AN INDISCREET ADVOCATE.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XII, Issue 9, 20 June 1884, Page 25

AN IN DISCREET ADVOCATE.

(From the Nation.') The objects of those who have advocated the establishment of open diplomatic relations between the English Court and the Holy See have been pretty accurately guessed by the Irish people ; but up to a recent date they had never been frankly avowed. It was always believed by most persons in this country that those objects were to obtain for the English Government more or less control over the Catholic Church in Ireland, and thus to add to the powers that Government already possesses for preventing or defeating Irish national movements and keeping the Irish nation enslaved ; but the plotters who aimed at those ends were wise enough to disguise their real intentions under vague phrases about furthering the interests of morality and religion. Mr. W. Maziere Brady, of whom our readers have heard ere now, and who is one of the leaders of the little anti- Irish Catholic faction in Rome, is an advocate of less discretion; for in an article in the current number of the Fortnightly Review that gentleman lets the cat out of the bag completely, and urges the appointment of an English ambassador at the Vatican on the ground, practically, that such an act would tend to stop the Irish national movement. The very title of Mr. Brady's precious essay is highly significant. He- pleads in favour of " an Anglo-Roman alliance " — that is, an alliance between England and Borne. On tne face of it such a proposal is one which instantly arouses Irish suspicion ; and that the suspicion is well founded we are not left long in doubt. 'The \ necessity," writes Mr. Brady, "of maintaining at Rome a regular and acknowledged diplomatic agent of Great Britian is now more evident than ever. The Pope's aid is essential, not indeed to repress Irish insurrections, but to oppose the spirit which leads to insurrection." There is no mistaking the meaning of thisproposition. "The spirit which leads to insurrection " is the Whig Catholic's description of the spirit of Irish nationality, which > will not cease to animate ' Irishmen to resist foreign oppression — the spirit of manhood which will not submit without protest to the innumerable insults, indigni-

ties, and outrages of which' a foreign bureaucracy is capable — the spirit of common human rature which cries out against the robbery of the poor and defenceless by the agency of laws enacted by an alien legislature. This spirit has hitherto defied all the efforts of England — efforts prolonged for centuries and taking various shapes — to extinguish or break it. It has defied fire and sword, the rack and the gibbet, imprisonment and exile. A member of a family of Whig place-hunters, who has been converted within the last few years to the Catholic faith would now try to extinguish this immortal sentiment by supplementing England's " resources of civilisation " with the spritual influence of the Church ! Mr. Brady is almost too frank. He makes no disguise of his anti-Irish animus. His ideas are all those of the landlord- Castle clique. The Land League agitation, according to him, has produced a general demoralisation in the country. It is apparently the efforts of Painellite emissaries in furtherance of their " separatist designs," and not the oppression and robbery wrought by Castle rule in Ireland, that have stirred up feelings of hatred to England among Irish Catholics at home and abroad. " The • farmers," he says, " unless disturbed by some fresh agitation, are bent on making the most of the Land Acts " — a sneaking insinuation, quite characteristic of an Irish Whig, that agitation in Ireland has no basis in actual grievances, but is the expression of the wantonness of the revolutionary idea. Mr. Parnell he styles " another Garibaldi," and he credits the present rulers of Ireland — the framers of the most infamous Coercion Act ever passed even by a British legislature, and the deliberate and all but avowed advocates of the extermination of the Irish people — with " benevolent views and intentions." Even the spiritual guides of the Irish people are not spared by this new Daniel come to judgment. "It has often been regretted," he writes, that many of the Irish Catholic priests have shown active sympathy with the extreme Nationalist or Separatist party " — evidently an awful crime in his loyal eyes ; and having in one sentence stated that " the Irish jieople have learned to seek temporal gain by disobedience to Divine and human laws, and to set up as the ultimate tribunal their own will in place of the law of the land," he proceeds in the next, apparently by way of illustration, to mention that the Archbishop of Cashel proclaimed as the standard of rent " the valuation to be fixed by the tenant alone." In all this, as coming from a person of Mr. Brady's class, there is nothing very astonishing ; what is astonishing is his notion that so free an exhibition of his contemptible hostility to everything really Irish would help to secure the success of his wise plan for muzzling Irish Nationalists, lay and clerical. For, although it is conceivable that it might induce the English to fall in with his views about an AngloRoman alliance, almost anyone but an idiot would know that an alliance between Rome andJEngland bronght about in consequence of such a disclosure as he has made of anti-Irish feelings and opinions would be certain to hurt not Ireland but Rome, and would, consequently, soon be broken up at the instance of the Holy See. It is Interesting, in conclusion, to note the admission of this Mr. Maziere Bardy that there never was a period whea the British Government omitted to seek the aid of the Pope through irregular channels, whenever that aid seemed to be desirable," " that even in more recent times no Papal appointments to important episcopal sees in Ireland were without attempts, more or less indirect, on the part of English agents or quasi-English agents to influence them" ; and that Mr. George Errington has discharged at Rome " some of the most important duties of a British envoy " — including, we suppose, the "duty " of trying to get anti-Irish Irishmen appointed to Irish sees. We knew all this, it is true, before ; but it is well to have it from one of the leading advocates themselves of the suggested " Anglo-Roman alliance." Indiscreet and inopportune acknowledgments of the kind are calculated to give the coup de grace to all the conspiracies of the godly anti- Irish faction hanging around the Vatican or drawling its affected accents in TCnglish Whig or Tory drawing-rooms. In the face of them even those few Irish Catholics who would be in favour of the establishment of an English embassy in Rome would shrink from the project, not les3 horror-struck at the danger to which it would expose the interests of religion, not only in this country, but wherever else Irishmen of the old faith are to be found, than amazed at the combined impudence and imbecility of such zealous advocates of it as Mr. William Maziere Brady.