The Duke of Norfolk and a number of distinguished British
members of the Roman Catholic Church have put out a very powerful Memorandum showing their reasons for disbelieving that Home-rule in Ireland will really benefit the Catholic religion. What they contend is that the Home-rulers have injured the Church by resisting the authority of the Pope on subjects strictly involving questions of faith and morals, and, in short, that the Home-rulers have done much more for Jacobinism than for the Catholic religion. To this the Glad- stonians reply that the British Catholics have pulverised the argument derived from the Meath elections, and that, as a matter of fact, it is the Irish democracy which moves the Irish priests, and not the priests who move the democracy,— which is just what the Duke of Norfolk and his co-signatories say. But how does that in any way weaken the warning of the Meath elections? What the Meath elections show is that when the priests are not thwarting the Irish peasants' land- hunger and sympathy with agrarian outrage, they are all- powerful as political intimidators and organisers of political victory, and double the momentum of democratic self-will. Is not that precisely the fact which the Irish minority regard with such thorough dismay ?
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