As I happened to have the book of M. de Mandat Grancey in my despatch-box, I compared it with the attack made upon it.  The results were edifying.  In the first place, M. de Mandat Grancey does not indicate the Canadian priest as his authority.  He says that he heard the story, apparently at a dinner-table in France, from a cure Irlandais, who was endeavouring to impress upon his hearers “the sympathy of the clergy with the Land League.”  The “Canadian priest” now comes forward and makes it a count in his indictment against M. de Mandat Grancey that he is described as an “Irish curate,” when he is in fact neither an Irishman nor a curate.  What was more natural than that an ecclesiastic, claiming to live in Ireland, and telling stories in France about the sympathy of the Irish clergy with the Land League, should be taken by one of his auditors to be an Irish cure, particularly as the French cure is, I believe, the equivalent of the Irish “parish priest”?

In the next place, the “Canadian priest” declares that the story “is as old as the Round Towers of Ireland,” and that M. de Mandat Grancey represents him as making himself the hero of the tale.  As a matter of fact, M. de Mandat Grancey does nothing of the kind.  On the contrary, he expressly says that the cure Irlandais, who told the story, gave it to his hearers as having occurred not to himself at all, but “to one of his colleagues.”  Furthermore he is at the pains to add (Chez Paddy, p. 43) that the story, which was not to the taste of some of the French ecclesiastics who heard it, was related “as a simple pleasantry.”  “But,” he adds, and this I suspect is the sting which has so exasperated the “Canadian priest,” “he gave us to understand at the same time that this pleasantry struck the keynote of the state of mind of many Irish priests, and, he said, that he was himself the President of the League in his district.”

In connection with Colonel Turner’s statements as to the conduct of Father White at Milltown Malbay, and with the accounts given me of the conduct of Father Sheehan at Lixnaw, this side-light upon the relations of a certain class of the Irish clergy with the most violent henchmen of the League, is certainly noteworthy.  I happen to have had some correspondence with friends of mine in Paris, who are friends also of M. de Mandat Grarncey, about his visit to Ireland before he made it, and I am quite certain that he went there, to put the case mildly, with no prejudices in favour of the English Government or against the Nationalists.  Perhaps the extreme bitterness shown in the pamphlet of the “Canadian priest” may have been born of his disgust at finding that the sympathy of French Catholics with Catholic Ireland draws the line at priests who regard the assassination of “bailiffs and tax-collectors” as a pardonable, if not positively amusing, excess of patriotic zeal.