on his own showing “indecently rich” somehow fails to fit in. Now for the figures. The population of Ireland at the last census was, roughly, 4,500,000, and the population of England and Wales 32,500,000. In Ireland there are 3 archbishops and 25 bishops, without reckoning Episcopalians. In England and Wales there are 2 archbishops, 33 bishops, 8 assistant bishops, and 27 bishops suffragan, without reckoning 1 Roman Catholic archbishop and 15 bishops, and the chiefs of the Wesleyan Methodist, Methodist New Connexion, Primitive Methodist, Baptist, Congregational, Free Church, Salvation Army, Church Army, Calvinistic, Unitarian, Catholic Apostolic, and a host of other bodies. In the matter of hierarchy, therefore, Ireland is not exactly overburdened, even if it be admitted that she should take her pattern from England. Then, as against Ireland’s 2,722 secular priests, England boasts the amazing total of 23,000 beneficed and unbeneficed clergy, plus from 7,000 to 10,000 Nonconformist ministers and 20,000 Salvation Army “Officers.” So that, at a moderate computation, while there is one priest or minister of religion to every 500 of the population in England, there is only one priest to every 800 of the population of Ireland. The ratios indicated may not be exact, but they are based on Whitaker and pretty near the mark. Taken another way the position amounts to this. In an English townlet of from 3,000 to 4,000 population you will find, as a rule, a couple of vicars, three or four curates, a Wesleyan minister, a Baptist minister, a Congregational minister, a Catholic priest and a couple of Salvationists. In an Irish townlet of the same size you have possibly six Catholic priests and a solitary Episcopalian. Dreadful, is it not? Being mainly of one sort, as it were, the priests of Ireland appear to be much thicker on the ground than the clergy and ministers of England. But it is nothing more nor less than an optical illusion—one of those many illusions upon which judgments about Ireland are usually formed. As to places of worship, it has been charged against the Irish Church that she builds too much. “The traveler walking or driving across the wastes of that empty land,” says the author previously quoted, “will nearly always find that the first thing to break the monotony of the horizon is a spire or tower; and when he arrives at the desolate little huddle of cabins or cottages that makes a town he will find, dominating and shadowing it, the Catholic chapel. Sometimes, indeed, the buildings are poor and rough: but these are becoming fewer and fewer, and are now gradually, even in the poorest districts, being replaced by structures strangely out of keeping with the ruinous poverty around them. The last few years have seen in Ireland a great activity in the building of these chapels; the very slight increase which has taken place in the standard of living has made the movement possible.” Assuming this to be a just statement of the case, is it not