Page:My Life in Two Hemispheres, volume 2.djvu/112

 were crammed with inmates stricken with the diseases that spring from want and neglect, the landlords were still levelling homesteads and rooting out the native race, and nothing was to be done for remedy or alleviation. Nothing was to be done, and three-fourths of the representatives elected by the stricken people assented in silence, and three-fourths of the bishops, born and bred among them, sanctioned the perfidy.

I have not disinterred from Hansard a line of the speeches of the Leaguers in Parliament, but there is a little story worth recording as an illustration of the sort of evidence on which English opinion as respects Ireland is sometimes founded. Sir Francis Head a retired Governor of Upper Canada, published a book entitled "A Fortnight in Ireland," for which the Irish Constabulary furnished materials in the shape of violent speeches delivered at tenant-right meetings, and reported by them to headquarters. Most of these speeches were made by the Reverend This or That; and they were naturally cited in a Maynooth debate to illustrate the discipline of that institution. Was a system to be tolerated which produced firebrands like these reverend orators? When my time came to speak I took up the reprehended speeches and read three or four of the strongest of them amid ironical cheers. The sentiments seemed to me, I said, not unjust or unreasonable under the circumstances which existed in Ireland, but in any case I submitted that it would be rash to hold Maynooth responsible. (Oh! oh! and ironical cheers.) I would only trouble them with a single fact in support of this conclusion; every speaker, without exception, whom I had quoted was a clergyman, but he was not a priest but a Presbyterian minister! There was an anonymous speech indeed in the collection particularly objectionable to Irish landlords, and it might seem impossible to relieve Maynooth from the imputation of having trained this unnamed speaker at any rate. But I undertook to prove a negative even in that case. (Oh! oh!) Yes, I really could not allow Maynooth to run away with the credit or reproach of this performance, for I recognised in it a policeman's version of a speech which I had myself delivered in the Tholsel of New Ross.