of her bishops and archbishops. But Rome
thinks probably more of the 40,000,000 people of Britain than of the
4,000,000 of Ireland. As long as England persists in holding Ireland in
bondage she must pay to Rome some compensation. The eighty votes at
Westminster are still doing the work which Cardinal Manning required of
them. Is it likely that Rome is so beset with anxiety to drive them
across the Channel? Is it altogether unlikely that some of the more
shrewd Italian or Spanish diplomatists at the Vatican--advised,
perhaps, by their English bishops and dukes--may hope to affect the
issue rather in the Unionist than in the Home Rule direction? Such
suspicions may be entirely baseless, but it will be impossible to
disregard them entirely during the events of the next few years.

It would not be the first time, nor the latest since Castlereagh, when
the extreme Protestant Unionists of this country conspired with the
Tory Ultramontanes of the Vatican to traffic away the liberties of
Ireland.[55]

Amid all these doubts and perplexities we shall be wise to stick fast
to the central doctrine that civil liberty and religious liberty stand
together. This is the one truth that emerges from the history of Europe
during the last three centuries. Wherever we look--whether in Germany,
France, Holland, Scotland, or England--we see that these two rights
have always gone hand in hand.

Is there, indeed, a single instance in human history when the grant of
civil liberty has led to the forging of religious chains? Look to the
West, and note how, in the freest countries of the world--in the United
States and Canada, where there is not even a shadow of an establishment
for any form of religion--every kind of human faith lives together in
simple human brotherhood, and draws from that brotherhood new food for
the refreshment of mankind. In Ireland the one reason why the religious
quarrel has been maintained is to be found in the absence of civil
liberty. At every crisis of Ireland's fate the passion of religious
hatred has been worked--then as now--in order to prolong civil and
political despotism.

May we not be sure that Home Rule, instead of strengthening this evil
tendency, will weaken it? May we not be equally sure that it will take
no blood or muscle from the cause of true religion, certain to flourish
with greater richness and power where Christian love prevails?

Is it possible, in short, that in Ireland alone, of all countries