Since these volumes were published, too, the Agrarian Revolution in
Ireland has been brought into open and defiant collision with the
Catholic Church by its leader, Mr. Davitt, the founder of the Land
League. In the face of Mr. Davitt's contemptuous and angry repudiation
of any binding force in the Papal Decree, it will be difficult even for
the Cardinal-Archbishop of Sydney to devise an understanding between the
Church and any organisation fashioned or led by him. It may be inferred
from Mr. Davitt's contemporaneous and not less angry intimation, that
the methods of the Parnellite party are inadequate to the liberation of
Ireland from the curse of landlordism, that he is prepared to go further
than Mr. George, who still clings in America to the shadowy countenance
given him by the Cardinal-Archbishop of Baltimore, and that the
Nationalisation of the Land will ere long be urged both in Ireland and
in Great Britain by organisations frankly Anti-Catholic as well as
Anti-Social.

This is to be desired on many accounts. It will bring the clergy in
Ireland face to face with the situation, which will be a good thing
both for them and for the people; and it should result in making an end
of the pernicious influence upon the popular mind of such extraordinary
theological outgivings; for example, as the circular issued in 1881 to
the clergy and laity of Meath by the Bishop of that diocese, in which it
was laid down that "the land of every country is the common property of
the people of that country, because its real owner, the Creator who made
it, has transferred it as a voluntary gift to them."

Language of this sort addressed to ignorant multitudes must do harm of
course whenever and by whomsoever used. It must tend to evil if
addressed by demagogues to the Congress of a Trade Union. But it must do
much more harm when uttered with the seeming sanction of the Church by a