nation, is
the cry. We may get that, but we'll be bankrupt next day. 'Tis like
putting a poor man in a grand house without food, furniture, or money,
and without credit to raise anything on the building. There now, ye
might say, ye have a splendid place that's all your own. But wouldn't
the poor man have to leave it, or die of starvation? Of course I wish
to respect my clergy, but I think they should not interfere with
politics."

Colonel Nolan said to me: "The priests wield an immense, an
incalculable power. All are on the same path, all hammer away at the
one point. It is the persistency, the organisation, that tells. In
some cases they have been known to preach for a year and a half at a
stretch on political subjects. What is going to stand against that?"

With these golden words I close my letter. The priest holds the
sceptre of the British Empire. Circumstances have placed in his hands
an astonishing opportunity. Nearly every priest in Ireland is using
his supernatural credit with one solitary aim. We know their
disloyalty, we know they are no friends of England--we know their
influence, their organisation, their perseverance, their
unscrupulousness, their absolute supremacy in Ireland--and it is high
time that England asked herself, in the words of Colonel Nolan--

"What is going to stand against that?"

Athenry (Co. Galway), May 6th.

No. 20.--RELIGION AT THE BOTTOM OF THE IRISH QUESTION.

Tuam has two cathedrals but no barber. You may be shriven but you
cannot be shaved. You may be whitewashed but you cannot be lathered.
"One shaves another; we're neighbourly here," said a railway porter.
They cut each other's hair by the light of nature, in the open street,
with a chorus of bystanders. The Tuamites live in a country of
antiquities, but they have no photographer. Nor could I find a
photograph for sale. The people are sweetly unsophisticated. A
bare-footed old lady sat on the step of the Victoria Hotel, sucking a
black dhudeen, sending out smoke like a factory chimney, the picture
of innocent enjoyment. The streets were full of pigs from the rural
parts, and great was the bargaining and chaffering in Irish, a
language which seemed to be composed of rolling r's and booming
gutturals. A sustained conversation sounds like the jolting of a
country cart over a rocky road, a sudden exclamation like the whirr of
a covey of partridges, an oath like the downfall of a truck-load of
bricks. I arrived in