Page:Australia and the Empire.djvu/301

 Catholic countrymen whose voices may he overborne for a while, but who are inwardly with us heart and soul."

All the world knows what these Irish Protestant ministers think of Mr. Gladstone's Irish Home Rule policy. Forgetting old political divisions and social animosities, 864 out of 990 Irish Nonconformist ministers signed the Unionist address to Lord Salisbury and Lord Hartington; and of the small minority who declined to sign it, "only eight did so because they were in sympathy with Mr. Gladstone." Surely never were figures so eloquent.

If Mr. Balfour is spared to serve this United Kingdom a little longer, we shall yet hear the voice of those "tens of thousands" of loyal and law-abiding Irish Roman Catholics to whom the Bishop of Derry feelingly alludes. Meanwhile it is pleasant to find an English priest using such wholesome language as Father Powell employs towards the leaders of illegality and rapine in Ireland.

But my Australian readers will naturally ask. What of the attitude of the head of that Church in England, himself an Englishman? I have regretfully stated what I believe it to be in my text. Allowance must be made for that "usual law of reaction" by which "converts" to an alien faith generally become extremists. Apart from this. Cardinal Manning seems to me to possess the qualities and defects of a born party leader. He has probably