As to the morale of the force, he cites one eloquent fact.  Out of a total of more than 13,000 men, the cases of drunkenness, proved or admitted, average no more than fourteen a week!  On many days absolutely no such cases occur.  This is really amazing when one thinks how many of the men are isolated on lonely posts all over the island, exposed to all sorts of weather, and cut off from the ordinary resources and amusements of social life.

Cork, Friday, Feb. 24th.—­This morning after breakfast I met in the South Mall a charming ecclesiastic, whose acquaintance I made in Rome while I was attending the great celebration there in 1867 of St. Peter’s Day.  Father Burke introduced me to him after the Pontifical Mass at San Paolo fuori le Mure; and we had a delightful symposium that afternoon.  I walked with him to his lodgings, talking over those “days long vanished,” and the friend whose genius made them, like the suppers of Plato, “a joy for ever.”  He is sorely troubled now by the attitude of a portion of the clergy in his part of Ireland, which is one almost of open hostility, he says, to the moral authority of the Church, and indicates the development of a class of priests moving in the direction of the “conventional priests,” by whom the Church was disgraced during the darkest days of the French Revolution of 1793.

Almost more mischievous than these men, he thinks, who must eventually go the way of their kind in times past, are the timid priests, for the most part parish priests, who go in fear of their violent curates, and of the politicians who tyrannise their flocks.  He showed me a letter written to him last week by one of these, whose parish is just now in a tempest over the Plan of Campaign.  Certainly a most remarkable letter.  In it the writer frankly says, “There is no justification for the Plan of Campaign on this property.

“I assented to putting it in force here,” he goes on, “because I did not at the time know the facts of the case, and took them on trust from persons who, I find, have practised upon my confidence.  What am I to do?  I am made to appear as a consenting party now, and, indeed, an assisting agent in action, which I certainly was led to believe right and necessary, but which upon the facts I now see involves much injustice to ——­ (naming the landlord), and I fear positive ruin to worthy men and families of my people.  I shall be grateful and glad of your counsel in these most distressing circumstances.”

“What can any one do to help such a man?” said my friend.  “The rebellious and unruly in the Church, be they priests or laymen, can only in the end damage themselves. Tu es Petrus; and revolt, like schism, is a devil which only carries away those of whom it gets possession out of the Church and into the sea.  But a weak sentinel on the wall or at the gate who drops his musket to wipe his eyes, that is a thing for tears!”

He asked me to come and see him if possible in his own county, and he has promised to send me letters to-day for priests who will he glad to tell me what they know only too well of the pressure put upon the better sort of the people by the organised idlers and mischief-makers in Clare and Kerry.