Note (return) — Chapter I

From the Chief-Justice’s I went with Lord Ernest Hamilton to a meeting of the Irish Unionists. Admission was by tickets, and the meeting evidently “meant business.” I suppose Presbyterian Ulster was largely represented: but Mr. Smith Barry of Fota Island, near Cork, one of the kindest and fairest, as well as one of the most determined and resolute, of the southern Irish landlords, was there, and the most interesting speech I heard was made by a Catholic lawyer of Dublin, Mr. Quill, Q.C., who grappled with the question of distress among the Irish tenants, and produced some startling evidence to show that this distress is by no means so great or so general as it is commonly assumed to be. 10 Able speeches were also made by Mr. T.W. Russell, M.P. for Tyrone, and by Colonel Saunderson, the champion of Ulster at Westminster. Both of these members, and especially Colonel Saunderson, “went for” their Nationalist colleagues with an unparliamentary plainness of speech which commanded the cordial sympathy of their audience. “Is it possible,” asked Colonel Saunderson, “that you should ever consent, on any terms, to be governed by such—, well, by such wretches as these?” to which the audience gave back an unanimous “Never,” neither thundered nor shouted, but growled, like Browning’s “growl at the gates of Ghent,”—a low deep growl like the final notice served by a bull-dog, which I had not heard since the meetings which, at the North, followed the first serious fighting of the Civil War. I was much struck, too, by the prevalence among the audience of what may be called the Old Middle State type of American face and head. A majority of these men might have come straight from those slopes of the Alleghany which, from Pennsylvania down to the Carolinas, were planted so largely by the only considerable Irish emigrations known to our history, before the great year of famine, 1847, the Irish emigrations which followed the wars against the woollen industries in the seventeenth century, and the linen industries in the eighteenth. A staunch, doggedly Protestant people, loving the New England Puritans and the Anglicans of Eastern Virginia little better than the Maryland Catholics, but contributing more than their full share of traditional antipathy to that extreme dislike and dread of the Roman Church which showed itself half-a-century ago in the burning of convents, and thirty years ago gave life and fire to the Know-Nothing movement. Even so late as at the time of Father Burke’s grand and most successful mission to America, I remember how much astonished and impressed he was by the vigour and the virulence of these feelings. One of the bishops, he told me, in a great diocese tried (though of course in vain) to dissuade him on this account from wearing his Dominican dress. These anti-Catholic passions are much stronger in America to-day than it always suits our politicians to remember, though to forget it may some day be found very dangerous. Even now two of the ablest prelates of the most liberal of the Protestant American bodies, Bishop Cleveland Coxe of Western New York, and Bishop Beckwith of Georgia, the latter of whom I met the other day in Rome on his return from Palestine, are promoting what looks very much like a crusade against the plan for establishing a Catholic University at Washington. Bishop Cleveland Coxe’s denunciations of what he calls “the alien Church,” point straight to a revival of the “Native American” movement; and I fear that President Cleveland’s gift of a copy of the Constitution to Leo XIII. will hardly make American Catholics forget either the hereditary anti-Catholic feeling which led him, when Governor of New York, to imperil the success of the Democratic party by his dogged resistance to the Catholic demand for the endowment of Catholic schools and protectories, or the scandalous persecution (it can be called by no other name) of Catholics in Alaska, which was carried on in the name and under the patronage of his sister, Miss Cleveland, by a local missionary of the Presbyterian Church, to the point of the removal by the President of a Federal judge, who dared to award a Catholic native woman from Vancouver the custody of her own child.