The Galway Town Commissioner said:--"We respectable Catholics are in a very awkward position. We have to live among our countrymen who are of a different way of thinking, and unhappily we cannot express our honest opinions without embarassing consequences. In England, where people of opposite politics meet on terms of most sincere friendship, you do not understand our difficulties. We are denounced as unpatriotic, as enemies to our native land, and as aiders and abettors of the hated English rule. Now we know very well--my friend from Dublin, who understands law, will bear me out--we know very well that the English laws are good, excellent, liberal. We know that the English people are anxious to do what is fair and right, and that they have long been doing their best to make us comfortable. But we must keep this knowledge to ourselves, for such of us who are in business would run great risk of loss, besides social ostracism, if we ventured to boldly express our views. Moreover, we do not care to put ourselves in open conflict with the clergy, upon whom we have been taught to look from earliest childhood with reverence and awe. It is almost, if not quite, a matter of heredity. I declare that, in spite of what I might call my intellectual convictions, I am to some extent overawed by any illiterate farmer's son, who has been ordained a priest. I feel it in my blood. I must have imbibed it with my mother's milk. No use for Conservative Catholics to kick against it. We are too few, and we are bound hand and foot." So did the Galway man deliver himself. I was reminded of Mr. O'Ryan, of Larne, a devoted Catholic, who said, "I protest from my innermost heart against Home Rule. I protest not only for myself, but also on behalf of my co-religionists that dare not speak, because if they did speak their lives might not be worth an hour's purchase, not being situated, as I am, in the midst of a loyal, and law-abiding population. I believe that all that Ireland requires is a just settlement of the land question, and a fair, reasonable measure of local self-government. For several generations past England has been doing all the good she could for Ireland, and none have more reason than the Roman Catholics of Ireland to be thankful for that good. The loyal Roman Catholics of Ireland are convinced that Home Rule would be the ruin of Ireland in particular and of the British Empire in general, which would find itself deprived in a few hours of a Constitution the workmanship of centuries, and the admiration of the whole nineteenth-century civilisation."