Page:My Life in Two Hemispheres, volume 2.djvu/216

. When I left the Government, the controversy which sprang up in the Press was stimulated by communicated paragraphs suggesting that the difference was not a public, but a personal one, and that the Government would probably be strengthened by my resignation, as it would put an end to the no-popery cry which was raised only because there were two Catholics in the Government. As the meeting of Parliament was several months distant, and the General Election would cause the question to be debated on many platforms, I found it necessary to publish a letter on the subject, and I will confine myself now strictly to the explanation I gave when all the parties concerned were alive to contradict me if it were possible.

"It was my intention," I wrote, "to have preserved the strictest silence on the subject of my retirement from office till the time came for the usual explanation in Parliament, but as each of the morning papers has been furnished with a version of the transaction, identical in spirit, and plainly coming from the same source, and as this version was not true, I was reluctantly compelled to depart so far from my original intention as to briefly contradict it. You stated, on what no doubt seemed to you adequate authority, that the circumstances which led to my resignation were 'of a personal and not of a political character;' &hellip; but the alienation of feeling which led to my resignation was of an origin not personal but purely political.

"When I returned to the department of Land and Works in September last, immediately after my illness, I found the public mind filled with the idea that the Government intended to throw an immense mass of agricultural land into the market at once; and I discovered, with painful surprise, that such was actually the policy of some of my colleagues. I represented to the Cabinet in the strongest manner the objections to this course, and finally I succeeded, by a bare majority, in negativing it. This decision and the policy upon which it was founded, which I have since felt bound to systematically carry out, has been a source of constant heartburning from that time forth. It led, I regret to say, to the loss of a friendship I very much valued—that of Mr. O'Shanassy. &hellip;