“We have in Ireland an organization which is practically a government of the country.  There is in O’Connell Street, Dublin, a great office managed by the real Chief Secretary for Ireland, J. Devlin, the Member for Belfast.”

The organization of the League is admirable.  The country is covered with a network of branches, to which people in the district are obliged to contribute under penalty of being boycotted; these branches are united under provincial executives, whilst the Directory in Dublin controls the whole.  The union between the League and the Roman Catholic Church is as complete as the union between that Church and some societies started on a non-sectarian basis became during the rebellion of 1798; as we have seen, a bishop is one of the trustees, and other bishops are amongst the subscribers; the Sunday meetings of the various branches, at which boycotting and other measures of the kind are arranged, are usually presided over by the parish priests.  On the other hand, few laymen, whatever their religion may be, who have any stake in the country, can be got to join the League; in the words of A.J.  Kettle, M.P.:—­

“On its roll of membership there are no landlords or ex-landlords, few merchants, fewer Irish manufacturers.  There are few of the men who are managing the business of Ireland in city or town, connected with the League.  The bankers who regulate our finances, the railway or transit men who control our trade, internal and external, even the leading cattle men who handle most of our animal produce, are not to be found in its ranks.”

In further evidence of this it may be noted that in spite of all the efforts of the League at collecting money, the subscriptions to the Irish Parliamentary Fund do not amount to a halfpenny per head of the population; as J. Dillon has remarked:  “The National cause in Ireland could not live for six months if it were deprived of the support of the Irish across the Atlantic.”

Closely allied with the League is the Ancient Order of Hibernians, a secret political and exclusively Roman Catholic association, of which J. Devlin, M.P. (the Secretary of the League), is President.  It is also called the Board of Erin, to distinguish it from the American branch.  The American branch, I may remark, is also known as the Molly Maguires, as it was under that name that it conducted the series of murders and outrages at the Pennsylvanian mines thirty years ago.  Hence the Irish branch is sometimes nicknamed the “Molly Maguires.”  The Order is very religious, in the sense that part of its programme is to deprive heretics of every means of earning their livelihood; as a Nationalist who did not sympathize with the operations of the Order expressed it:  “If Protestants are to be robbed of their business, if they are to be deprived of public contracts, and shut out of every office and emolument,—­what is that but extermination?” The political principles of the Order can be gathered