of the bishop as such. As a matter of fact the Catholic Church in Ireland during the nineteenth century has always been on the side of law and order. It has had a strong bias towards constituted authority, as was to be expected from a branch of the most conservative institution in the world. It excommunicated the Fenians, it opposed the Land League, it condemned the Rising. It is hardly too much to say that Ireland would have been ungovernable but for the influence of the Church. It raised its voice against outrage and murder in language beside which the denunciations of politicians sound tame and flaccid. If it has meddled in politics (as it has) it has done no more than the Protestant Churches in Ireland, every one of which is "in politics" up to the neck. And the co-operation of Labour and Sinn Fein in the opposition to Conscription by no means meant either that Labour had become Sinn Fein or that Sinn Fein had adopted the Labour programme. In fact its relation to Labour is a problem which Sinn Fein has been very long in solving. The alliance between Republican Volunteers and the Citizen Army in the Rising effected no more than a temporary and partial union. The very first number of _Irish Opinion_ had some very open criticism of the attitude of Sinn Fein to Irish Labour. The Sinn Fein Convention of November 1st, 1917, had passed two Labour resolutions, one of which affirmed the right of Labour to a "fair and reasonable" wage: the other was in favour of Irish Labour severing its connection with British Trades Unions. On the first of these _Irish Opinion_ remarked: "The resolution of the Sinn Fein Convention conceding to Irish Labour the right to fair and reasonable wages was not by any means encouraging. It was a resolution to which the assent of even Mr. W. M. Murphy might have been secured. It did not go far enough, and it bore upon the face of it timidity and trepidation. The Labour demand to-day goes rather beyond fair and reasonable wages: the British Government is prepared to offer, in fact has actually offered, some share in direction to British Labour. This being so, there is not much to be gained from Mr. de Valera's statement in his Mansion House speech 'that in a free Ireland, with the social conditions that obtained in Ireland, Labour had a far better chance than it would have in capitalist England.' 'Our Labour policy,' continued Mr. de Valera, 'is a policy of a free country, and we ask Labour to join with us to free the country. We recognize that we can never free it without Labour. And we say, when Labour frees this country--helps to free it--Labour can look for its own share of its patrimony.' We agree that 'to free the country' is an object worthy of all the devotion that men can give to it, but at the same time we would urge that, pending this devoutly-to-be-wished-for consummation, men and women must live and rear the families upon which the future Ireland depends. What Mr. de Valera asks in effect is that Labour should