St. James's Hall, London, is primarily a place for concerts and singers, as Exeter Hall is. But, like its venerable predecessor, St. James's Hall has come to be identified with political meetings of a certain class. Exeter Hall, a huge, gaunt, unadorned, and dreary room in the Strand, is resorted to for the most part as the arena and platform of ultra-Protestantism. St. James's Hall, a beautiful and almost lavishly ornate structure in Piccadilly, is commonly used by the leading Roman Catholics of London when they desire to make a demonstration. There are political classes which will use either place indifferently; but Exeter Hall has usually a tinge of Protestant exclusiveness about its political expression, while the ceiling of the other building has rung alike to the thrilling music of John Bright's voice, to the strident vehemence of Mr. Bradlaugh, the humdrum humming of Mr. Odger, and the clear, delicate, tremulous intonations of Stuart Mill. But I never heard of a Roman Catholic meeting of great importance being held anywhere in London lately, except in St. James's Hall. Let us attend such a meeting there. The hall is a huge oblong, with galleries around three of the sides, and a platform bearing a splendid organ on the fourth. The room is brilliantly lighted, and the mode of lighting is peculiar and picturesque. The platform, the galleries, the body of the hall alike are crowded. This is a meeting held to make a demonstration in favor of some Roman Catholic demand--say for separate education. On the platform are the great Catholic peers, most of them men of lineage stretching back to years when Catholicism was yet unsuspicious of any possible rivalry in England. There are the Norfolks, the Denbighs, the Dormers, the Petres, the Staffords; there are such later accessions to Catholicism as the Marquis of Bute, whose change created such a sensation, and Lord Robert Montagu, who "went over" only last year. There are some recent accessions of the peerage also--Lord Acton, for instance, head of a distinguished and ancient family, but only lately called to the Upper House, and who, when Sir John Acton, won honorable fame as a writer and scholar. Lord Acton not many years ago started the "Home and Foreign Review," a quarterly periodical which endeavored to reconcile Catholicism with liberalism and science. The universal opinion of England and of Europe declared the "Home and Foreign Review" to be unsurpassed for ability, scholarship, and political information by any publication in the world. It leaped at one bound to a level with the "Edinburgh," the "Quarterly," and the "Revue des Deux Mondes." But the Pope thought the Review too liberal, and intimated that it ought to be suppressed; and Lord Acton meekly bowed his head and suppressed it in all the bloom of its growing fame. Some Irish members of Parliament are on the platform--men of station and wealth like Munsell, men of energy and brains like John Francis Maguire;