inspector, his family must guarantee him a salary of fifty pounds a year, during a period of probation as a cadet. The unaccountable manner in which mere ability is usually combined with prejudices against the existing system of government in Ireland, unless its possessor is strongly interested from practical motives in its support, is a sufficient explanation of this remarkable rule. The constables are recruited from the farming classes and receive about double the pay of soldiers in the army. The only precaution taken with them is, that they shall never be employed in their own county, and that in each barrack men of different districts and religious persuasions shall be grouped together. The duties of the force are not usually heavy. They drill for about an hour each day and patrol the roads for a few hours in the evening. The peculiar arrangements adopted for keeping them apart from the population, naturally renders them almost wholly inefficient in arresting criminals. As, however, there is little ordinary crime in the country, that is a matter of secondary importance, unless in times of disturbance. Times of disturbance, in the official sense, usually occur in Ireland about every nine or ten years and last three or four. The officials and judges say they are wholly unaccountable for by any natural causes. The usual remedy applied is a coercion law. The habeas corpus act is suspended, men are imprisoned on suspicion for unlimited periods, and fines are levied on the disaffected district. The last is much recommended by the officials, but a serious obstacle to its application is found in the increasing poverty of the country. Just before Christmas an application was made to levy a hundred thousand dollars in taxation off a district in Galway and Mayo, where a Mr. Burke had been murdered. At the same time, it was found impossible to recover the poor rates, in a large part of the district, the people being penniless. The problem of how to levy taxation on a destitute population is one on which the whole intelligence of the Irish administration has been engaged for some time, but the solution arrived at has not yet been made public. We may remark that the total cost of the Irish constabulary is rather large, amounting to nearly seven millions of dollars for the past year. Three million six hundred thousand are spent on popular education. The average cost of a school teacher is very close to one-half that of a police officer, and their numbers are nearly the same.

The boards which we have described are the real government of Ireland at present. It will be seen that the system is a quite peculiar one. It has grown up entirely since Catholic Emancipation. The penal laws having then been abandoned, the English government had to decide between letting the Irish people manage their own affairs or devising a new system for governing

them. The board system was invented in consequence, and since the death of O'Connell and the abandonment of the repeal movement, the boards have practically had absolute sway in every department of the government of Ireland. How the country has thriven under them, a few figures will show. The area of cultivated land was nearly six million acres in 1851. In 1881 it had fallen to less than three millions two hundred thousand. During the preceding ten years, six hundred thousand acres fell out of cultivation. During the same period there absolutely had been a decrease of twenty thousand cattle, about a million of sheep, and over half a million of hogs. The fisheries of Ireland employed a hundred and ninety thousand men and boys in 1847. They fell to twenty-four thousand in thirty years. Mines and miners shared the same fate in a lesser degree. The population had gone down by uninterrupted decreases from eight millions two hundred thousand to five millions one hundred and seventy thousand. The wealth of the country at the time of the union was estimated at one-ninth of that of England. At present, judged by the income tax returns, the amount of funds held in Ireland, and the value of Irish and English railways, it is about one-twentieth. No class in Ireland is exempt from the general decay. Ulster, during the last ten years especially, has actually suffered the greatest losses of any province.

Episcopalians, Presbyterians and Catholics have suffered alike, both in numbers and in wealth. The ruin which has fallen on Ireland is wholly unknown in any other country of the modern world. Like its form of government it is wholly peculiar to Ireland, and whether the latter be its true cause or not we leave our readers to judge for themselves. To govern Ireland by English ideas has been for three centuries the object of the English government. It has carried out its policy unchecked for nearly two. The moral result has been the most infamous penal code known to man; the intellectual, to reduce to ignorance a country which was once the school of Western Europe; and the material, to inflict on it a ruin, such as has never before been witnessed in a Christian land.

From the facts we have stated, it may be judged how eminently practical a question is the demand of the Irish people for home rule. They simply ask that the system which is crushing them shall be removed. They demand that the representatives of the people shall replace the foreign boards which control every branch of public life, that the laws shall be made by the people who live under them and shall be administered by men of their own approving. With less than this they cannot live in their land. The choice is home rule or extermination. The land question, on which

so much has been written, is but one branch of Irish grievances. The whole system of English government is ruinous to Ireland. The English Parliament is powerless to remedy its defects in detail, but so long as it retains control of Irish affairs, it will be forced by the current of events to occupy itself with them and their results. Already it has been forced to sacrifice half its freedom of debate to the exigencies of Irish politics. It must sacrifice the whole before it can hope to suppress the complaints of the Irish people. If the English people will not allow the Irish to be partners in self-government, they must themselves accept a partnership in centralized thraldom. We shall see what choice they will make.

CONVERTS THEIR INFLUENCE AND WORK IN THIS COUNTRY.

An account of the Conversion of the Rev. Mr. John Thayer, lately a Protestant minister at Boston, in North America. Baltimore, 1788. Apology for the Conversion of Stephen Cleveland Blyth. New York, 1815. History of my own Times. By the Rev. Daniel Barber. Washington, 1827.

The Reasons of J. J. M. Oertel, late a Lutheran minister, for becoming a Catholic. New York, 1840.

Trials of a Mind. By L. S. Ives. Boston, 1854.

Path which led a Protestant Lawyer to the Catholic Church. By P. H. Burnett. New York, 1860.

THE

HERE is something terrible in the results of heresy, as we study those results in the history of the Church. It ever carries with it a deadly blight. The dogma denied, in some cases, may seem one of less vital importance, compared to the whole deposit of the faith, the form of Church government may be retained, a hierarchy perpetuated, the holy sacrifice offered, but the breaking away from unity is attended with a blindness, life and light die out, the branch cut off from the parent stem, no longer traversed by the vivifying sap, withers and perishes.

Where any country or large district has accepted a heresy, there is scarcely an instance in history where it has ever recovered from the fatal step and returned to the faith. Gradually one doctrine after another, one devotional safeguard after another is lost, the Christian life sinks, flickers, flutters and is gone. In the East the

lands won by the Arian, the Nestorian, the Monophysite became the prey of the Mohammedan, and Christianity died out utterly. In the West, where the hierarchs Wicklif, Huss and Luther denied. the dogmas on which the theory of the Church, the divine worship and the channels of divine grace rested, the countries in which they obtained sway began a downward course, gradually yielding up all the Christianity they first retained, till the personality of God, supernatural religion, revelation, the inspiration of the Scriptures, the fall of man, redemption through a Saviour, are rejected in the nineteenth century as absolutely as the authority of the Church or the Real Presence was in the sixteenth.

No country has ever renounced a single error or made a single step towards a return to the truth. Self-exiled from paradise they seem cut off by a sword of flame from all return. The doctrines they profess all seem lightly held but one, and that is the belief that the Church is false and wrong and dangerous. A thousand new errors and differences may arise, but this point is never questioned. In their eyes the Church is ever in the wrong. Men may hold the very doctrine she maintains, yet will insist that she is and must be wrong. When Pope Pius IX. solemnly defined the belief, so long clearly and openly held, that the Blessed Virgin was free from original sin from the first instant of her existence as a human. being, from her conception, there was a wild storm of denunciation. Yet thousands who reviled the doctrine believed it, as firmly as any Catholic did, for as thousands and thousands in every Protestant country had ceased to believe the doctrine of original sin, they believed that all men were conceived and born free from any taint of any original sin of Adam, and believing this of all men, they necessarily believed it of the Blessed Virgin, and if questioned would admit that they believed her to be free from the sin of Adam. They really agreed with Catholics in regard to her case, though they were at variance with us in regard to the condition of the rest of the human race.

It is an example of that terrible spiritual blindness, that veil over the heart, which is the result of heresy, and which makes the return of a country or a race seem virtually impossible, and makes the return of an individual born under its shadow, a miracle of divine grace.

In some countries men know that their ancestors were forced from the Catholic Church by penal laws, by the halter, the stake, by torture, by confiscation, by privation of all religious guides, yet human argument, human eloquence, the clearest evidence, fail to reveal to their minds the truth of the old faith, and they seem to require like Saul to be hurled, dazed and blinded, to the very dust, before the light of the Sun of Justice can penetrate into their souls. If a Catholic priest, a zealous layman were to attempt to present

the truth to them, prejudice would raise such an impenetrable barrier that conviction would be hopeless. A Mormon missionary or the Leatherwood God might go into a Protestant community and make converts, but a Catholic missionary would only excite the deepest and bitterest hatred of the faith he proclaimed. Grace must do its work first: ordinarily speaking, it is only when the poor prodigal, finding that he has nothing but husks for food, says "I will arise and go back to my father's house," that the priest can go forth to meet him.

Yet from the time when the Germanic nations, last in Europe to accept the faith and first to reject it, fell into heresy, conversions of individuals, retroversions have gone steadily on. England, Germany, Holland, Denmark, Sweden, all have their long line of those who, faithful to the grace vouchsafed them, returned to the bosom of the Mother Church. There seem to be indeed special seasons when Grace works more powerfully and overcomes the obstacles, not in single minds and hearts, but in whole classes.

This country, in the settlement of nearly all the colonies, was leavened with some form of error which sprang up after the original revolt, and seemed as far removed as possible from the kingdom of God. The Church established by law in England never acquired any strong hold here, and indeed as long as allegiance was acknowledged to the king, he never dared as head of the Church of England to send a bishop to the colonies. But though Anglican, Presbyterian, Congregationalist, Lutheran, Dutch Reformed might disagree on other points, they all agreed in hatred of Catholicity, and penal laws were aimed at it in New England, New York, New Jersey, Maryland, Virginia, Carolina, Georgia.

Yet from the settlement of Maryland, from the appearance of Catholicity, conversions began, and the stream deepens and widens as it comes down to our time.

The gentry who came with Calvert to Maryland and founded the settlement under Lord Baltimore's charter, were almost if not exclusively Catholics, but many of the humbler colonists brought over by the proprietors were Protestants. No minister came to attend them, however. These settlers were as destitute of a Protestant ministry as the Pilgrim Fathers who landed on Plymouth Rock; yet one of Calvert's first acts was to give these Protestants a place and a structure for their religious services. Catholics gave Protestants their first church in Maryland. They were free to foilow the practices of their own Protestantism. The Church of England sent no one to them, but they could contrast the zeal of the Catholic priest with the indifference of their own ministers in England, and when at last some of their clergy came to Maryland, the contrast became only sharper, so utterly unfit, as all now acknowledge, were the first Protestant clergy of the province. Men