All this, of course, is perfectly consistent with the views which in 1884 the leader of the Fourth Party had expressed when, speaking on the Franchise Bill, he declared his opinion that “the agricultural peasant is much more under the proper and legitimate influence of the Roman Catholic priesthood than the lower classes in the towns."[17] But how is one to reconcile either of these declarations with his action in 1886, when, the tremendous force of the Catholic Church not having come over to the Tory side, he “decided to play the Orange card, which, please God, will prove a trump,” and went, with his hands red from making overtures to what they considered the scarlet woman, to rally the Orangemen with the haunting jingle that Home Rule would be Rome Rule.

This was before the general election of 1886.  Seven years later, when another election was approaching, he returned to the charge, this time in a letter to Lord Justice FitzGibbon:—­“What is the great feature,” he wrote, “of the political situation in Ireland now?  The resurrection in great force of priestly domination in political matters.  Now I would cool the ardour of these potentates for Mr. G. by at once offering them the largest concessions on education—­primary, intermediate, and university—­which justice and generosity could admit of.  I would not give them everything before the general election, but I would give a good lot, and keep a good lot for the new Parliament.  I do not think they could resist the bribe, and the soothing effect of such a policy on the Irish vote and attitude would be marked.  Of course the concessions would have to be very large—­almost as large as what the bishops have ever asked for, but preserving intact Trinity College.  It would assume the material shape of a money subsidy."[18]

I have set down without omissions and with nothing extenuate the data on which is based the indictment that the clergy have been, and are, anti-national, and I ask the reader to say whether the charge is unsupported or not.  That overtures have again and again been made sub rosa to the clergy to wean them from the popular side is proved up to the hilt, but that in any single instance they have closed with the offers or been forced by the rigours of ecclesiastical discipline into compliance, appears to me not proven, as is also the imputation that the people have in any degree departed from the lines of O’Connell’s dictum—­that we take our theology from Rome, but our politics we prefer of home manufacture.  If the action of Cardinal Cullen with regard to the Tenant League in 1855 be adduced as an argument in favour of the proposition, it must be remembered that though as Primate his voice was preponderant and his policy was affected, in Dr. MacHale, the Archbishop of Tuam, an exponent of opposite views was to be found, and that it is on the lines laid down by MacHale, and not those advocated by Cullen, that the policy of the Catholic Church in Ireland has as a rule been based.