18 SEPTEMBER 1869, Page 3

The Visiting Justices of Tothill Fields' Prison are evidently not

men of distinguished sense, to say nothing of their anti-Catholic bias. The Roman Catholic Chaplain, the Rev. Alfred White, whom they have never paid for his services, though Parliament has, in fact, expressed its opinion that Catholic chaplains should be paid, called to their attention that Roman Catholic Irishwomen often falsely enter themselves, when they go into prison, as Protestants, to obtain the advantage now accorded only to Protestants of being employed in the laundry, which is much preferred to the garden, or to picking oakum. We can hardly doubt that if a similar preference had been given to Catholics, and Protestant prisoners had been found misrepresenting their faith for a similar reason, the visiting justices would have taken up the matter. As it was, they only snubbed Mr. White, and told him it was not their intention to interfere with the matron's arrangements. Thereupon Mr. White, or some one else—but most likely Mr. White—sent the correspondence, which is a strictly public one, to the Pall Mall, and that journal was disrespectful to the visiting jus- tices. On this the visiting justices fly into a pet like a boy whose school-fellows havetold tales of him out of school, and dismiss him— terrible penalty to an unpaid chaplain working hard and gra- tuitously !—from his post, with this very strange mitigation of the sentence,—that " in order that the Roman Catholic prisoners may not be suddenly deprived of spiritual ministrations, his visits may be continued till the 18th of the present month." What do these touchy old gentlemen mean by " suddenly" ? Do they think, perhaps, that Roman Catholic absolution is a sort of strong dram, without which, if discontinued too suddenly, the constitu- tion may give way, but which if gradually diminished, may be safely and even profitably abandoned ?