Plan of Campaign.  Parnell, referring publicly to the rescript as “a document from a distant country,” declared that his Catholic colleagues must decide for themselves what action to take.  Mr. Dillon contradicted the statements in Cardinal Monaco’s letter to the effect that the contracts were voluntary or that the campaign fund of the Land League had been collected by extortion.  A meeting of forty Catholic members of Parliament assembled in Dublin, and in the Mansion House in that city signed a document denying the allegations about free contracts, fair rent, the Land Commission, and the rest, declared that the conclusions had been drawn from erroneous premises, and while asserting their complete obedience to the Holy See in spiritual matters, no less strongly repudiated the suggestion that Rome had any right to interfere in matters of a political nature.  Mass meetings were held in the Phoenix Park in Dublin, and in Cork, which indorsed this position by popular vote.  The Orangemen were delighted at the imminence of a schism, and the discomfiture of the Catholics under a decree, the result of internal division, was hailed with pleasure only by the enemies of the Church.  In the event they were doomed to disappointment, for in the closing days of the year the Holy Father wrote a letter to the Archbishop of Dublin concerning his action, which had been “so sadly misunderstood,” in which he wrote that “as to the counsels that we have given to the people of Ireland from time to time and our recent decree, we were moved in these things, not only by the consideration of what is conformable to truth and justice, but also by the desire of advancing your interests.  For such is our affection for you that it does not suffer us to allow the cause in which Ireland is struggling to be weakened by the introduction of anything that could justly be brought in reproach against it.”

In this manner was closed an incident which was expected by its foes to threaten the allegiance of Ireland, and with it that of more than half the Catholics in England, to the Holy See.

The Nationalist members at the Mansion House had flatly declared that the decree was an instrument of the unscrupulous enemies both of Ireland and of the Holy See.  The Tablet, which declared that it had been promulgated with full and intimate knowledge of all the circumstances, retorted—­“As a matter of fact we believe that the English Government has taken no steps, direct or indirect, to obtain the pronouncement, which is based solely on the reports of Mgr.  Persico and the documents and evidence which accompanied them.”  And it went on to add that Persico was expected to return to Ireland to watch the application of the decree.