As we expected, after Dr. McCabe's declaration, the Catholic Church
in Ireland is pronouncing strongly against the Land League. At a conference of the Catholic Bishop and Clergy of Cork, for instance, the ecclesiastics, after pronouncing in favour of fixity, fair rents, free sale of tenancies, and the removal of all obstacles to the sale of land, unanimously passed the following strong resolution :—" While advocating the settlement of the Land Question as set forth in the foregoing resolutions, and declaring our readiness to co-operate with our flocks in their constitutional efforts to secure its accomplishment, we would fail in our duty as ministers of religion, if we did not proclaim in the most em- phatic manner our uncompromising hostility to all who pro- pound doctrines destructive of the rights of property, or who, by violence of language, seem to suggest to our excitable people that crime may help towards the advancement of the tenant-farmers." There is no uncertain sound in thore words, and no shrinking from opposition to the people, and the effect of them will be to liberate whole classes, who are now only carried away by the apparent unanimity. They will not kill the Land League, but they will help to compel its members to consider whether any movement can succeed, if it sets common justice—the justice which everybody's conscience acknowledges—entirely at defiance.
