"Irish Brigade are destined to save Ireland, and make her free." I trust my patriotic and respected brother may prove a prophet; and yet I fear there are some members of that corps who would be found very unwilling to diminish in the least the high feudal privileges of their order -yet these privileges constitute the murderous and degrading yoke of Irish slavery.

"I am, dear Sir, your obedient servant,

66

"MICHAEL FITZGERALD, P.P.'"

County Wicklow.

"The following letter was read from the Rev. James Redmond :

666

Arklow, April 18, 1852. "DEAR SIR,-An arrear of the duties of this season will not permit me to attend the meeting on Tuesday.

"I earnestly press on the council not to delay their applications to constituencies till the latter shall have passed their words to more early candidates. Limerick

was lost in this way.

"I have written to nearly all the Parish Priests in the county Wicklow to combine for the expulsion from the representation of the exterminating bigot, Lord Milton, whose father, Earl Fitzwilliam, outraged the Catholics of the United Kingdom, in and out of Parliament, last year, by his calumnies on their religious tenets, and by aiding the penal legislation against their Ecclesiastical liberties. The said noble earl has also repeatedly raised his rents, during the last six disastrous years, compelling his tenants to pay interest for their own money by an enhanced rent for their improvements. As Lord Milton has aided and abetted his father in all this tyranny and wrong, he must be made share in the punishment; he must be made feel that he shall not with impunity insult and injure men as good as himself, and must account for his misdeeds at the bar of an enlightened public opinion. No Catholic can vote for the noble lord without dishonour and without incurring the sacrilegious guilt of co-operating with the persecutor and the plunderer of the Catholic Church by sending him to parliament to forge new chains for our bishops, to

inflict heavier fines for the exercise of essential spiritual functions, and to deprive the poor of Christ of their bread by an unholy legislative confiscation. No tenant farmer can vote for him without being a consenting party to the continued robbery and vassalage of his class, and without being a sharer in all the miseries and crimes resulting from irresponsible landlordism.

"I confidently trust my beloved clerical brethren of this county will take-as they have always taken their stand in good time, and firmly, between their faithful people and their oppressors; that they will employ their fair influence to paralyse the arm of the prosecutor now uplifted to strike down our religious liberties; that they will combine to deprive the landlord of the power of confiscating his tenant's property by expelling him at the end of his tenure without full compensation for his improvements, or by making him pay an increased rent in respect of the same, or by binding him to contracts rendered flagrantly unjust or absolutely impossible by legislative depreciation of the markets or heavy supervening taxation. I am quite satisfied it will not be the fault of the worthy Catholic clergy of the county Wicklow if a man, not pledged to the defined and essentially just principles of tenant-right, and to the removal from the statute-book of all restrictive laws interfering with religious liberty, shall go into parliament for this county.

"I remain, dear Sir, yours truly,

"JAMES REDMOND, P.P.

"To the Secretary of the Irish Tenant League.''

FROM THE TABLET,' MAY 8, 1852.

"New Ross Election-Mr. Duffy.

"TO THE EDITOR OF THE TABLET.'

"Burt, Derry, May 3, 1852.

"MY DEAR SIR,-I have published that I shall call on the people of my parish on the 9th instant, requesting them to be prepared on that day to contribute their mite towards Mr. Duffy's expenses at the approaching election

of New Ross. My people are poor, but willing to do all in their power on this most pressing occasion. Our duty to our country is next to our duty to GOD. I hope Mr. Duffy's friends, who, I will say, are as numerous as there are lovers of country, will do their duty. Their general contribution throughout the kingdom will make the Castleman Redington tremble for his fate. This pouring in of money to free Mr. Duffy of all expenses will tell, more decidedly than language can command, the hatred of the people to him who helped to puff the Castle bellows to forge chains for our Bishops, and their approval of Duffy, the four-fold martyr and lover of his country. Nothing ever terrified oligarchy so much as the general contribution to the Catholic rent, and the thousands poured into the Repeal treasury.

"Ireland showed herself great and independent in '28 by sustaining in the Clare election the great O'Connell, and I trust she will consider New Ross a second Clare. "Believe me, dear Lucas, yours faithfully,

"JAMES M'ALEER, P.P."

"The People and their Pastors.-Letter of Archdeacon Fitzgerald.

"Rathkeale, April 26, 1852.

"MY DEAR O'DWYER,-I thank you for your kindness in communicating to me the important fact that the Clergy of Emly have unanimously resolved to demand unequivocal pledges from the candidates for the representation of this county at the coming election. The resolve is in every way worthy a body so truly respectable and patriotic as I have always considered your manly and honest fellow-clergymen of Emly to be.

"I will take this opportunity to observe that there are many things in the present aspect of Irish affairs that sadly puzzle these old brains of mine; and as you are so much younger, and as I verily and sincerely believe so much sounder, I wish to Heaven you could be induced to help me a little to a right understanding. Thus, for instance, it appears to me not a little strange that clergymen should

see the houses inhabited by Catholics in their parishes diminished by one half-(as most certainly happened in this parish within five years, and in hundreds of parishes besides) without giving themselves apparently the slightest concern on the subject, or making the least effort to save the remnant of their people. When the object was to repeal the Union, great efforts were made, and large sums were subscribed or collected by clergymen. Some clergymen in this diocese insisted on every newlybaptized child being registered a Repealer, and duly qualified by his parents paying down the usual shilling entrance fee.

"But there is another sort of persecution, which I can well understand, where millions are shut up in workhouse graves, or workhouse prisons, or banished for ever to foreign climes. I can imagine that the religion of a country is in danger when a Church and a nation are in process of speedy extinction-when, under pretence of the rights of property, a small class of men exercise unbounded power over hundreds of thousands. Have those who are zealous for the faith considered that there is not a landlord in Ireland who, if he set about it in right earnest, could not make his Catholic tenants, in nine cases out of ten, apostates? He had only to say-You must pay rent to the day, and endure all the extremes of landlord infliction, unless you go to the church and send your children to my anti-popery school. Are not the worldly goods, the morals, the religion, the whole being of the tenant-slave in Ireland, utterly at the mercy of his owner or his landlord, whichever you please? And is this a state of things that ought to be endured?

"I remain, my dear O'Dwyer,

"Most truly yours,

"MICHAEL FITZGERALD, P.P."

PRINTED EXTRACTS

FROM THE PRIESTS' PRESS.

THE Connection between the Roman Catholic priests of Ireland and that portion of the press which avowedly disseminates their temporal and political doctrines, has been publicly explained and advertised by themselves as follows:

1. In The Warder newspaper of the 14th of August, 1852, the Archdeacon of Meath addressed a letter to Dr. Cantwell, titular bishop, in which he stated that at an election meeting held at Kells on the 6th of June, 1852, Mr. Lucas, editor of The Tablet, was, by the Very Rev. N. M'Evoy, P.P., introduced to the meeting (at which it was stated by The Tablet that upwards of ten thousand persons were present) 66 AS THE TRIED AND

TRUSTED ADVOCATE OF EVERY PRINCIPLE DEAR TO THE HEARTS OF THE ENTIRE PRELACY AND PRIESTHOOD OF THE LAND."

Again, in another newspaper, it was publicly declared by Dr. M'Evoy, P.P., that Mr. Lucas, "the trusted advocate of every principle dear to the hearts of the entire Prelacy and Priesthood of the land," "WAS THE DEFENDER OF THE SACRED CHARACTER OF THE PRIESTHOOD;" and that in token thereof he had stereotyped in front of the Tablet newspaper, of which he was the editor, the following picture of the Holy Virgin and Child.