Every thing, in fact, is regulated by the wishes of that numerous body of the priesthood, who from their ardent exertions for ascendancy, have obtained the title of the _La Mennaisiens_, and whose influence in every family and in every parish, rules, regulates and determines every political movement. They it is who conduct all the elections, name the candidates, and marshal the constituency to the poll, and when I was at Ghent, the curate of Bottelaer, a rural district in the vicinity, read from the altar the persons for whom the congregation were to vote, at a pending contest, on pain of the displeasure of the Bishop. If the coincidence does not strike irresistibly every individual, who has attended to what is passing in Belgium, it is here again unnecessary to point out the parallel, between the composition of the two parties, in that country and Ireland, who sympathise in the principle of repeal and separation. In each country the majority of the “movement” is composed of the Roman Catholic clergy, and the devotees of the church, but in both their strength would be ineffectual, and certainly their object suspected, had they not been joined by honest but mistaken individuals, who, aiming at Utopian theories in politics, have been content to employ for their accomplishment, the aid of those, whose designs are more essentially sectarian, than civil or political. In Belgium, however, the demonstration has been made, of what may be expected to ensue, should the project of Repealing the Union be ever successfully effected in Ireland. There, as in Flanders and Brabant, the priests and their followers would have the overwhelming majority; and caution or concealment being no longer essential, the triumph of their attempt, would be but the signal for discarding their allies, and proceeding boldly to the consummation of their own ambition. The union once repealed, the objects of the liberal protestants of Ireland and the Roman Catholic party, would be as distinct as the very spirit of freedom, and the genius of despotism could render them. The manifesto of the Roman Catholic prelates to the Congress of Vienna, and their protest against _Liberty of Conscience_, _Education_, and _the Freedom of the Press_ in Belgium, made, not at any remote or antiquated era of history, _but within the last ten years_, sufficiently attest the animus in which their admirers and imitators would set about the regeneration of Ireland. The Archbishop of Malines would find a cotemporary and congenial spirit in the benignant prelate of Tuam, the pastoral superintendance of the clergy would be as vigorous in the elections for a domestic, as for a “Saxon” legislature, and as successful in securing a majority in the parliament of Dublin, as in the “Palace of the Nation,” and the services of the patriots who now shout in the train of the Agitator, could be as readily dispensed with in Ireland, as they have been summarily discarded in Belgium.