There are a vast number of complaints in Ireland of
clerical intimidation, especially in relation to the declarations of illiteracy falsely made by voters who perfectly well understood how to mark their ballot-papers, only in order that the priest might mark them for them, and so have it in his own knowledge that they voted for the Anti-Parnellite and not for the Par- nellite. Dr. Nulty, the Catholic Bishop of Meath, laid it down in a pastoral published on July 9th in the Irish Catholic and Nation, that " Parnellism strikes at the very root, and saps the very foundations of Catholic faith," and continues thus : "The dying Parnellite himself will hardly dare to face the justice of his Creator till he has been prepared and anointed by us for the last awful struggle, and for the terrible judgment that will immediately follow it." These utterances certainly appear to us to amount to spiritual intimidation against voting for a Parnellite candidate, and no doubt explain the eagerness of many of the voters to give the priest the means of knowing that they did not so vote. It is a great pity that an election petition cannot be brought to settle the legal point. If it vitiated any one of the elections in which such terrorism had been used, we should have some chance both of getting rid of such pastorals as Dr. Nulty's for the future, and of getting rid of these violations of the secrecy of the ballot in the very cases in which secret voting is least cowardly and most likely to be an act of self-defence. We have no more sympathy for the Parnellites than for the Anti-Parnellites,—indeed, if anything, rather less,—but no fair-minded Catholic would, we believe, maintain that voting for a Parnellite candidate "strikes at the very root, and saps the very foundations of Catholic faith."
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