"That Protestants are perfectly well aware of the mortification entailed upon their Catholic fellow-subjects by the existing state of things, and regard it with complacent acquiescence, is not the least painful feature of the case. The Irish Church is bad, not only in itself, but as being the last of a long series of oppressions which fear, passion, or necessity have at various times led the English to inflict upon their feeble neighbour. There have been periods when the deliberate idea of even intelligent politicians was, that the one population should exterminate the other; and Burke has pointed out how the religious animosities, which seem now the great cause of dispute, are in reality only a new phase of far earlier hostility, grounded originally on conquest, and strengthened by the cruelties which conquest involved. It is to some such fierce mood, traditionally familiar to the ruling race, that an institution so unjust in principle, so troublesome in practice, so incurably barren of all useful result, can appeal for sanction and support. The blind and almost ferocious bigotry of Irish Presbyterians is owing, one would fain hope, less to personal temperament than to the tastes and convictions of a ruder age, embodied in evil customs and a conventionally violent phraseology. And the same is more or less true of their Episcopalian brethren. It is from the calmer feelings and more discriminating judgment of the English nation that any remedial measure is expected"--pages 33-37. We have nothing to add to this. Every Catholic will recognize the truth of the picture thus ably drawn. Our obligations to Mr. Cunningham do not, however, end here. There is still another lesson which, although he does not mean to teach it, we are glad to learn from him. It is this. Speaking of the paid clergy of the Establishment, he says:-- "So far from assisting the government in its schemes, they are among its bitterest opponents. Dr. Cullen himself is hardly more hostile to the National Education System than these paid officials of the state, for whom the one possible excuse would be an unflinching support of state measures. The Church Education Society numbers something like two-thirds of the Established clergy among its adherents, and is one of the most serious difficulties with which at present the cause of National Education has to contend. What shall be done with these spaniels that forget to cringe, but bark and snap at the hand that feeds them? Might they not, at any rate, be scourged and starved into a more submissive mood?"--page 43.