they have every reason to be satisfied with Ireland and the Irish people, and, I will add, the British Government in Ireland, just as they are. From the point of view of the Church there can hardly be any change that is not a change for the worse; in the eyes of a zealous hierarchy the Ireland of to-day must be very nearly the ideal country. The people dwindle, but the Church thrives; emigration continues, but those who are left behind seem to yield themselves more and more to priestly guidance and authority. Convents and monasteries multiply, Irish missionaries scatter over the world, the wealth and power and property of the Church grow from year to year, and British statesmanship has thoroughly assimilated the maxim that the road to peace lies in governing Ireland with and through the priesthood. Protestant England is, indeed, one of the main bulwarks of the secular power of Irish Catholicism. Every official in the country, from the Lord-Lieutenant to an inspector on the staff of the Board of Works, quickly learns that to get anything done he must have the Church on his side. Every Secretary of State soon becomes aware that the bishops and their subordinates are the most useful friends or the most powerful never more powerful than when they appear to be altogether indifferent and in the background-of the policies he projects. There is hardly a Board, or Council, or Committee anywhere in Ireland, outside of a corner of Ulster, that is not directly or indirectly swayed by clerical influence. Whatever party is in power in Great Britain the Church acts largely as its intermediary in the government of Ireland, distributes no small proportion of the official patronage, and may always be sure that its wishes and representations will be listened to with the most cordial deference. Its hold over education is such as it hardly pos

enemies-and

sesses in any other land; and in return it has consistently, but not always effectively, interposed a moderating and pacifying influence between the people and their rulers. Its spirit, in Ireland as elsewhere, is and must be essentially conservative; and to-day, strictly in proportion to its growth in wealth and property, it is more conservative than ever. It does not stand, and never has stood, for real Nationalism or real democracy. dividual priests have often and genuinely stood for the former, and in a few rare cases may even have been sufficiently democratic as to contemplate popular control over education. But the hierarchy, while always inflexible on the school question, has never allowed its sympathies with Nationalism to override or interfere with its primal duty of safeguarding Catholic interests.

In

It would be perhaps too blunt a way of putting it to say that the Church in Ireland is for Home Rule only so long as it is sure of not getting it. But it is at least certain that its attitude towards any Home Rule Bill that stood the slightest chance of becoming law would be highly equivocal. The influence of many scores and hundreds of the younger priests, whose Nationalism is as undoubted as their popularity; the apprehensions aroused by the multiplying bonds between the Irish Nationalist party and the English Labor party, and by the certainty that British legislation will be directed with a constantly increasing decisiveness against property and against clericalism; the extreme probability that an Irish Parliament would be a Tory Parliament and an instinctive upholder of vested interests, and that Ireland under Home Rule would be less exposed to the subversive and rationalizing spirit of British politics and British literature these are factors that would urge the Church to accept and advocate au

tonomy. But the factors pulling the other way are stronger. A people possessed of self-government, unless all history is a lie, is a difficult team for a Church to drive, and the priesthood under Home Rule could not hope to retain the power it wields at present. Already there are incipient signs of anti-clericalism. The whole Irish-Ireland movement is impregnated with a spirit, and is forming a type of character, that are instinctively, though not so far avowedly, hostile to sacerdotal rulership in the secular affairs of life. Agricultural co-operation and technical instruction are likewise developing backbone and self-reliance. The County Councils accept the co-operation of the priests, but no longer follow their lead as automatically as they did. The mass of the people continue to pay their dues, but they are beginning to grumble and inquire. An educated laity is revealing a suspicious interest in educational problems, and in spite of the new University, with its wealth of professors and paucity of lectures and students, Trinity has to-day more Catholic undergraduates on its books than ever. Peasant proprietorship, again, means, not only a new social order, but the inevitable, if tardy, emergence of a new set of ideas, none of which are likely to be favorable to priestly authority. If Ireland had Home Rule no power on earth could prevent these forces-at present faint and dispersed-from combining into a formidable, and in the end a successful, onslaught, first, upon the clerical hold over the schools, and secondly, but long afterwards, upon the congregations. With a Parliament in session on College Green the Church might feel that it possessed a greater security for its property than any that is likely to be forthcoming when Labor holds the balance of British politics and both Liberals and Conservatives are bidding for its support. But it would feel at the

same time that the flood-gates had been opened to democratic impulses threatening its secular privileges, and that from being the ally of the British Government its position had shifted to that of an object of contention and attack in the political life of Ireland. It is not merely a desire to gratify the Vatican, which is indifferent to Ireland but enormously interested in England, by not depriving English Catholics of the Parliamentary support of the Nationalist party, that ranges the Church against Home Rule. It is, above all, that in its own mind its temporal and spiritual powers are inseparably linked and that Home Rule must first loosen and then destroy its absolute and deeply cherished control of education. One may, therefore, with some confidence anticipate that if the coming Home Rule Bill proves unsatisfactory to the more ardent Nationalists, if it withholds from the Irish Parliament, for instance, the control of the customs, if its financial provisions are held to be inadequate, if it can be represented, like the Councils Bill of five years ago, as "a sham and an insult to the Irish people," the Church will do nothing to facilitate its passage into law, will perhaps even assume the mantle of outraged patriotism, will more probably look on with tacit encouragement while the Sinn Feiners and the O'Brienites engineer its rejection by the inevitable Convention. But, as I said in the November issue of this Review, the political power of the Irish hierarchy, while great, is not illimitable; and if Mr. Birrell's Bill were to prove a full and genuine grant of self-government, striking the imagination and capturing the enthusiasm of the masses, the Church could not and would not oppose it, knowing that to do so would merely advertise once more the fact that in the face of a national movement, and when the passions of the people are really aroused,

its power to influence or restrain disappears and that nothing is left for it but submission and patience.

The

On the whole, therefore, it would seem as though the Church had as good reason to be satisfied with itself, and its situation, and Ireland and the Irish people, and the British Government, as any Church these days can hope to have, and that it would be quite content to go on with things as they are. An onlooker, however, can only share this satisfaction after certain deductions. He cannot, for instance, for one moment blind himself to its failure as an instrument of learning. Except in the case of the Christian Brothers, the Catholic Church in Ireland is a blight upon-one might almost say the enemy of a modern and efficient system of education. There are other aspects, too, of its policy and organization that he is bound to canvass. Church is the second Irish landlord, and the yearly tribute it receives can be little, if at all, less than the money annually paid out by the people in rent and purchase-instalments. What becomes of it all no one knows. The laity are inflexibly excluded from the smallest share of Church administration, and no priest in Ireland renders any account of the sums that pass into his hands. One reads in the papers of an endless flow of bequests into the ecclesiastical exchequer, of the expensiveness of marriage and burial fees, and of the generous proceeds of the Easter and Christmas offerings, and of the half-yearly "stations" at which the priest collects his dues in person. Priests occasionally leave considerable fortunes behind them, and there is a general belief that they live very well. But there is a marked absence of the social and philanthropic and charitable enterprises that engage so much of the time and energy and money of other churches in other lands; and the most palpable fruit of the sums sub

scribed is to be seen in the towering, ungainly churches that spring up in the midst of hovels. So long as the people retain the power of the purse they have a formidable weapon of cumpulsion in their hands, and it is, indeed, often puzzling to decide whether the people influence the priests, or the priests the people, the most. But in any event, it is an unhealthy system, inasmuch as it materializes too many of the priesthood, robs the laity of all real responsibility, and constitutes a heavy drain on the economic vitality of the people. The universal preference in Ireland for dealing only with banks that have Protestant managers, is due to the fear that otherwise the priest might learn the size of each customer's account and increase his demands accordingly; and the Irish trick of looking and living below one's means, while it was fostered by landlordism and misgovernment, is undoubtedly maintained by a dread of priestly exactions. And in other and more vital matters the inquirer into the realities of Irish life finds himself abruptly confronted by the evidences of clerical power. He sees the Hierarchy warring on and suppressing journals that refuse to subordinate to its interests, whatever aspirations they may cherish for a united and regenerated Ireland, and he asks how freedom of thought can exist in such conditions. He hears from manufacturers of the hindrances placed in their way by the Church, with her restrictions and demands, and he is tempted to believe that Ireland is one of the last battlegrounds of the age-long conflict between Catholicism and industrialism. He regards the inordinate drink bill of the Irish people and wonders whither the spirit of Father Mathew has fled. He cross-examines the emigrants Queenstown, and begins to suspect that the policy of dragooning the people in their homes and diversions, if it has

at

helped to make the Irish the most continent of nations in the single matter of sex, has also done much to blast the innocent pleasures and gaiety of the countryside, and to invest the prospect of escape into life with a new attractiveness; and the census figures of the United States and of England are there to confirm his forebodings that, once free from the special atmosphere of Ireland and released from the confinement of a pentitential code, the faith of but too many of the Irish emigrants will prove a fragile barrier against the seductions of freedom and the onsweep of an unaccustomed commercialism. The great and continuous defection from Catholicism of the Irish in America is a phenomenon at least as much explicable by the environment they have left as by that they have entered. He forms, finally, such estimate as he can of the mind and character of the Catholic masses, and finds himself asking whether a people barely emerging from the anthropomorphic phases of belief, penetrated with the listlessness of fatalism, and conspicuously deficient in virility, self-confidence, perseverance, and straightforwardness, is a people that does much credit to the teachings of its Church.

There are some to whom these defects of the Irish character and these features of the Catholic polity and discipline seem arguments against Home Rule, who forecast a régime of religious intolerance and persecution, and flourish Papal decrees in the affrighted faces of the British electorate. But over nineteen-twentieths of Ireland the Roman Catholics already hold supreme political power, and yet nothing beyond the normal amount of discrimination that is practised by every sect in favor of its own votaries in every English village exists, and the Protestant minority, in the south and west, virtually disfranchised as they are, would be the last to pretend that they are in The Fortnightly Review.

any way "persecuted"; while the idea of an Irish Parliament wanting to bully, or being able to bully, the dour Presbyterians of Ulster is of all political nightmares the most fantastic. The lines of division in any assembly that is ever likely to meet on College Green would be primarily urban and rural, and, in the fullness of time, clerical and anti-clerical, with the farmers arrayed against the traders over questions of taxation in the first instance, and the Catholic, Episcopalian and Presbyterian clericals allied against popular control of education in the second. To suppose that Irish politics will split up into a Catholic and a Protestant camp is precisely as absurd as to suppose that women, when they get the vote, will use it as a sex; while the preposterous bogeys of “Catholic domination," "absolute spiritual and absolute temporal jurisdiction," "the crushing of the Protestant minority beneath the heels of Catholic bigots," and so on, are not merely discounted but disposed of by the fact that the Irish Hierarchy does not want Home Rule, will not lift a finger to get it, and will be heartily relieved if it escapes being compelled to accept it. Every trait in the Irish character which is weak and needs bracing, every feature of clerical organization and policy which may justly be held to be anti-social or anti-economic or to shackle the national intelligence, so far from weakening the case for Home Rule, enormously strengthens it; and Unionist writers and speakers who affect to deplore "the tyranny of the Church" over the minds and conduct of the Irish masses may well be invited to declare how they propose to get rid of it if not by confronting clericalism in Ireland with the only power that has ever succeeded in subduing it-the power of an educated, self-governing, responsible democracy.

Sydney Brooks.

The tender mercies of the thoughtless, as of the wicked, are often cruel, and charity when it ceases to be a blessing is apt to become a curse; Mansion House funds we used in old days to count among the possible winter horrors of East London. The boldlyadvertised details of destitution, the publication of the sums collected, the hurried distribution by irresponsible and ignorant agents and the absence of any policy, stirred up wild expectation and left behind a trail of bitterness and degradation. The people were encouraged in deception, and were led on in the way which ends in wretched

ness.

In 1903 a Committee was formed which used a Mansion House fund to initiate a policy of providing honorable and sufficiently-paid work which would, at the same time, test the solid intention of unemployed and ablebodied applicants. The report of that Committee has been generally accepted, and has indeed become the basis of subsequent action and recommendations. It seemed to us East Londoners as if the bad time had been passed, and that henceforth charitable funds would flow in channels to increase fruitfulness and not in floods to make devastation.

The hope has been disappointed. Funds inaugurated by newspapers, by agencies, or by private persons have appeared in overwhelming force, and have followed in the old bad ways. The heart of the public has been torn by harrowing descriptions of poverty and suffering, which the poor also read and feel ashamed. The means of relief are often miserably inadequate. A casual dinner eaten in the company of the most degraded cannot help the "toiling widows and decent workingmen," "waiting in their desolate homes

to know whether there is to be an end to their pains and privations." Two or three hours spent in fields hardly clear of London smoke, after a noisy and crowded ride, is not likely to give children the refreshment and the quiet which they need for a recreative holiday.

Much of the charity of to-day, it has to be confessed, is mischievous, if not even cruel, and to its charge must be laid some of the poverty, the degradation, and the bitterness which characterize London, where, it is said, eight million sterling are every year given away. Ruskin, forty years ago, when he was asked by an Oxford man proposing to live in Whitechapel what he thought East London most wanted, answered, "The destruction of West London." Mr. Bernard Shaw has lately, in his own startling way, stated a case against charity, and we all know that the legend on the banner of the unemployed, "Curse your charity," represents widely-spread opinion.

But-practically-what is the safe outlet for the charitable instinct? The discussion of the abolition of charity is not practical. People are bound to give their money to their neighbors. Human nature is solid-individuals are parts of a whole-and the knowledge of a neighbor's distress stirs the desire to give something, as surely as the savor of food stirs appetite. But as in the one case the satisfaction of the appetite is not enough unless the food builds up the body and strength, so in the other case the charity which relieves the feelings of the giver is not enough unless it meets the neighbor's needs. Those needs are to-day very evident, and very complex. Our rich and ease-loving society knows well that a family supported on twenty shillings a week cannot get sufficient food,