the encompassing pressure of the Roman Catholic priesthood, not in
educational matters alone, but in all the petty activities of every-day
life.

Whenever this aspect of the Home Rule controversy was emphasised
Englishmen asked what sort of persecution Irish Protestants had to fear
from a Parliament in Dublin, and appeared to think all such fear
illusory unless evidence could be adduced that the Holy Office was to be
set up at Maynooth, equipped with faggot and thumb-screw. Of persecution
of that sort there never has been, of course, any apprehension in
modern times. Individual Catholics and Protestants live side by side in
Ireland with fully as much amity as elsewhere, but whereas the Catholic
instinctively, and by upbringing, looks to the parish priest as his
director in all affairs of life, the Protestant dislikes and resists
clerical influence as strongly as does the Nonconformist in England and
Wales--and with much better reason. For the latter has never known
clericalism as it exists in a Roman Catholic country where the Church is
wholly unrestrained by the civil power. He has resented what he regards
as Anglican arrogance in regard to educational management or the use of
burying-grounds, but he has never experienced a much more aggressive
clerical temper exercised in all the incidents of daily life--in the
market, the political meeting, the disposition of property, the
amusements of the people, the polling booth, the farm, and the home.

This involves no condemnation of the Irish priest as an individual or as
a minister of his Church. He is kind-hearted, charitable, and
conscientious; and, except that it does not encourage self-reliance and
enterprise, his influence with his own people is no more open to
criticism than that of any other body of religious ministers. But the
Roman Catholic Church has always made a larger claim than any other on