Pending a fuller investigation, the police office books were impounded, and, as a result of the inquiry, several of the police were suspended.  Dowling was dismissed from his post as head constable of Liverpool, and lost a retiring pension which, if all had been well with him, he would have come in for a short time afterwards.

An amusing story is told of a Liverpool daily paper in those days.  It was struggling with adversity, and the manager, a worthy Scotsman, sat in his office on Monday morning with the weekly statement before him, showing increasing expense and decreasing revenue.

To him entered a Liverpool parson—­very determined and very menacing.  He had asked for the editor, but that gentleman had not yet come down, and the manager was the only person in authority visible, so he had to make shift with him.

“I am here,” the parson said, “as the mouthpiece of a large number of people who are not satisfied with the attitude of the ‘Liverpool ——­’ on the great question of the hour—­Whether Popery is to dominate our liberties or are we to crush Popery?”

“Yes,” said the manager, wearily, his mind still on the balance sheet.  “What do you complain of?”

“I wish to tell you, sir,” said the parson, with impressive emphasis, “that only this morning I have heard the belief expressed by merchants on ’Change that the ‘Liverpool ——­’ is actually in the pay of the Pope of Rome!”

In a second a ray of light seemed to irradiate the gloom of the manager’s soul, as he contemplated in a flash of thought the untold treasures of the Vatican—­

“Man!” he exclaimed fervently, “I wish to Heaven it was!”

But the numerous exhibitions of bigotry stirred up in connection with Lord John Russell’s Ecclesiastical Titles Act were of trifling consequence compared with the injury done to the Irish people arising out of the same Act.  For it led to the ruin of the Tenant Right agitation in Ireland, in which the Irish people, Protestant as well as Catholic, had been united as they had not been since 1798 and the days of Grattan’s Parliament.

For the Tenant League and the Irish Party in Parliament had in their ranks some of the greatest rascals who had ever disgraced Irish politics.  These, while posing as the champions of Catholicity in opposing Lord John Russell’s bill, were simply working for their own base ends, and were afterwards known and execrated as the Sadlier-Keogh gang.

Their infamous betrayal of the Irish tenantry dashed the hopes and destroyed the union of North and South from which so much was expected, besides creating a distrust in constitutional agitation which lasted for nearly a generation.

The after fate of the Sadlier-Keogh gang—­including the suicide of John Sadlier and the scarcely less wretched end of Keogh—­have ever since been terrible object-lessons to the Irish people.

In his later years I enjoyed the friendship of one of the most distinguished of the Tenant Right leaders, who had also played a prominent and honourable part in the Repeal and Young Ireland movements.  This was Charles Gavan Duffy, whom I met after his return from Australia.