They went away, like the Senatus of Augsburg from the presence of Napoleon—­“tres mortifies et peu contents.”  After they had gone, the Cardinal remembered that for some time past queer documents had reached him through the post-office, setting forth the doctrine of Divine Right, and the story of the Stuarts.  One of these, which with the rest he had thrown into the fire, was an elaborate genealogical chart, designed to show that the crowns of Great Britain and Ireland ought rightfully to be worn by a certain princess in Bavaria!

If there is anything more in all this than a new variety of the “blue China craze,” may it not be taken as a symptom of that vague but clearly growing dissatisfaction with the nineteenth century doctrine of government by mere majorities, which is by no means confined to Europe?  This feeling underlies the “National Association” for getting a preamble put into the Constitution of the United States, “recognising Almighty God as the source of all authority and power in Civil Government.”  There was such a recognition in the Articles of Confederation of 1781.  Archbishop Ryan of Philadelphia should have mentioned to His Holiness the existence of this Association, when he presented to Leo XIII., the other day at Rome, President Cleveland’s curious Jubilee gift of an emblazoned copy of what a Monsignore of my acquaintance calls “the godless American Constitution."[8]

We made a quick quiet passage to Kingstown.  These boats—­certainly the best appointed of their sort afloat—­are owned, I find, in Dublin, and managed exclusively by their Irish owners, to whom the credit therefore belongs of making the mail service between Holyhead and Kingstown as admirable, in all respects, as the mail services between Dover and the Continental ports are not.

I landed at Kingstown with Lord Ernest Hamilton, M.P. for North Tyrone, with whom I have arranged an expedition to Gweedore in Donegal, one of the most ill-famed of the “congested districts” of Ireland, and just now made a point of special interest by the arrest of Father M’Fadden, the parish priest of the place, for “criminally conspiring to compel and induce certain tenants not to fulfil their legal obligations.”

I could understand such a prosecution as this in America, where the Constitution makes it impossible even for Congress to pass laws “impairing the validity of contracts.”  But as the British Parliament has been passing such laws for Ireland ever since Mr. Butt in 1870 raised the standard of Irish Land Reform under the name of Home Rule, it seems a little absurd, not to say Hibernian, of the British authorities to prosecute Father M’Fadden merely for bettering their own instruction in his own way.  I could better understand a prosecution of Father M’Fadden on such grounds by the authorities of his own Church.