reason for this appropriation of another man’s property, this setting aside of a will, this abolition of a trust, that, in his opinion, the schools ought to be under the patronage of the rector, and in connection with the Church Education Society.  He had a perfect right to think and say this, and it might be his conscientious conviction that the property would be thus better employed; but he ought to know that the end does not sanctify the means; that he had no right to substitute his own will for that of Captain Bolton, and that he had no right to take advantage of the absence of an act of parliament to possess himself of the rightful property of other people.  Unfortunately, too, he was a judge in his own case, and he did not find it easy to separate the rector of the parish from the agent of the estate.  It is a significant fact that when his son, Mr. Stannus, handed his power of attorney to Mr. Otway, the assistant-barrister, that gentleman refused to look at it, saying, ‘I have seen it one hundred times;’ and the Rev. Mr. Clarke, while waiting in the court for the case to come on, observed that all the ejectment processes were at the suit of the Marquis of Hertfort.  The school-house was built by Mr. Bolton, at his own expense twenty-eight years ago, and he maintained it till his death.  The Rev. W.J.  Clarke, the acting trustee, bravely defended his trust and fought the battle of tenant-right in the courts till driven out by the sheriff.  He was then called on to perform the same duty with regard to the school-house.  He has done it faithfully and well, and deserves the sympathy of all the friends of freedom, justice, and fair dealing.  ‘I shall never accept a trust,’ he says, in a letter to the Northern Whig—­’I shall never accept a trust, and permit any man, whether nobleman, agent, or bailiff, to alienate that trust, without appealing to the laws of my country; and if the one-sidedness of such laws shall enable Dean and Mr. Stannus to confiscate this property, and turn it from the purpose to which benevolence designed it, then, having defended it to the last, I shall retire from the field satisfied that I have done my duty to the memory of the dead and the educational interests of the living.’  Nor can we be surprised at the strong language that he uses when he says:  ’The history of the case rivals, for blackness of persecution, anything that has happened in the north of Ireland for many years.  But such a course of conduct only recoils on the heads of those who are guilty of it, and it shall be so in this case.  The Marquis of Hertfort will not live always, and the power of public opinion may be able to reach his successor, and be felt even in Lisburn.’