“I don’t know why you call Cork a Nationalist city,” he replied, “for Parnell and Maurice Healy were returned for it by a clear minority of the voters.  If all the voters had gone to the polls, they would both have been beaten.”

A curious statement certainly, and worth looking into.  Mr. M’Carthy gave me also much information as to the working of the municipal system here, and a copy of the rules which govern the debates of the Town Council.  One of these might be adopted with advantage in other assemblies, to wit, “that no member be permitted to occupy the time of the Council for more than ten minutes.”

There is an important difference between the parliamentary and the municipal constituencies of Cork.  The former constituency comprises all residents within the borough boundaries occupying premises of the rateable value of L10 a year.  The municipal constituency consists of no more than 1800 voters, divided among the seven wards which make up the city under the “3d and 4th Victoria,” and which contain about 13,000 of the 15,116 Parliamentary voters of the borough.  The same thing is true in the main of nine out of the eleven municipal boroughs of Ireland including Dublin.  The 3d and 4th Victoria was amended for Dublin in 1849, so as to give that city the municipal franchise then existing in England, but no move in that direction was made for Cork, Waterford, Limerick, or any other municipal borough.  The Nationalists have taken no interest in the question.  Perhaps they have good reason for this, as in Belfast, where the municipal franchise has been widely extended since the present Government came into power, the democratic electorate has put the whole municipal government into the hands of the Unionists.  The day being cool, though fine, Mr. M’Carthy got an “inside car,” and we went off for a drive about the city.  The environs of Cork are very attractive.  We visited the new cemetery grounds which are very neatly and tastefully laid out.  There was a conflict over them, the owners of family vaults staunchly standing out against the “levelling” tendency of a harmonious city of the dead.  But all is well that ends well, and now two handsome stone chapels, one Catholic and one Protestant, keep watch and ward over the silent sleepers, standing face to face near the grand entrance, and exactly alike in their architecture.  A very pretty drive took us to the water-works, which are extensive, well planned, and exceedingly well kept.  They are awaiting now the arrival from America of some great turbine wheels, but the engines are of English make.  In the city we visited the new Protestant cathedral of St. Finbar, a very fine church, which advantageously replaces a “spacious structure of the Doric order,” built here in the reign of George II., with the proceeds of a parliamentary tax on coals.  Despite his name, I imagine that admirable prelate, Dr. England, the first Catholic bishop of my native city in America, must have been a Corkonian, for he it was, I believe, who put the cathedral of Charleston under the invocation of St. Finbar, the first bishop of Cork.  The church stands charmingly amid fine trees on a southern branch of the river Lea.  We visited also two fine Catholic churches, one of St. Vincent de Paul, and the other the Church of St. Peter and St. Paul, a grandly proportioned and imposing edifice.