In the New York Herald, for June 14th, is contained
an in- teresting account of an interview with Sir Charles Govan Duffy
at Paris, in which Sir Charles, who generally evades inter- viewers, talked freely on the subject of Ireland, as a mode of showing his gratitude to the paper which had generously given
$20,000 (E4,000) to the Irish Distress Relief Fund. Sir Charles Duffy, in explaining his reasons for not wishing to re-enter Parliament at present after his long Australian career, said that he desired first to finish his book on the Irish leaders of his youth, and on the party, beaded by himself and Mr. Lucas, which was scattered principally by the policy of Rome and Archbishop Cullen in discouraging political organisation in Ireland in the years between 1850 and 1855; and he declared that the policy of that party, so far from having ended in a coup manqui, had really, in the ultimate result, supplied Mr. Gladstone with the general conception of his Irish policy of 1869-70, though the true historical credit had not been done to the Irish initiators of that policy, when at last a popular English statesman took it into his own hands. ir Charles Daffy was very far from enthusiastic as to Mr. Gladstone's policy, though he spoke with infinite respect of Mr. Gladstone himself. .He laughed at the idea of the Disestablishment of the Protestant Church in Ireland being regarded as anything like ideal justice, and reminded his inter- locutor that Parliament gave the Disestablished Church "all the buildings, all the glebes, and the bulk of the fund, by way of compensation, and that when the other party asked a single ruined church, dear to them from historic associations, the House of Lords threw out the Bill which granted the conces- sion." That may be so, but is Sir Charles Duffy quite just in his turn ? Does he allow for the vivid sympathy felt with the immediate sufferers from so rare and severe an act of tardy justice as the Irish disestablishment and disendowment P He must not look at it as if it were the act of Minos and Rhoda- manthns rigidly weighing nations in their scales. There were Irish priests even, who denounced Mr. Gladstone for his impiety in disestablishing "his own Church."
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