speech I heard was made by a Catholic lawyer of Dublin, Mr. Quill, Q.C.,
who grappled with the question of distress among the Irish tenants, and
produced some startling evidence to show that this distress is by no
means so great or so general as it is commonly assumed to be.[10] Able
speeches were also made by Mr. T.W. Russell, M.P. for Tyrone, and by
Colonel Saunderson, the champion of Ulster at Westminster. Both of these
members, and especially Colonel Saunderson, "went for" their
Nationalist colleagues with an unparliamentary plainness of speech which
commanded the cordial sympathy of their audience. "Is it possible,"
asked Colonel Saunderson, "that you should ever consent, on any terms,
to be governed by such--, well, by such wretches as these?" to which the
audience gave back an unanimous "Never," neither thundered nor shouted,
but growled, like Browning's "growl at the gates of Ghent,"--a low deep
growl like the final notice served by a bull-dog, which I had not heard
since the meetings which, at the North, followed the first serious
fighting of the Civil War. I was much struck, too, by the prevalence
among the audience of what may be called the Old Middle State type of
American face and head. A majority of these men might have come straight
from those slopes of the Alleghany which, from Pennsylvania down to the
Carolinas, were planted so largely by the only considerable Irish
emigrations known to our history, before the great year of famine, 1847,
the Irish emigrations which followed the wars against the woollen
industries in the seventeenth century, and the linen industries in the
eighteenth. A staunch, doggedly Protestant people, loving the New
England Puritans and the Anglicans of Eastern Virginia little better
than the Maryland Catholics, but contributing more than their full share
of traditional antipathy to that extreme dislike and dread of the Roman
Church which showed itself half-a-century ago in the burning of
convents, and thirty years ago gave life and fire to the Know-Nothing
movement. Even so late as at the time of Father Burke's grand and most
successful mission to America, I remember how much astonished and
impressed he was by the vigour and the virulence of these feelings. One
of the bishops, he told me, in a great diocese tried (though of course
in vain) to dissuade him on this account from wearing his Dominican
dress. These anti-Catholic passions are much stronger in America to-day
than it always