LETTERS TO THE EDITOR.
THE BISHOP OF DURHAM ON HOME RULE.
[To THE EDITOR Or THE " SPEOTATOEC."] Sin,—The Bishop of Durham renews in your columns of last week his appeal (first made in the columns of the Times) to Nonconformists that they should oppose Home Rule as a danger to Irish Protestants. Since a bishop is not es-officio a Tory politician (even when appointed by the late Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman) we are entitled to ask that he shall not use in politics the high authority of his office without full consideration of the facts—especially when his intervention involves denouncing as untrustworthy the adherents of a church not his own. In his first letter we had simple assevera- tion: now he produces evidence—and what evidence ! If in a certain recent municipal election (the place not specified) a Nationalist majority had been returned, it was "an open secret" that a friend of the Bishop's—Protestant, Unionist, and
an exemplary Christian "—would get his dismissal from some post—not specified—under the unspecified council. Provi- dence secured a Unionist majority, so the exemplary Christian's "efficient work and happy home remain at present undis- turbed." Any layman who produced such corroborating evidence in Parliament (not to speak of a court of law) would be laughed at. Is episcopal authority to endorse all the tattle of a country club ? I would respectfully ask the Bishop of Durham to produce one case where a Nationalist council has dismissed a Unionist and Protestant official on account of his politics or creed. He has ten years' record to pick from.
Further, let me ask him this ! There is a text about the mote and the beam. Did he ever, before the Grand Jury control was abolished, remonstrate with the Protestant Unionists who everywhere held the power for their practice of reserving patronage to their own political and religious partisans ? Has he uttered one word of protest against the narrow spirit of monopoly which governs Unionist county councils and corporations in Ireland to-day? Has he ever shown the least generous recognition of those instances, neither few nor remarkable, in which., Catholic and Nationalist bodies have selected Unionists and Protestants in competition against Catholic Nationalists ? And if, having neglected all these things, he rushes in with an appeal to that inveterate prejudice against Roman Catholics which exists in any English Protestant, does he not singularly impair the spiritual dignity of his great office ?
I set out briefly two sets of figures.—(a) In Armagh, Protestants are 55 per cent, of the population. They hold 94 per cent. of the appointments under the County Council. In Tyrone they are less than half, but have a majority of one on the Council. They hold 90 per cent. of the jobs. (b) In Monaghan (bordering on the tolerant Tyrone) Protestants are only 34 per cent, of the population, yet they get 41 per cent. of the appointments. In Tipperary they are 6 per cent., they get 29 per cent.
I have taken these two Nationalist counties because, although in practically all the other cases Protestants hold a share of preferment disproportioned to their number (in Carlow, e.g., 40 per cent., where they number 11 per cent.), it is fre- quently answered (as by Desdichado ' in the same page of the Spectator) that these officials were "appointed under the old regime"—when Protestants and Unionists got everything as by right divine—an arrangement to which very naturally
Desdichado' saw no objection, and whom cessation leaves, as he signs himself, "disinherited "—bereft of his natural monopoly. But in Monaghan and Tipperary the Nationalist councils have appointed Protestant Unionists in each case to the headship of the County Asylum, almost the best thing in their gift, besides other minor instances of the same unsectarian justice.
I challenge the Bishop of Durham to procure from any of his friends a case in which any Protestant Unionist Council has acted with corresponding liberality. Until he can do so I submit that he will be more properly concerned with removing the beam from the Protestant Unionist eye than with emphasizing whatever motes may disfigure the Catholic
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