civil rights, and pass illegal sentences and inflict illegal punishments.  Under the reign of Liberal Governments the writ of these courts runs where the King’s writ cannot run, and the law of the League has been allowed in great measure to supersede the law of the land.  We have also an increasing force in Irish Nationalism which seeks to paralyse the government of Ireland by means of the general or sympathetic strike.  This organisation seeks to establish courts in Ireland in opposition to the ordinary law courts, and to enforce their decrees by means of illegal intimidation and outrage.  The people of Ireland have therefore been familiarised with the idea of courts competing in authority with those of the King’s Government.  Supposing under Home Rule the Judiciary proved less pliable than was expected or desired, the development of such competing authorities would be facilitated by a complaisant Cabinet in Dublin.  But of all attempts to over-ride the authority of law this conspiracy to exempt ecclesiastical persons from its scope is the most insidious and dangerous.  The existence of a class of men answerable for their actions, not to any domestic tribunal, but to a foreign ecclesiastical court, cannot now be tolerated by any self-respecting Government.  Yet it is not easy to see how an Irish Cabinet could refuse to make, by executive if not by legislative action, what is now the law of the Church eventually the law of Ireland.  Against this danger no safeguards can be devised.  If the Administration refuses to put the law into effective operation against a certain class of offender or abuses the prerogative of mercy in his favour, there is no power in the constitution to coerce it.  A few years ago we saw in Ireland the extraordinary spectacle of persons being prosecuted for cattle-driving and similar offences, while those who openly incited them to crime escaped with impunity.  We saw judges from the Bench complaining in vain that the real offenders were not brought before them, and criticising openly the negligence and partiality of the Crown.  If the Nationalists, whose influence then paralysed the aims of the Government, ever get supreme control of the Executive, we are certain to see these abuses revived on a still more shocking scale.  The operation of the new decree places the Roman Catholic minister or law officer who is called upon to administer justice under the terms of his oath in a position of cruel embarrassment.  As a law officer it might be his duty to order the prosecution of some clerical offender; as a Roman Catholic compliance with his duty to the State must entail the awful consequences of excommunication.  It needs no elaboration to show that what may be a grave embarrassment under the rule of impartial British Ministers, must under a local Irish Government develop into a danger to the State.  A case recently tried at the Waterford Assizes establishes a precedent which may prove most mischievous.  Recent illustrations in Ireland of the working of the Temere decree have secured for it a sort of quasi-legality and provided a great argument to those devout Churchmen who, under Home Rule, would naturally desire to carry the process a further step.