of indecency to create new varieties of insult. We must hold him responsible for them. Yet, in the whole range of Protestant officials, civil and military, one could not be found outside of this society to fill a position of such exceeding trust and honour as that now occupied by Captain Fishbourne. Could we conceive a Catholic society at all resembling the society of which your secretary is a member; could we represent it to ourselves teaching the Protestant people of England to believe that her gracious Majesty as head of the Established Church, is the realization of types of abomination in the prophet Daniel and the Apocalypse; did it teach that Protestants esteem it no sin to lie, to steal, to worship idols; did it, in handbills and placards, apply to your religion and to its cherished and peculiar doctrines the foulest epithets the language can supply: did it speak from the platform or the pulpit in a similar strain; did the emissaries of this Catholic society dog your heels, ambush in your path, thrust papers into your hand, follow the Archbishop of Canterbury into his house, nay pursue him to the cathedral and insult his episcopal chair, as Captain Fishbourne's society has repeatedly done in Catholic churches in Ireland; I ask you, my Lord, would a member of that society be considered a proper secretary for a Commission such as yours, would the Protestant people of England put faith in its administration by him, and would they suffer the scandal to endure for an hour? I have now done with the report. I have impeached it in its statements and its arguments. I have given a probable explanation of the cause of its defects and contradictions. If the Commissioners allow things to remain as they now are, if they refuse all endowments to Catholic institutions, if they refuse to give full and accurate returns of the children under their care, such as were required by the Duke of Norfolk, it must be admitted that they have not acted with the utmost impartiality, as they were required to do by her Majesty, and the doubts regarding their proceedings will be confirmed, and public suspicion increased. It concerns the honour of this great empire, and above all, it concerns the interest of the military service, that the fullest light should be thrown upon this controversy, and that proofs of the most perfect impartiality should be given. The Irish love the military service, and very much of its glory is due to them; but they love their religion more, as centuries of persecution testify. The Catholic soldier will not fail to inquire : "Is our's the service of a gracious Queen and of a grateful country? or is it a kind of Moloch to which we must sacrifice the souls of our children? Must the very bounty of my country," will he say, "become my torment and my loss? Shall it be, that almost before my remains are cold, the minister of a hostile religion will be allowed to buy up my children from their mother, and teach them that their father was a perjurer, a thief, and a liar by profession? Must the weakness, the poverty, the vice, or the ignorance of my widow be watched and turned to account? Will her eagerness, perhaps, to contract new obligations, and relieve herself from the charge of my orphans, be improved to the advantage of the soul-merchant? and should my children escape the dangers that beset their infancy, is the spirit of our military schools to be maintained so adverse to Catholic faith that their ultimate safety is hardly possible?" Trust me, my Lord, it will not do to meet all this with the case in the Queen's Bench, The Catholic soldier will plead the original compact between the country and himself-that compact, than which there is none more holy between man and man-that compact, in virtue of which the country for whom the father of a family gives up his life, becomes exactly such a mother to his children as he should have been a father. The law of this compact, my Lord, is the offspring neither of statute nor of custom. It was not enacted by the Queen, although it is embodied in her Commission; it was passed without the consent or authority of parliament. "Est hæc non scripta sed nata lex, ad quam non docti sed facti, non instituti sed imbuti sumus; quam non didicimus, accepimius, legimus ; verum etiam ex ipsâ naturâ arripuimus, hausimus, expressimus," My Lord, notwithstanding the hands and seals that authenticate the Report before me, I refuse to hold the Commissioners, and prin. cipally your Lordship, responsible for all that it contains. The aggregate of honour for which those signatures stand, and the great learning represented by one of them, give an air of paradox to their appearance at the foot of such a document. I do not presume to suggest an explanation, unless, perhaps, easy faith and a misplaced confidence may account for its adoption. But I hope to see her Majesty's Commissioners as forward as others in the work of reparation and amends. Catholics seek no triumph-their humble ambition is limited to safety; they ask nothing better than to be dealt with according to military honour and commercial honesty; but not the honour of army contractors, nor the honesty of the Royal British Bank. Undo the injurious ligatures that ignorant or malicious hands have knotted upon this or that member of the body politic, and suffer the charity of the nation to flow through all her arteries. It is no pro. fit to gorge one by the depletion of another. If an impartial distribution of the surplus funds be decided on, if the children of Catholic soldiers now detained in Protestant schools be placed under Catholic care, if all the information asked for by His Grace the Duke of Norfolk be granted, if it be made plain to the comprehension of the Catholic soldier, that he has rights in fact as well as upon paper, and that no man, lay or clerical, shall be suffered to encroach upon their sacred. ness, then will the bad effects of this Report be corrected; but unless that be done promptly, broadly, and intelligibly, it will have to be said, that never did there issue from any department of the state a paper more hurtful to the best interests of the country and of the military service, than the document upon which it has been my duty to address your Lordship." Comment on the above passage would be useless. We have now done. We have shewn the injustice done to the Catholic body, in placing their representatives in such a small minority. We have stated the result of having such a Secretary in the cases to which we have referred. We have only to add, that we regret the existence of any necessity for complaints, but we regret still more the disingenuous and untruthful manner in which those complains have been met. But that disingenuousness bas been its own punishment, as by means of those documents which I ssity compelled them to produce, we have been able to dete e absence of those they have suppressed. ART. XI.-A LETTER TO THE EDITOR ON THE DERBY LEGAL APPOINTMENTS IN IRELAND. MY DEAR FRIEND, Four Courts' Library, June 24th, 1858. You and I have often talked over that faculty of the poetic mind, which very frequently makes the poet appear the prophet. Of modern poets, Geothe, perhaps, develops most clearly this faculty. How the soul of the reader reels, as it were, before the flashes of that intellect, which, long years ago, in his quiet home at Weimar, could thus word-paint the Derby appointments in Ireland "Das Unbeschreibliche Could anything be more perfect? at Last the Indescribable is Realized, or, has Realized Itself. From the day on which Lord Eglinton quitted the jetty of Kingstown, at the close of his former viceroyalty, to that which again brought him to our shore, the people of Ireland had read little in the Conservative and Orange newspapers, but dispraise of those in office, and emphatic descriptions of all the wonderful things to be accomplished as soon as that conglomeration of genius, ability, learning, eloquence, and Orange Protestantism, a Tory administration, should have once again obtained its proper position-office, and ascendency. Then we should behold learning on the Bench; then we should be overwhelmed and astonished by eloquence at the Bar; then we should be dazzled by the splendour of a vice-regal court, rivalling, if not surpassing, that of St. James'sgorgeous dresses, family jewels, which it would be sacrilege to show at Carlisle's Drawing Rooms, lovely women, the ladies, pur sang, coming up from their country places, where they had vegetated during the usurpation of the Whigs! And thus we dreamed of a life of joy, and thought of the bright days in store for Ireland, and extatic stuff gownsmen who read Tennyson in place of Pitt Taylor, were heard to mutter, as they fondly gazed at the Castle "We drank the Lybian Sun to sleep, and lit Lamps which outburn'd Canopus. Oh! my life But there were graver matters than these latter. Papas had long looked for the time when once again they could eat the vice-regal dinner free from the company of a Whig, and secure from the contagion of Popery, to which they were exposed in dining with Lord Carlisle's guests. The Poor-houses wanted looking after; nuns were actually admitted to attend Catholic paupers; the elected guardians were becoming troublesome, and were nominating Catholic officers; the elective franchise, founded on poor law valuations, was going to destruction,-more ex-officios could alone make matters secure. This was an awful state of things; down with the Whigs! out with them! a nest of brainless destroyers, minions of the Pope, and satellites of Paul Cullen, out with them, Toryism for ever, down with Ultramontainism, civil and religious liberty all over the world, founded on sound Protestant principles ! Well, the wished for moment arrived. "Me and the Queen," said Mr. Smith, the lessee of the Drury-lane Theatre, to the electors of Bridport, "had a difference, and I would'nt give in to her;" so it was with Lord Palmerston, he and the House had a difference, he would not give in, and therefore he went out. Loud was the joy; The Evening Mail was in ecstacies, The Warder was in pious convulsions, in a state, like Judy M'Cann, of "Wind and devotion;" The Saunders went as near writing something original as possible; several quires of drafting paper were sold by the Librarian of the Courts, and in snug quiet corners of this library might be seen, writing with a more than Alexander Dumas power of speed, the herd of briefless, brainless waiters upon Providence and Faction, those, as Macaulay describes the species, "venal and licentious scribblers, with just sufficient ability to clothe the thoughts of a pander in the style of a bell-man," who toady Napier, and flatter Whiteside, in that burlesque of The London Standard, The Daily Express. And what did it all come to at last? Where was the administrative talent? Naas for the chief secretary! The Fat Boy" of the Carleton sent to regulate the affairs of Ireland!" What," writes the correspondent of The Liverpool Albion," is the use of a chief secretary? It is astonishing how the question can be asked with Naas to the fore. What can be the functions a capacity like his is adequate to the efficient discharge of? He looks like the winner of a first-class medal in Barnum's prize Baby show, a Titanic infant, rubbed, scrubbed, combed polished, and spread out on the hearth-rug to play with the cat and a lollypop, for the admiration of surrounding maternities and nursery maids. And he is in every respect worthy of his looks. Yet is he deemed a rising statesman. Happy state that shall have him when he is fully risen! When that blessed hour comes there will be no need to trouble ourselves about the millennium,"-and I add, unhappy the country which has him, and his herd of hungry, grasping followers quartered upon it. But who was to be Attorney General, who Solicitor General? Something resplendent was expected in their appointments. There was that grand galaxy of learning and eloquence, of which Ireland had heard so much, to be selected from; and after delays without number, after disappointments and false reports, distracting to all, the whole difficulty of selection was solvedOh! shade of Curran, of Plunket, of Bushe, of O'Connell, of Sheil!-in the ignorance, the factiousness, "the wrath and cabbage" bluster of Whiteside; in the sound sense and respectable Northern stolidity of Hayes! But there must be a Chancellor. Who shall be Chancellor? Who can tell? Is there not all the resplendent Tory bar open for selection? So it was open, all open, with its brilliant intellects, its towering reputations, its perfection of all qualities mental and physical, and yet the Court of Chancery was turned into an auxiliary ward of the Hospital for Incurables, by the appointment to the Chancellorship of the godly but afflicted, the pious but fanatic, the moderately learned, but incurably and notoriously deaf, Joseph Napier. I object to this appointment on public and on private grounds. On public grounds, because it places in the Court of Chancery a man who was never an equity lawyer of any standing. I object to it on private grounds because, my voice being naturally weak, I cannot make the Chancellor hear me, even with the assistance of that reputed acoustic chair; and I object further to the appointment as the principles of acoustics are not laid down as part of the Chancery rules or orders; perhaps, however, Mr. Blackham may print them from Lardner in his forthcoming Chancery Practice. Have you ever, my dear friend, fancied what glorious. scenes of fun we shall have in the Courts as soon as, his |