignity's way
Must be caught from the pile where their country expires I
Then blame not the bard, if in pleasure's soft dream
He should try to forget what he never can heal:
Oh! give but a hope—let a vista but gleam
Through the gloom of his country, and mark how hell feel I
That instant, his heart at her shrine would lay down
Every passion it nurs'd, every bliss it ador'd,
While the myrtle, now idly entwin'd with his crown,
Like the wreath of Harmodius, should cover his sword.

Note 2.
Ireland in truth stands in need of poesy, in order to forget the present m
the souvenirs of the past.
Music and poesy have ever been cherished in Ireland. In times past every
house had its pair of harps for travellers and bards errant; and those who
did most justice to the liberty of olden times, the glory of olden patriots, and
the greatness of the national cause, received in recompense a more generous
hospitality. Thirty or forty years ago there were many harp players who
travelled from house to house. To-day they are gone like every thing else.
It has been often attempted to smite Ireland in this last refuge of her sorrows and her hopes, by vexatious proceedings against those itinerant bards.
Note 3.
" Not but the Irish are lively enough (vif), spiritual, ready in repartee,
fond of adventure. They excel in the sciences, arts, and literature. The
Dublin University vies with those of Oxford and Cambridge. The Dublin
bar surpasses that of London. The Dublin physicians yield not in skill to
those of any other country"—M. J. de Lastyrie, Revue de Deux Mondes.
Note 4.
M. de Lastyrie continues :—" The Irish race possesses every charm—
grace, eloquence, beauty, and misfortune. It succumbs without yielding,
and cherishes memories from want of hopes. . . . . . . A touching trait is
this invincible attachment to the past on the part of men who have known
only misfortune"—Ibid,

61
Note 5. .
M. Henri Martin, in his History of France, ii. 130, says :—- *u -. ^«
years the disciples of St. Columbanus wrought fundamental changes both in
the men and the soil of the northern provinces, and to them is really due the
honour commonly awarded to the Benedictines, who have only reaped the
fruit of their labours. Others of their brethren won over to the Gospel the
Germans and the Boiowares, and thus reclaimed for Christianity that portion of Germany to the south of the Danube, anciently in possession of the
Romans. The entire seventh century belongs in a moral aspect to the students of Ireland".
Note 6.
" At the very moment that the throne was overturned, that religion was
proscribed, its ministers massacred—when sanguinary laws covered seas
and foreign lands with the debris of the Church of France—do we behold a
young ecclesiastic, hitherto brought up in the shade of the sanctuary, strange
to that world which, perhaps had been painted to him under an alluring
form, still more strange again to that world which suddenly presents itself
to his view in images of blood, we find this young man forming the resolve
of consecrating himself exclusively to that religion, now become the object
of so much hate and persecution, and becoming the stay and consolatiou of
the unfortunate and the victimised. ' This resolve of his heart shall be the
history of his entire life* "• 1
" The first public act of his ministry is that of an heroic devotedness. He
asks of his own accord to accompany to the scaffold the most virtuous
king that Heaven has ever given to France, to soothe him by his attention,
and, if need be, to shed his own blood by his side. His youth, his candour,
his sweet and calm resignation, totally divested of ostentation, astonished
and disarmed even hatred and fury. His prayer he did not obtain. A
priest less meritorious (M. Edgeworth) had anticipated him, and thus
0ierited to leave his name to history for the gl@ry of religion and humanity"
—-Notice Historique sur M. ISAbbe Legris Duval, par M. L. C. I). 2?>, 1820.
Note 7.
What a beautiful passage the following by Sydney Smith on Grattan, the
great Irish Orator!
" Thank God that all is not profligacy and corruption in the history of that
devoted people; and that the name of Irishman does not always carry with
it the idea of the oppressor or the oppressed—the plunderer or the plundered
—the tyrant or the slave! Great men hallow a whole people, and lift up
all who live in their time. What Irishman does not feel proud that he has
lived in the days of Grattan ? who has not turned to him for comfort from
the false friends and open enemies of Ireland ? who did not remember him in
the days of its burnings and wastings and murders ? No Government ever
dismayed him—the world could not bribe him—he thought only of Ireland

62
—lived for no other object—dedicated to her his beautiful fancy, his elegant
wit, his manly courage, and all the splendour of his astonishing eloquence.
He was so born and so gifted, that poetry, forensic skill, elegaut literature, and
all the highest attainments of human genius, were within his reach; but he
thought the noblest occupation of a man was to make other men happy and
free ; and in that straight line he went on for fifty years, without one sidelook, without one yielding thought, without one motive in his heart which
he might not have laid open to the view of God and man. He is gone!—
but there is not a single day of his honest life, of which every good Irishman
would not be more proud, than of the whole political existence of his countrymen,-—the annual deserters and betrayers of their native land".
This was written in 1820, when no Catholic could sit in Parliament, and
when the Irish Protestant members sacrificed everything for place.
Note 8.
During last year enormous sums of money have been sent from Ireland to
the Holy Father, although the year 1860 was one of privations and even
of famine in certain parts of Ireland.
Several bishops have said to me, ".If the Holy Father could only maintain
them, we would send him 40,000 men". I might cite numberless admirable
traits of their simple and unaffected (nai ) faith. |The following is not without interest, as illustrating the trust of th© Irish in the Holy Father, and the
paternal love of Pius the Ninth for them in return. A peasant girl wrote to
the Pope: " Most Holy Father, I am weak and sickly. For several years
I have not been able to walk ; still I have to earn my bread. I have recourse to you, the successor of St. Peter. ' And entering into the temple of
Jerusalem, St. Peter said to the lame man, Arise and walk'; and this man
was cured. I appeal to you, Most Holy Father, and pray you to say,
* Arise and walk', and I shall arise and walk". The Holy Father replied :
" True, I am the successor of St. Peter; but you must bear in mind that St.
Peter said to the lame man on entering the temple, ' Neither silver or gold
have I, but what I have I give thee'. I cannot say, like St. Peter, ' I have
neither silver or gold', for I have; but I add like him, ' What I have I give
thee', and I shall send you some aid, which I hope may better your condition". This anecdote was told us by Mgr. Talbot, who saw the letters.
Nothing can equal their devotedness wherever there is question of the
Church. They are remarkable for their most generous support of their
clergy. They give it in a spirit of faith, and not merely of honour. During
the last twenty years they have built churches, unpretending chapels in the
country places, and in the large towns immense cathedrals, costing four, five,
and upwards of 600,000 francs (yes, and 1,000,000, i.e., £40,000). For
instance, in Armagh, Londonderry, Tuam, Killarney, Cork, etc.
Note 9.
Among'the most distinguished of the Irish generals in the service of
France, let us cite O'Brien, Marshal of France, wounded at Fontenoy and

63
Tournay; Lieutenant-Generals Andrew Lee, Francis Count Buckley, and
Michael Count Roth; Field Marshal Patrick Sarsfield, wounded at the
battle of Neerlindeu ; Colonel Richard Talbot, wounded at the battle of Lazzara in 1702; Field Marshal Lord Clare, wounded at Ramillies in 1706;
Field Marshal James Fitzgerald, who crowned himself with glory at Fontenoy
and Lansfeld, with numberless others. But there are especially three Irish
families whose noble descendants making France their home of necessity,
have covered their escutcheon with a blazonry of glory—the Hamiltons, the
Dillons, and the Lally Tollendals. In the year 1667, yielding to the
intolerance and jealousy of the Protestants against Papistry, Charles the Second so far submitted as to discharge such of his body guard as was Catholic.
They withdrew into France, where Louis the Fourteenth received them with
open arms. The Scottish portion of them was incorporated in the old company of the Scottish Gendarmes of the Royal Household. The Irish and
English formed another company with the title of the English Gendarmes,
of which Louis the Fourteenth, as a mark of special compliment, became the
Captain. Sir John Hamilton had the command of this company, and in the
year 1671 passed over to Ireland, where he recruited an infantry regiment
for the service of France. He was no more than two paces from Tourenne,
when the fatal cannon-ball cut short the days of that great man, and he had
the presence of mind to cover over with his mantle the body of the hero,
thus to conceal from the soldiers the loss of their chief. Colonel Hamilton
with his regiment took part in the passage of the Rhine in 1672, in the siege of
Maestrecht, and the battles of Turkheim and Altenhehn. His three brothers
were likewise in the service of Louis the Fourteenth. Anthony Hamilton is
well known as the author of the enchanting (spirituel) memoirs of Chevalier Grammont, his brother-in-law; but he gained distinction in Ireland as
Major-General and Governor of Limerick. The cause of his sovereign being
lost beyond recovery, he withdrew to St. Germains, where he endeavoured to
wear off its ennui by the superabundant resources of a mind the most fertile
and sensitive. Richard Hamilton, Colonel in the French armies, was forced
into exile from the Court of Louis the Fourteenth, because, says M. Lafayette,
he fell in love with the Princess of Conti, the king's daughter, and that it
appeared he was more given to speak to her than to anybody else. He became Lieutenant-General of the Irish Army; and was no less distinguished
at the siege of Londonderry, than at the battle of the Boyne. In fine, John
Hamilton reached the grade of Major-General, and fell in the wars^4 Ireland
Count Arthur Dillon, who landed at Brest in 1691, as Colonei of the
regiment which bore his name, soon became Lieutenant-General of the regiment which bore his name. With a valour of the most brilliant kind, he
ever rushed into the scenes of the greatest danger; but his fortune clung to
him to the end in all his battles; so that though at the close of his days he
reckoned fifty sieges or pitched battles in which he was actively engaged,
in all he escaped unscathed. One of his sons, James Dillon, Knight of Malta,
fell gloriously at the head of his regiment on the plains of Fontenoy.
Another son, Edward, became in his turn Colonel of Dillon's Regiment,
received his death wound at Lansfeld, as did James at Fontenoy, The
third son, Arthur, successively bishop of Evreux, of Toulouse, and of Nar-

64
bonne, presided in the Assembly of the States of Languedoc, and so eminent
was his merit that he was twice elected President of the Assembly of the
Clergy of France. His grandson, Arthur, inherited with their regiment the
valour of his sires. With his regiment he formed part of the corps d'armee
sent by Louis the Sixteenth to the aid of the Americans, and he had the
satisfaction of using his sword against the English, for centuries the hereditary foes of Ireland. Raised to the post of Field Marshal, he shared with
Dumouriez the honour of repulsing the Austrians in the defiles of Narbonne;
but the glories of that campaign were no protection to him against the rigours
of the revolutionary government. The noble descendant of Irish kings wras
beheaded in the Place Louis Fifteenth in 1794, while his brother Theobald
Dillon perished at Lille, assassinated by the revolted soldiers. It is told that
on his getting off the fatal cart, an unfortunate woman was first called out for
execution. Seized with trembling, and in an agony of fright, she begged of
Dillon to set her the example. " There is nothing", said he, " I would not
do to oblige a lady", at the same time saluting her in the most chivalrous
fashion. He mounted the scaffold, and while he submitted his head to
Samson, he cried out, in a voice of thunder, " Vive le Roil"
The Laliy Tollendals are no less illustrious.
On this entire subject, see the remarkable paper of M. Laroche Heron,
The Irish in the Service of France, in the Correspondant of 15th May,
1855, whence we have taken these extracts.
Note 10,
The Journal de Debats has published the following, addressed by Lord
Pliuiket, bishop of Tuam, and peer of Ireland, to Lord Cowley, British
Ambassador at Paris.
"Episcopal Palace, March 12.
" MY LORD,—I learn that an advertisement has appeared in some of the
Paris papers to which it is fit to call the attention of your Excellency, as
ambassador in France of this kingdom. According to the terms of this
advertisement, it appears that the Bishop of Orleans proposes to preach a
charity sermon at St. Roch, for the purpose of accusing me in that church
of having, as a landed proprietor, expelled from my farms a crowd of Roman
Catholics for the sole reason of their having refused to send their children
to Protestant schools, and in consequence of this presumed act of persecution he has, it is added, the intention to tell truths to Protestant England.
It is my duty to enlighten your Excellency as to this remarkable falsehood.
" I have the honour to be, etc.
" PLUNK ET,

" Bishop of Tuam, Peer of Ireland".
The Bishop of Orleans has addressed the following letter to the Editor of
the Debats:
" Orleans, March 23, 1861.
" SIR,—Permit me to express some surprise that you have noticed favourably, in your number of the 22nd, the insertion of a letter designed as a

65
protest by anticipation, against a chanty sermon which I have undertaken
to preach, on the 25th, in Paris, for certain poor Irish. The writer of that
letter, Lord Plunket, an Anglican bishop and a wealthy Irish landlord, designates, as an elaboration of calumny, my future words. He must be very
clever to know what I shall say. I avow humbly that I am not as yet
altogether so well instructed. He does not deny that there are paupers in
Ireland; it is sufficient that I demand charity in their favour. But who has
made them paupers ? I do not profess to accuse any one, nor deny Lord
Plunket's right to evict his tenants in the winter season. I congratulate
him solely at his not being a bishop in the States of the Church. To what
accusations would he not he exposed at this moment throughout England.
As to myself—a Catholic bishop—whenever I see poverty, if I seek out its
cause, I endeavour, above all things, to alleviate it. That will be the object
of my sermon, no matter how it may displease Lord Plunket, whose case ha3
been sufficiently judged, and about whom I do not intend to occupy myself.
I offer beforehand this sermon to its critics ; but although much accustomed
to discussions, it is the first time that I see a reply made to words which
have not yet been uttered. You will feel it just, sir, I doubt not, to insert
these lines in your next number. Be good enough to accept the homage of
my most distinguished consideration.
*5* " FELIX, Bishop of Orleans".
Note 11.
A French traveller who visited Ireland six months ago, and studied with
peculiar care the condition of the peasantry, has communicated to us the following description. " Miserable cabins, the walls of which in many instances
consist of clay tempered with broken straw—no chimney—no door betimes,
the opening into those cabins is so low that the visitor cannot enter except
by stooping sometimes to the very earth. He has great difficulty, at first, to
see about him: but in a few moments he observes in one corner, a bed consisting of hay or straw, with some patches of covering; in the other,
surrounded with ashes, are grouped together crouching, some half-naked
children—the whole furniture some few bowls; rarely a bed or a table.
" I myself have entered a great many of such dwellings, especially in Kerry,
Mayo, and Donegal. I must confess I did not expect to find, in September,
1860, twenty years after the tour of M. Gustave de Beaumont, the misery
which he had so eloquently described".
On this point and all the others touched upon in this portion of the sermon,
I refer for information to the very interesting and very important work
about to be published on Ireland by the tourist just quoted here, P. Adolphe
Perraud, priest of the Oratory of the Immaculate Conception.
Note 12.
As to the fisheries, which one would think ought to form no small element
of support in a country peculiarly favoured with lakes and rivers and
water-courses of all kinds, they are, by virtue of enactments, old and

66
modern, so completely ruined (tue'e), that Ireland is obliged to import from
England and Scotland her herrings and other saved fish, which the people
use for their support.
The total amount of exportations from England of herrings and cod-fish,
being 367,160 barrels of herrings, and 34,310 quintals of cod-fish, Ireland
alone figures in the calculation for 58,534 barrels of the first, and 16,447 of
the second.
The following details, truly astounding, are furnished by the Dublin Review of November, 1841, vol. xxxvi.:—
" Not only the land, but the very water, has been confiscated from the
people of Ireland, by laws passed since the reign of Elizabeth, and opposed
to the English laws. The yearly revenues of fresh-water fisheries (lakes and
rivers), are estimated at half a miilion sterling; and of such superior quality
is the fish found therein, that it is entirely consumed in England. The
Blue Book for 1824 (page 127) attests that, were these fisheries properly
developed', they would yield such an abundance of fish as could hardly find
a market in England".
Note 13.
The English themselves admit, says M. Leouce de Lavergne, that the soil
of Ireland is superior to that of England. . By a peculiar conformation, her
mountains arise nearly ail along the sea coast, and the interior forms a vast
plain. Its area consists of 20,399,608 millions of acres. Five millions of
these are covered over with rocks, lakes, and bogs; five more pretty fair
land ; and the remainder, i.e., one-half the entire, is a rich and productive
land, writh limestone subsoil, and none better.
" It is the richest soil I have ever seen", writes Arthur Young, speaking
of the counties of Limerick and Tipperary, " and the best suited for everything. The climate, milder at once, and more moist than that of England,
makes the extremes of heat and cold there almost unknown, at least in threefourths of the island. Its vegetation is a marvel; so that it is not without
reason that the trefoil has become the national emblem of the green isle, as
it is called. The south-western parts enjoy a perpetual springtime, owing
to the southern currents of wind from the region of the tropics. Myrtles
are there to be seen in the open fields, and among the commonest is the
strawberry bu*n"~~ Essay on Rural Economy, p. 312. " Its soil is proverbially rich and fruitful"—Joseph Kay, The social condition and education
of the people*
Note 14.
A Quaker writes, in January, 1847 :
" I took a boat to it [Bundoragha], and was much struck by the pale, spiritless look and air of the boatmen, so different from their wild Irish fun when I
made the same excursion before. In my previous visit, it struck me even then
as a very poor place ; the dark thunder-cloud was brooding over it, but as yet
the tempest had not broken. The small cottiers, then gathering in their few

67
potatoes,.were in great fear: they saw the qaick, sure approach of famine :
death stared them in the face, but as yet his hand was stayed. One poor
woman, whose cabin I visited, said: 'There will be nothing for us but to
lie down and die'. I tried to give her hope of English aid, but, alas! her
prophecy has been but too true. Out of a population of 240, I found 13
already dead from want. There were neither potatoes or corn. . . .
" I here met with a striking instance of the patience of these sufferers.
The Bundoragha men had been at work for three weeks on the roads, and
the men at a neighbouring village, for fi?e weeks; owing to the negligence or
mistake of some officers of the works, with the exception of two of the gangsmen, who had gone themselves to Westport the end of the previous week, no
wages had until this morning been received. While I was there, the pay
clerk sent a messenger over; but still only with wages for a few ; and it was
wonderful, but yet most touching, to see the patient, quiet look of despair
with which the others received the news that they were still left unpaid.
I doubt whether it would have been easy to find a man who would ha/ve
dared to bear the like announcement to starving Englishmen".—-Transactions
of the Central Relief Committee, p. 153.
" We visited the poorhouse at Glenties, which is in a dreadful state; the
people were in fact half-starved and only half*clothed. The day before,
they had but one meal of oatmeal and water; and at the time of our visit
had not sufficient food in the house for the day's supply. The people complained bitterly, as well they might, and begged us to give them tickets for
work, to enable them to leave the place and work on the roads. Some were
leaving the house, preferring to die in their own hovels rather than in the
poorhouse. Their bedding consisted of dirty straw, in which they were laid
in rows on the floor; even as many as six persons being crowded under one
rug; and we did not see a blanket at all. The rooms were hardly bearable
for filth. The living and the dying were stretched side by side beneath the
same miserable covering! No wonder that disease and pestilence were filling the infirmary, and that the pale, haggard countenances of the poor boys
and girls told of sufferings which it was impossible to contemplate without
the deepest feeling of commiseration and pity"—Transactions of the Central
Relief Committee, p. 150.
Note 15.
The following are, according to official returns, details of exportation from
Ireland to England (for July, August, and September, 1846, alone) :—
Wheat,
.
.
.
.
59,478 qrs.
Barley,
18,417 qrs.
Oats,
245,067 qrs.
Meal,
242,257 qrs.
Oatmeal,
138,241 qrs.
Bullocks and Heifers
33,850
Calves,
1,923
Sheep and Lnmbs,
56,609
Pigs,
124,762

68
Mr. Martin, of Loughorne, in a letter published in October, 1847, furnishes
large statistics, and draws from them that the total value of merchandise in
Ireland in the previous year was £41,000,000—the exports to England
£15,000,000. But other Irish economists think his figures rather low, for
in the year 1846, according to Thorn's Almanac, the exports of grain alone
from Ireland to England in 1846, were 1,875,393 quarters.
But nothing can open our eyes more to the truth of the facts now
stated than the statements in the newspapers during a single week, and that a
week of famine, about the exports.
The Daily News of 3rd October, 1847, states that in the London markets, " the oats chiefly consisted of the last harvest in Ireland". We read in
the Examiner of 4th October, that in one day there came from Ireland to
London, 11,050 quarters of grain. The Drogheda Argus tells us that in
one week ending the 3rd of October, there were shipped off from Drogheda
1,200 cows, 3,500 sheep and pigs, 2,000 quarters of wheat, 211 tons of
meal, 130 boxes of eggs, besides butter, pork, etc. Waterford during the
same week (Evening Post, 3rd October) exported 250 tons of meal, 1,100
sheep and pigs, 308 horned cattle, 5,400 barrels of flour and oatmeal, 7,700
firkins of butter, and 2,000 fletches of lard. From Nevvry there left for
England in the course of five days in the end of September, 11 vessels laden
with wheat, not to speak of the steam boats that start four times a week,
carrying cattle, butter, eggs, etc., etc.
In a word, during the four years of famine, Ireland exported four quarters
of grain against each one imported, and part even of the imports was grain
previously exported, and came back to the luckless consumers after its
speculators had secured their gains.
In Thorn's Government Directory for 1853 (an official annuary) we find
the report of Captain Larcom, government commissary in 1847, in which he
estimates the produce of Ireland during that year at 16,248,934 quarters
of wheat, and 8,785,144 tons of potatoes, besides cattle, fowl, etc., etc.
This amount would suffice to support sixteen millions of men. It was
consumed, but not by the Irish.
Note 16.
Here a social question—a question of humanity of the very first order,
presents itself.
Let us ask: Have people a right to turn, to any indefinite extent, arable
into pasture land, so as to reduce the population to a third of what the
country could sustain, and thus to force the surplus inhabitants either to emigrate or to die of hunger ? In a word, have people a right to replace men
with sheep and horned cattle ? and that for what ? For a few hundred proprietors—for the beefsteaks and roastbeef of English tables.
There- is the question.
'" While millions of unfortunate beings ask themselves each day how are
they to provide for their most urgent necessities, the revenues of the rich in
some parts of Ireland rise to an amount which might appear to us fabulous.
The rich man in this country is cast on a happy lot. He has splendid

69
chateaux, boundless demesnes, mountains, meadows, forests, lakes. All this
does he possess, and in many instances does he possess them twice or three
times over" (Gustave de Beaumont, i. 241).
" Landlords hold meetings to exhibit cattle fattened on their pasturage.
The Lord Lieutenant attends these reunions, and bears witness to the good
condition (embonpoint) of the huge Durham beeves and these Dislhey sheep.
He encourages with pet and flattering phrases the beef-fatteners, and in
their public banquets, drinks with enthusiasm to the INCREASING prosperity
of Ireland. On other occasions, it is to large commercial and maritime towns
that he directs his steps. There he is witness to the movements and life of
a great sea port. Sailing and steam vessels crowd the roadsteads—several
hundreds of active hands are employed in the work of lading. The evening
banquet comes to regale the illustrious visitor. The commercial speeches
are eloquent and sublime in their statistics of the truly prodigious number of
measures of wheat, heads of cattle, casks of butter, that are yearly shipped
off to England. True, there is a dead silence about the significant number
of emigrants huddled together in the holds of those ships that are on the
point of startingfor Canada or Australia"—P. Perraud, Irelande en I860,
Economie Charitable,
Note 17.
This 12,000 house levelling police are scattered all over Ireland. Every
magistrate landlord can obtain from the government one or more garrisons
in the shape of police barracks, which he distributes, not so much as required by the extent of his property as of the rigour with which he exercises
his legal right of eviction. Thus it is that the other day the Protestant
Bishop of Tuam, not content with four barracks already established about
him, demanded and obtained from the government a fifth establishment.
Note 18.
One of these evictions took place under circumstances that I cannot pass
over in silence. A man of the name of Bernard Flynn thought fit to vote for
a candidate other than his master. Notice to quit was served. His
wife was dangerously ill. Flynn imagined that her condition should move the
heart of the landlord and his agents. The physician gives a written certificate that the woman could not be removed without danger of death ; and
Flynn ran off with this certificate to the agent. The only answer was this,
" We have nothing to say to your wife. It is your house we want". The
unfortunate woman was then carried out of the house, and died immediately
after.
On the property of the same was evicted another man who refused
to vote for his landlord. His wife . . . asked for mercy . . . " Pardon us",
said she, " we will not do it again". " Be off, woman", cried the Driver,
" go look for a priest who pretends to have the power of granting you pardon". (From the excellent article of the L'Abbe Perraud, of the Oratory, in
the Correspondant, on the Irish Tenant Bill). Who would venture to expend
£1,000 on his land, as did the family of Porter, to have it wrested from him,
though in the hands of his family a whole century?

70
To look for any analogy between the tenure in France and Ireland is to
risk having no knowledge whatsoever of the latter. On the one side in
France, there is not a farmer, who, on taking possession of land, does
not find there a dwelling-house and the necessary offices, such as stables,
etc., as the case might be. Again, in France there are a thousand
ways of gaining a livelihood, and to till the land is not an absolute
necessity, and no farm3 are taken without a lease and reasonable conditions. In Ireland, on the contrary, where manufactures and commerce
have been ruined, where you must either have a spot of ground or die of
hunger, no conditions are entertained. There is no lease. The rent is exorbitant ; for frequently the large farmer can only meet his gale day by subletting a part to others. But what is worse than all, after having met the
inexorable claims of the landlord, the unfortunate tenants must often appease
the rapacity of the agents—a terrible name for the Irish.
And of absenteeism what shall I say ? The annual amount paid to
absentees is estimated at £4,000,000. This is exported with everything else.
Let us ever keep before our eyes the law which enables the landlord to evict
after a few months' notice (See able article of M. Perraud, Correspondent}
25th March, 1860).
Can we be charged with exaggeration of language if we say, with a Protestant whom such an outrageous violation of justice made to exclaim with
indignation, that " it is an act of simple robbery, committed under the name
of law"? (Letter of Mr. Smith O'Brien to the Archbishop of Tuam, October, 1859).
The laws of 1816, 1820, 1836 [and especially the £12 valuation law—
P. L.], immensely facilitated evictions. From the beginning of the present
century, no less than sixteen acts have been passed in favour of the landlords. Could the English government show more clearly its wish to maintain the old state of things ?—(See Bichino, cited in Prize Essay of Alderman
Staunton, and Law Magazine, May, 1841).
Note 19.
THE WORKHOUSES.

Pastoral of the Bight Reverend Doctor Keane, Bishop of Cloyne, on the
actual condition of Ireland.—The poor inmates of the workhouses, who
live in them hi a truly sad state, and are there deprived of the consolations
and affectionate cares of the domestic hearth, should not be forgotten. They
should receive that care to which they have a legal right, without being
wounded in their religious feelings. Ireland is a Catholic country, and to
such an extent is the faith of its people ignored, that the Central Board of
Commissioners in Dublin is EXCLUSIVELY Protestant, incapable of comprehending either the doctrine or discipline of the Catholic Church, while
the foundlings are registered and brought up as Protestants.
In some cases the means essential for the spiritual instruction of the poor
are denied, unless indeed an additional priest is called in, who would not be
otherwise required. Pursuant to actual regulations, the holy sacrifice has to

71
he offered up in the refectories, and consequently to precede or follow the ordinary meals of the paupers therein*
The Bishop of Glasgow relates in a letter such facts as the following:—" O u t of the ninety-four young Irish in the chief house in Glasgow, eighty
were Catholics, and no Catholic priest was adinitted into the establishment
on any pretext whatsoever. In the year 1858, a poor young man of the
name of Mooney, died of consumption in the house, and implored of an old
Catholic female whose religion was unknown to the authorities, to obtain for
him the benefit of a priest of his Church. The Master and the Board refused.
Recourse was had to the Minister of the Interior. Tie refused, and the young
man died screaming for a priest".
This letter of the Bishop of Glasgow was read at a large and importnnt
meeting of the clergy and laity, held in London, 8th June, 1859. The Hon.
Charles Langdale presided. There were present, Lord Stafford, Lord Edward
Howard, Lord Campden, Dr. Gil lis, bishop of Edinburgh, Mr. Wiiberforce,
brother of the Bishop of Oxford, the most distinguished Catholic members
of Parliament, Mr. Monsell, Mr. Bowyer, etc.
Lastly, there is one fact, which has produced a wide impression in Ireland,
which shows the regard for liberty of conscience on the part of the administrators of legal poor relief, Protestant as they are for the most p a r t ; it
tends to expose the advantage which sectarian proselytism endeavours to
take of the distress of the Irish people. Will it be believed that in a country
peopled in great majority by Catholics, the Government assumes that all
foundlings must be presumed to belong to the Protestant religion, " being
that of the state", and insists, in fact, that they shall all be brought up in
that religion ?
In the month of November, 1858,f the Rev. Mr, Daly, P . P . of the town
of Gaiway, and at the same time chaplain of the Union Workhouse, administered baptism to a foundiing child which had been snatched from certain
death by a Catholic of the city, who had brought it to the workhouse, and
caused it to be registered there as a Catholic. The Attorney-General reprimanded the master of the workhouse for having neglected his " duty", which
was to make Protestants of all children taken to the workhouse. But this
is not all. The Poor Law Commissioners, for this act, in January, 1859,
summarily dismissed the Rev. Mr. Daly, in despite of the wishes of the
Board of Guardians, formally expressed; and the Rev. Mr. Daly having,
after this brutal dismissal, continued to fulfil, though gratuitously, his functions as a charitable and zealous priest among the workhouse paupers, was
summoned to appear before the Court of Queen's Bench!
As to the notoriously Catholic orphans of which the poor law administration takes charge, they are frequently confided to Protestant nurses; and at
an age which ought to be respected beyond all others by the religion of individual self-examination and private judgment, these children are surreptitiously brought up in a religion which was not that of their fathers.^ T H E
* Here there is a long quotation from the pastoral of his Lordship the Bishop of
Cloyne, which it would not be so well to retranslate, the original not at hand.—P. L,
t See the Freeman, 15th November; Tuam Herald, 19th November, 1858.
% See the resolutions of two meetings held in Dublin in 1852 and 1857.— Catholic
Directory, 1853, p. 315, and 1858, p. 209.

72
GREAT FOUNDLING HOSPITAL OF DUBLIN, FOUNDED IN 1704, AND
CLOSED IN 1835, is CALCULATED TO HAVE GIVEN TO PROTESTANTISM
IN THIS WAY 56,000 CHILDREN IN 131 YEARS.

To these sad details must be added what follows:—
" It would be a mercy'', said lately the Mayor of Cork, Sir John Arnott,
M.P., " t o close to these children the gates of the workhouses, aud to leave
them to await the release of death, rather than condemn them to become
crippled and deformed under the system to which they are subjected. For
want of suitable and properly varied nutriment, the blood of these poor creatures is so much exhausted, that instead of supplying vigour and health to
their frames, it is but a medium for the circulation of weakness and ill
health throughout their limbs and bodies.
" Of these children, a fourth part, or, at least, a fifth, die before they
reach the age of puberty; and in most cases those who survive, live only
ruined in constitution" (see the Catholic Telegraph, 14 th May).

Note 20.
It is said that " Ireland enjoys all the rights of English freedom5'. There
are, nevertheless, essential and vital rights of which Ireland is deprived.
She is not free (an Act of 33 Geo. III. forbids it under pain of fine and
imprisonment), she is not at liberty to name delegates to a convention, to
meet, to deliberate peaceably, in any spot within the country. Associations,
public unions, are not indeed forbidden, as witness the Association for the
Repeal of the Union, organised by O'Connell; but that the Irish should name
delegates, meeting together to form a convention, this the law punishes
severely in Ireland. Does this law exist in England ? No. It is a law
made expressly with regard to Ireland alone. In England all sorts of conventions are permitted; and we have seen, in 1848-, a great convention of
the Chartists held there, composed of delegates from the people.
We do not consider here, be it understood, whether it would be prudent
and timely on the part of England to accord to Ireland, a conquered country, the means of resuming possession of itself. We desire merely to
establish against M. de Lasteyrie that there are English liberties which are
doubly foreign to Ireland.
Here is another of the same kind: the English have the right to keep in
their houses and to carry arms,—to form volunteer companies,—to instruct
each other in military seience. The Irish enjoy none of these rights. A
long series of Acts of Parliament restrict, and specially regulate for them
the privilege of possessing arms. These acts are at present in force in all
the ounties of Ireland, and are rigorously put in force. Besides, an Act
of the 60 Geo. III. makes it a crime, punishable with transportation, to
teach or practise military exercises in Ireland outside the royal army. In
1848, a young man named Geraghty was actually tried and condemned for
having simply given the word: right about,—march! to thirteen young
men, unarmed, and assembled in a private room, in Dublin!
Here then, in two matters of importance, we have a distinct legislation,
entirely unknown in England, and which deprives the Irish of English

73
rights. This code alone, made for the special use of Ireland, would be
sufficient to enslave it.
A third instance of English rights which the Irish do not eujoy:—the
English have the right to elect City Sheriffs, by municipal Corporations,
which spring themselves from popular election. In Ireland it is not so.
The Sheriff of Dublin, and those of other cities, as well as the Sheriffs of the
counties, are named by the Crown; and it is thus that the English Government, can count on them when, in political prosecutions, it has-an interest
in packing the Jury, the registry and preparation of the jury lists being
among the duties of these functionaries (Le Nord, January 14, 1861).
What an example of this disgraceful abuse did not the O'Connell Trial
present but a few days ago! " O'Conoeil was condemned ; England gained
that victory; but that victory, said the historian Lord Macaulay, was more
shameful and more disastrous than any defeat. O'Connell was found guilty;
but you cannot deny that his conviction was unjust. . . . . . Yes,
you have obtained a verdict which declared him guilty; but that verdict was
obtained from twelve men illegally assembled as a jury, and selected in such
a way that their decision can carry with it no respect!"
I know that the verdict of the jury was afterwards quashed, and that a
rare example of impartiality was then exhibited ; but in the month of April,
last year,* the same means exactly were resorted to, in another prosecution,
which took place in the County Kerry. Two Catholics only were allowed
to take their places on the jury; and as, notwithstanding this first iniquitous
proceeding, the members of this jury did not yet satisfy you, another jury list
was prepared, from which care was taken to exclude every Catholic without
exception. And the arbitrary nature of the proceedings was here the more
revolting, that the County Kerry is almost entirely Catholic, and that among
those qualified to act as jurors, the great majority is Catholic.
And what is to be said of the Coercion Bills, a sort of martial law continually decreed by the British Parliament under the pretence of ameliorating the lot of the Irish ? Since the commencement of the present century
there have been no less than Thirty-Three of them! Here are some of the
clauses of that proposed by the government in 1846, at the commencement
of the famine, on the motion of Sir James Graham :—
Sect. 15.—Whosoever shall be found outside his house one hour after sunset
may be imprisoned and kept in custody until his trial.
Section 16.—Whosoever shali be imprisoned in such, case may be punished
with Fifteen Years' Transportation, if he does not prove that he had gone out
of his house on occasion of some business authorised by law.
Section 18.—The Police may enter every house, from one hour after sunset, until the following morning.
In order to show how in certain circumstances the Coercion Bills can serve
the interests of the landlords, let us recal what Judge Fletcher said, in 1814, to
the grand jury of Waterford: " I know of landlords who, to get rid of tenants
holding leases for their lives, have had them transported under this law". ,
And pray observe, I do not speak here of ancient intolerance; I speak of
injustice, not only flagrant, but of to-day.
For example, again : the Catholic University of Dublin has been -founded

74
since 1854: ever since then the Catholics have constantly demanded from
the English government a charter to enable this University to confer degrees ;
and up to the present time they have been unable to obtain it. Yet if this
University confers Education, why forbid it to confer Degrees ?
A Catholic cannot be a Fellow either of the University of Oxford or of Cambridge. Yet almost all the colleges of both these Universities were founded
and endowed by Catholic kings, and every year great revenues are enjoyed by the incumbents of these colleges, for the celebration of masses for
the souls of their founders. (See Edinburgh Review, July, 1852, page 250.)
Note 21.
After having quoted a beautiful description of the University of Oxford
by a German savant, Dr. Newman adds these noble and eloquent words:—
" There are those who, having felt the influence of this ancient school, and
being smifc with its splendour and its sweetness, ask wistfully, if never again
it is to be Catholic, or whether at least some footing for Catholicity may
not be found there. All honour and merit to the charitable and zealous
hearts who so inquire 1 Nor can we dare to tell what in time to come may
be the inscrutable purposes of that grace which is ever more comprehensive
than human hope and aspiration. But for me, from the day I left its walls,
1 never, for good or bad, have had anticipation of its future; and never for
a moment have I had a wish to see again a place, which I have never ceased
to love, and where I lived for nearly thirty years. Nay, looking at the
general state of things at this day, I desiderate for a school of the Church,
if an additional school is to be granted to us, a more central position than
Oxford has to show.
" Since the age of Alfred and of the first Henry, the world has grown,
from the west and south of Europe, into four or five continents; and I look
for a city less inland than that old sanctuary, and a country closer upon the
highway of the seas. I look towards a land both old and young; old in
its Christianity, young in the promise of its future ; a nation, which received
grace before the Saxon came to Britan, and which has never quenched i t ;
a Church, which comprehends in its history the rise and fall of Canterbury
and York, which Augustine and Paulinus found, and Pole and Fisher left
behind them. I contemplate a people which has had a long night, and will
have an inevitable day. I am turning my eyes towards a hundred years to
come, and I dimly see the island I am gazing on, become the road of passage
and union between two hemispheres, and the centre of the world.
" I see its inhabitants rival Belgium in populousness, France in vigour, and
Spain in enthusiasm ; and 1 see England taught by advancing years to
exercise in its behalf that good sense which is her characteristic towards
every one else.
" The capital of that prosperous and hopeful land is situate in a beautiful bay and near a romantic region; and in it I see a flourishing University, which for a while had to struggle with fortune, but which, when
its first founders and servants were dead and gone, had successes far ex-

75
ceeding their anxieties. Thither, as to a sacred soil, the home of their
fathers and the fountain head of their Christianity, students are flocking
from East, West, and South, from America, and Australia, and India, from
Egypt and Asia Minor, with the ease and rapidity of a locomotion not yet
discovered, and last, though not least, from England,—all speaking one
tongue, all owning one faith, all eager for one large true wisdom ; and
thence, when their stay is over, going back again to carry peace to raen of
good will over all the Earth"—Catholic University Gazette, June 15, 1 8 5 1 .
Note 22.
Lord Macaulay.—This
candid man, if he did not go so far as to acknowledge the truth of the Catholic Church, knew at least how to divest
himself of those hateful prejudices, whose blindness and injustice I have
made a reproach to England, and has written on the Church lines well
worthy the consideration of his countrymen. Thus, for instance, does he
appreciate the action of the clergy in England during the middle ages.
" The ascendancy of the clergy was for a long time the ascendancy which
naturally, and of right, belongs to intellectual superiority. The priests, in
spite of their faults, were by far the most enlightened and instructed portion
of society. The encroachments of the ecclesiastical on the civil power were
productive of much more good than harm, in those times when ecclesiastics
were the only persons wlrb studied history, philosophy, public law, and when
the civil power rested with savage chieftains, who knew not how to read the
writings which they signed themselves".*
It is still Lord Macaulay who has written on the Catholic Church this
beautiful passage, calculated to inspire sincere minds, if not with admiration
and love, at least with moderation and respect.
" There is not, and there never was on this Earth, a work of human policy
so well deserving of examination as the Roman Catholic Church. The history of that Church joins together the two great ages of human civilisation.
No other institution is left standing which carries the mind back to the times
when the smoke of sacrifice rose from the Pantheon, and when camelopards
and tigers bounded in the Flavian amphitheatre. The proudest royal houses
are but of yesterday, when compared with the line of Supreme Pontiffs. That
line w7e trace back in an unbroken series, from the Pope who crowned
Napoleon in the nineteenth century, to the Pope who crowned Pepin in the
eighth; and far beyond the time of Pepin the august dynasty extends, till
it is lost in the twilight of fable. The republic of Venice came next in
antiquity. But the republic of Venice was modern when compared with the
Papacy ; and the republic of Venice is gone, and the Papacy remains. The
Papacy remains, not in decay, not a mere antique, but full of life and
youthful vigour. The Catholic Church is still sending forth to the farthest
ends of the world missionaries as zealous as those who landed in Kent with
Augustin, and still confronting hostile kings with the same spirit with which
she confronted Attila. The number of her children is greater than in any
former age. Her acquisitions in the New World have more than conipen* This passage alone is rc-translated from the French.

76
sated for what she has lost in the Old. Her spiritual ascendency extends
over the vast countries which lie between the plains of the Missouri and Cape
Horn, countries which, a century hence, may not improbably contain a population as large as that which now inhabits Europe. The members of her
communion are certainly not fewer than a hundred and fifty millions; and it
will be difficult to show that ail other Christian sects united amount to a
hundred and twenty millions. Nor do we see any sign which indicates that
the term of her long dominion is approaching".
I love to quote this eminent man, whose noble and religions impartiality,
soared so high above the prejudices of his countrymen and the superficial
appreciation of vulgar writers, and whose example and words prove much
better than I either could or would, the shainefulness and ingratitude of those
unaccountable hatreds which I demand of England to abjure. For in the end,
it is from positive facts—from the enlightened and impartial study of history
<—it is in the open light of the highest historical arguments, that Macaulay
has formed his opinion respecting the beneficent influence of Catholicism on
his country.
Well might I here cite other English names which would lend me the
support of their testimony, the Newmans, the Mannings, the Wilberforces,
and all those noble souls, all those elevated characters that the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge have seen renounce fortune, honours, the
friendships of youth, and, in spite of piejudices the most inveterate, devote
themselves to the cause of truth, and, in their learned works, render to the
Catholic Church a homage, the irresistible value of which, no less than its
heroic sincerity, no one, up to this day, has dared to question.
But, more logical than he (Macaulay), they pursued their path of light to
the end, and the evidence of their conversion is undoubtedly one of the most
striking that could be adduced in favour of Catholicism. Yet error and
prejudices will accuse such testimony because uf its vecj force and authority. Hence I prefer appealing to Macaulay, who continued a Protestant in
spite of ail his professions of respect and admiration for the Catholic Church.
And without doubt such words as I have quoted could never proceed except
irom the very depths of his conscience.
There are many other passages of this illustrious historian, the perusal of
which I would recommend to every Englishman, and to every man who truly
loves liberty and the dignity of the human race. I give one in particular, in
which Lord Macaulay points out in Catholicism, an influence, an action, deserving assuredly of a better fate than insult and contempt.
" It would be most unjust not to acknowledge that the chief agent in these
two great deliverances was religion; and it may perhaps be doubted whether
a purer religion might not have been found a less efficient agent. The benevolent spirit of the Christian morality is undoubtedly adverse to distinctions
of caste. But to the Church of Rome such distinctions are peculiarly odious ;
for they are incompatible with other distinctions which are essential to her
system. She ascribes to every priest a mysterious dignity which entitles him
to the reverence of every layman; and she does not consider any man as
disqualified, by reason of his nation or of his family, for the priesthood. Her
doctrines respecting the sacerdotal character, however erroneous they may be,

77
have repeatedly mitigated some of the worst evils which can afflict society.
That superstition cannot be regarded as unmixedly noxious, whichy in regions
cursed by the tyranny of race over race, creates an aristocracy altogether
independent of race, inverts the relation between the oppressor and the
oppressed,. and compels the hereditary master to kneel before the spiritual
tribunal of the hereditary bondman. To this day, in some countries where
Negro slavery exists, Popery appears in advantageous contrast to other forms
of Christianity. It is notorious that the antipathy between the European
and African races is by no means so strong at Rio Janeiro as at Washington.
In our own country this peculiarity of the Roman Catholic system produced,
during the middle ages, many salutary effects. It is true that, shortly after
the battle of Hastings, Saxon prelates and abbots were violently deposed, and
that ecclesiastical adventurers from the Continent were intruded by hundreds
into lucrative benefices. Yet even then, pious divines of Norman blood
raised their voices against such a violation of the constitution of the Church,
refused to accept mitres from the hands of William, and charged him, on the
peril of his soul, not to forget that the vanquished islanders were his fellow
Christians. The first protector whom the English found among the dominant
caste was Archbishop Anselm. At a time when the English name was a
reproach, and when all the civil and military dignities of the kingdom were
supposed to belong exclusively to the countrymen of the Conqueror, the despised race learned, with transports of delight, that one of themselves,
Nicholas Breakspear, had been elevated to the papal throne, and had held out
his foot to be kissed by ambassadors sprung from the noblest houses of Normandy. It was a national as well as a religious feeling that drew great multitudes to the shrine of Becket, whom they regarded as the enemy of their
enemies. Whether he was a Norman or a Saxon may be doubted: but
there is no doubt that he perished by Norman hands, and that the Saxons
cherished his memory with peculiar tenderness and veneration, aud, in their
popular poetry, represented him as one of their own race. A successor of
Becket was foremost among the refractory magnates who obtained that charter
which secured the privileges both of the Norman barons and of the Saxon
yeomanry. How great a part the Roman Catholic ecclesiastics subsequently
bad in the abolition of villenage we learn from the unexceptionable testimony
of Sir Thomas Smith, one of the ablest Protestant counsellors of Elizabeth.
When the dying slaveholder asked for the last sacraments, his spiritual
attendants regularly adjured him, as he loved his soul, to emancipate his
brethren for whom Christ had died".
True, it is hot a child of the Roman Church who speaks in those pages,
and in more than one instance that may be easily seen. But it is a noble
soul - a lofty and candid mind—who fears not to do justice, and is never
carried away by a blinded hatred. Well, it is in this spirit that I beseech
the English to study us and to judge us.
And truly may they find many more souvenirs of their history everywhere,
even on the very soil of their country,—many more evidences of the olden
benefits of Catholicism that ought to open their eyes at last, and make them
admit the ingratitude of a hatred so unjust and so obstinate.
" The most venerable institutions of England", writes an illustrious Ca-

78
tholic whom the English cannot suspect, and to whom more than any other
man in France he has paid the tribute of praise, " her brightest glories came
from Catholicism. The jury, the parliament, the universities, date from the
period when England was obedient to the Holy See. It was the Catholic
barons who wrested from John the Magna Charia. It is Irish Catholics
that formed the chief of the English armies in the Peninsula and in the
Crimea. Except queen Elizabeth, the only sovereigns whose memory lives
with the people were Catholic kings. Alfred, Edward the Confessor,
Eichard Cceur de Lion, Edward the Third, Henry the Fifth. The cathedrals, the churches, the old castles, all the ecclesiastical and feudal structuies
which England possessed before us, and which she restores and preserves
with so pious a care, are exclusively the work of Catholic generations. The
fervent piety of the newly converted Catholics finds heaven peopled with
English Saints, from. St. Wilfrid and St. Boniface, to St. Thomas of Canterbury".—See M. de Montalembert, d* Avenir Politique oV Angleterre.
Note 23.
I hear it said that the great, the national charge against the Papacy is the
re-establishment of the hierarchy in 1852, in its different spheres in England.
Well, I ask, is there a man of common sense, of common honesty, that
could believe the Establishment was threatened by this hierarchy? Was it
not more British pride than Protestant faith that originated that explosion ?
The selfish and clever worked upon the dominant faults, as well as the high
qualities of English patriotism; and Great Britain seemed to rise up against
what was put before her as a retaking possession of the country and the
Church by the Catholic episcopate. But in reality, was what then occurred
other than a homage paid to England, a confidence manifested in the common
right of English citizens, an act which in no wise threatened the constitution,
and should give no one the slightest ground of fear? How could the exercise
of a liberty the first and dearest of all, be so misunderstood ? The English
would descend below even Muscovite intolerance, were they to proscribe
the Catholic worship; but could this worship continue without the fundamental conditions of its existence, that is, without its spiritual hierarchy ? The
episcopate is essential to it. We must accept it; but is it not better that it
should exist under the hierarchical form, known, proclaimed perpetual, universal, than under the exceptional form of vicariates apostolic ?
But should you not, here, in a very special manner, applaud that view to
order and regularity which emanated from Borne? Bishops, though subject
to the Pope, as they ought to be, are less closely dependant upon him in a
certain manner than vicars apostolic, who are only delegates that may be at
any moment recalled.
In the whole affair there was neither violation of English law, or menace
or defiance; and all who love liberty throughout Europe are astonished at the
violent prejudices and passions of another period, which then blazed out in
England.*
We must then fully understand the truth.
" All that is said to alarm the Protestant powers, on the influence of a

79
strange power, is a chimera, a bugbear, raised up in the sixteenth century,
having no longer any sense or meaning in order. The era of passions is
gone by. We can now address one another without hatred or even excitement"—De Maistre on the Pope.
" The English", adds De Maistre, " in their prejudices against us, only err
about the time. Their unreasonableness is only an anachronism. They read
iu a certain book that obedience is not due to an heretical prince. At once
they get alarmed, and cry out against Popery. But, if they only deign to
read the date of the book, all this fire dies out,—a book dating from that deplorable epoch of wars of religion and changes of dynasties".*
Assuredly, the author of the excellent book, UAvenir Politique P?An*
gleterre, is one of the most faithful and intrepid friends of liberty; and is it
not he who says to the English :
" The glory of the Catholic Church, one of the conditions and consequences of its immortality, is that it makes itself always all to all, that it
accommodates itself with an unwearying flexibility to the institutions, the
manners, the ideas of every nation and of every age, to all that is opposed to
faith and the Christian virtues. It is, that it allows all its children to have,
in a certain way, their own abode, to possess private property in the very
bosom of this matchless unity, which triumphs over all, and survives all, only
by its elasticity and universality" •
Note 24.
And it is not even necessary to go back to olden times, in order to comprehend the motives which ought to make the English pursue a different line
of conduct towards the Papacy, and abjure a hostility, alas, up to this day, as
ungrateful as it is implacable. The very memories even of the present age
should suffice. Yes, I ask, since in concert with the great powers of Europe,
the English concurred in re-establishing the Papacy in the beginning of
the nineteenth century, what injury have they to avenge against her? Nay,
I could rather recall the titles which the Roman Pontiff has to their regard
and respect. In truth, the magnanimous conduct of Pius the Ninth towards
them would seem to merit a different return. The whole world knows this.
Some years before, during the famous debates in the English parliament, in
1805, on what was called the Catholic Emancipation, a member of the upper
house, imbued with the same prejudices that some statesmen nourish up to
the present day, did not hesitate thus to express himself:—" I think, and I
am quite certain, that the Pope is only a miserable puppet in the hands of
the usurper of the throne of the Bourbons ; that he dare not move but by the
order of Napoleon ; and that if the latter asked him for a bull to get the Irish
priests to make their flocks rise up against the government, he would not
refuse the despot". Well, to borrow here the expressive language of
De Maistre—
"The ink was hardly dry on the paper which brought us this curious
* The English seem to have understood this. And they let their " Ecclesiastical
Titles Bill fall to the ground," the very day they passed it.

80
certainty, when the Pope, called upon with all the parade of terror to yield
to the general views of Napoleon against the English, replied that, being the
common father of all Christians, he could not have enemies amongst them ;
and rather than yield he allowed himself to be outraged, banished, and
imprisoned, and then began that long martyrdom which has endeared him to
the universe. Why should he make England an exception ?"
Note 25.
Bnt should human wisdom, however, come here to object to me, that my
aspirations in their impatience anticipate overmuch the work of time, and
that the happy return of England to Catholic unity is not an event yet in
maturity, let this, while I renounce not my hopes, be my last word to the
English nation. Let me be allowed the expression, what transactions would
I propose to her in order to bring back the reign of that peace which is in
our hearts? "Nothingin the world", would I say to her, " so upsets every
Catholic idea, so wounds our conscience, as the spectacle which you afford at
this day, of a spiritual supremacy resting upon a woman's head; and we feel
much for you when we see your Queen Victoria the legal heir—singular though
it be—to that beautiful title of " Defender of the faith", awarded, with perhaps too much eagerness, by Pope Leo the Tenth to Henry the Eighth.
However, like our Catholic brethren of the three kingdoms, we entertain only
sentiments of respect for the person of this queen, worthy object of your
affection; nor does it cost us less to pay homage to those royal qualities and
domestic virtues, of which she gives on the throne such a noble example.
Well, what we ask of you in return, is to respect also the virtues, the august
old age, and, as we said before, the weakness of the Pontiff King, in whom
you may have the misfortune to recognize the supreme prerogatives of the
successor of St. Peter, but for whom the rights of an old and venerable
sovereignty—the proclaimed sentiments of the entire Catholic world—the
prayers and the sorrows of Ireland—the most venerable souvenirs of your
own history, and, I shall add, these very trials, the cup of which he is forced
to drink, and I know not what incomparable qualities misfortune adds to
virtue—claim at your hands justice, delicacy, and respect. I ask no more at
this moment. Charity, patience, prayers, learned and friendly controversy,
the preaching of the Gospel, study of the fathers, the moanings of the saints,
the grace of God, will do the rest for your happiness and for the progress,
throughout the whole world, of that civilization, of which France will be
happy to share with you the immortal'glory.
Shall you refuse the peace which, is offered you on such favourable terms?

J. F. FOWLEK, Printer, 3 Crow Street, Dame Street, Dublin.