Go on, therefore, venerable brethren, in making the young your chief care; press onward in every way your episcopal work, and cultivate with alacrity and hopefulness whatever good seeds you find; for God, who is rich in mercy, will give the increase. As a pledge of gifts from above, and in witness of our good-will, we lovingly grant in the Lord to you, and to the clergy and people committed to each one of you, the Apostolic Benediction. Given at Rome, at St. Peter's, on the 27th day of November, in the year 1885, in the eighth year of our Pontificate. LEO PP. XIII. BISHOP SPALDING ON STIMULANTS.--I hate drink, because it destroys the good in life. I find in my own experience that I am more myself, while under total abstinence, than when I was a moderate drinker. Life is sweeter, fonder, freer to me as a total abstainer than as a moderate drinker. So I say, if you want to get the most out of your life, if you want to sympathize with your fellow-man, to feel the true force of your beginning, abstain from alcoholic stimulants. Te Deum. The course of the general election has surpassed the most sanguine expectations of the Irish leader. Our success has been such as might well take our breath away with joy. The Irish race at home and in the stranger's land have risen to the height of the great crisis with a unity and soldier-like discipline absolutely unparalleled in the world's history, and their magnificent enthusiasm has swept all before it. Three grand results may already be chalked up, and they involve triumphs that a few years ago would have been deemed the ideal of crazy dreamers. The Nominal Home Rulers are effaced to a man. The once proud Irish Whig party, who for a quarter of a century held undisputed sway over the Irish representation, is literally annihilated. If Mr. Dickson should be a solitary survivor, he will survive not as a living force in Irish politics, but as the one bleak and woe-begone specimen now extant of a race of politicians who once swarmed over four-fifths of the constituencies of this island. The third great achievement of the election campaign, and the mightiest of all, is that the Irish vote in England has been proved to demonstration to be able to trim and balance English parties to its liking, and consequently to make the Irish vote in Ireland the supreme power in the English legislature. It is impossible to over-estimate the magnitude of these results. The causes of joy are absolutely bewildering in number. A few years ago, the National voice in Ireland was heard only as a faint, distant murmur at Westminster. It could only rumble under ground in Ireland, and every outward symptom of Irish disaffection could be suppressed with the iron hand without causing one quiver of uneasiness at Westminster, much less shaking Ministries and revolutionizing parties. Even at home Nationalism was a shunned creed. It was not respectable. The few exponents it occasionally sent to Parliament were regarded as oddities.