The Express.
London, England, 1851-04-29 00:00:00

IRELAND.

Dentist, APRIL 28. !
The subjoined mysterious statement, accompanied
by an equally mysterious letter, appears 111 the
l'abkt•
LETTRR TROY THZ EARL OT TO vnit EARL OTC.
We give below the substance of the greater part of a
letter which has recenCy reached our hands under circuits-
stances that leave us at lull liberty to give it to the world.
It came to us from England, from a layman; it has passed
through many hands— has more than once been referred to !
i.t the press—has already attained considerable notoriety—,
and, though in form addressed by a nobleman in office to a
nobleman in private lift, it is, in substance, an official
despatch, obviously written for use as a despatch, and
liable, therefore, to the incidents and accidents to which
such documents arc exposed. We fancy we shall not err
very widely if, on guess, we fill up the blanks iu the
names of the noble correspondents (we have them only
in blank) with the titles of Clarendon and Shrewsbury.
Lord Clarendon, we take it, is the writer—Lord Shrews-
bury the recipient; but the persons (or whom every
line of the letter was written arc evidently the l'ope and
the cardinals at Rome:

Dublin, Dee. 2, 18.50.
My dear Lord,-1 am sincerely obliged to you for your
letters of November the 12th and dith, and I know nut
• • • - " -•

wl•ether most to admire your accurate knowledge of all the
affairs of Ireland, or the eminent tact and judgment you
have displayed in the conferences with the holy father and
the cardinals, of which you have the goodness to send me so
complete and so interesting a report. I take the liberty of
making some observations on what was said in those con-
ferences, and I hope that you will permit me to express
them with all frankness, lweausel cannot write about the

. ,
ignorance, or something worse, which prevails in Rome re-
garding this country without candidly declaring my judg-
ment as to its causes, and the deplorable consequences which

, .
must attend it.
The Pope has shown the extent of the deceit which has
been practised upon him. All good men in Ireland, of
whatever creed or politics, are agreed in reverencing Dr.
Murray as the bean ideal of a Christian pastor, and yet
your lordship found his Holiness irritated against him
aione. All agree in considering Dr. M'llale as an ill-
disposed demagogue, who does nothing but afford an
example of all that a bishop ought not to do, and yet, when
your lordship blamed him, you were told that you had a
strange animosity against the Irish. This is enough to prove
that the state of things as to the hierarchy has been presented
to the Pope in such a way as to make him believe the very re-
verse of what is true. So far as regards the colleges, the most
complete, and I must add, the most deliberate mistake has
existed from the first, mid continues to exist, at Rome. They
were founded with the purest motives by Sir It. Peel, in
accordance with the united and expressed will of the elerey •
and laity, and with a clear understanding that they would
be founded un the principle of inked education—the only
system practicable in Ireland, and which, after the experi-
ence of many years in the national schools, was seen to work
with perfect security to the faith and morals of the 400,000
children educated in them by the bounty of the state. Ob-
jections were raised, and new guarantees demanded by
some of the bishops, uud in every important point Lord
Ileytesbury acceded to their wishes. Other securities
were demanded of me, and were granted, and yet the
opposition of Rome continues to be as unqualified
eta it was at first ; and although these colleges guard
the faith and morals of the students in a manner not
. .

to be found in any other institution in Europe,
and although they have been established a whole
year without any accusation of misconduct being made to
the authorities against any of the students (iii number
about 100), although they were very attentive to their re-
ligious and had lived chiefly with their parents
and tutors, instead of being exposed to temptation. by living
away from home, and deprived of exact surveillance, the
mad clamour of infidelity still continuo. in Ireland, and
comes back to us re-echoed from Rome. I call it mad,'
because: not one syllable of proof has been brought forward I
to prove the accusation; and when it we., demanded, all
our opponent,' could say was, that there was not u due pro-
portion of catholic professors. Now, no person was more
annoyed than I was est there not being a due proportion of
catholic candidates for the chairs. But whose fault Iva; it ?
WAS it any wonder, when, long before the election, the
fiercest denunciation.; were read every day in the writings
of Dr. M'llalc, and in all that portion of the press over
which flee priesthood exercise a despotic control? • • •
Oreat complaints have been made to your lord-
ship about Mr. Freeborn, and you have been asked how
you can have confidence in the British government when
they allowed such a loan at Rome. I do not pretend to
know much of this matter, but I am certain that some of
the things alleged against him iu your letter are exagge-
rated, and in all such eases one should hear the other title.
Mr. Freeborn has, I believe, proved clearly that in giving
passports to certain persons, and renelaug them quickly
away, be promoted the cause of order and the safety Of the
city. But I may be permitted to ask, on the othe r hand,
what we ought to think of the government of the Pope,
who, in violation of the rules for the nomination of bishops,
sent here a man like Dr. Cullen, whose only object has been
to destroy the colleges established by the legislature, and
maintained by the State, and to extinguish the national
schools, in which 500,000 of the poorest CIIISACS are
educated, without an attempt to provide for the defi-
ciency of establishments of these two kinds, and thus leave
the middle and poorest class in brutal ignorance, without
troubling himself about the consequences that would fol-
low ? Dr. Cullen, moreover, published a synodical address,
in which he did not stop at condemning the colleges, but
sought to set class against class, and to represent every poor
man us a martyr and every rich man as a tyrant. There is
more rank communism in that address than could be chemi-
cally distilled trout'. de Vetrieour's whole book. It cannot
be alleged that all this opposition arises front religious seal,
because at this moment Dr. Wile& and others would
induce the students to leave the colleges where their
faith and morals are protected, and to go to Trinity
College its Dublin, a place eminently proteatant, where
there are no guarantees for faith, and where there is
every temptation to apostacy. Mr. Lucas, editor of the
Tabkt—one of the most virulent and most offensive
newspapers in Europe—is in constant communication with
Dr. Cullen, and is, moreover, the chief instigator, as his
paper is the organ, of the tenant league, the object of which
is to abolish the rights of properly, and to shake to its very
foundation everything on which society depends. Ile is
ably assisted in this work of regeneration by the priests,
who, with this end in view, have fraternised with the pres-
byterial clergy. But not a word of counsel or reprimand
has been uttered by the primate; on the contrary, leis
journal applauds, and the editor acts in the league with Mr.
Duffy, of the Notion, who would have been at this hour a
deported felon if one of the jury had not perjured himself.
It is very true that the rola, ordered the clergy not to med-
dle in politic. This he did in NV, in the emus rescript in
which he condemned thecolleges. Thesecond part was received
with reverence, as hostile to the government, and the
first was obeyed by the clergy rushing headlong into the
revolutionary movement of lrittl, when nothing saved
them, except their belief in the impartiality of the
government—in which they were quite rigid ; because,
if the legal evidence of their guilt had been to strong
as its moral certainty, several of them would have now
been along with their friends in exile in \'an Diemen's
Lund.
Not a word of reprimand came from the Pope to Ireland
against these unchristian and unclerical proceedings—not a
sign of disapproval of the disobedience of his orders—not an
attempt was made by the primate (although invested with
special powers to have the commands of the l'opc executed)
to keep the clergy within the sphere of their duties. And now
let me ask of you, my dear lord, what could I, or rather
what could any unprejudiced spectator of passing
events think, or what could one infer as to the COIM•
quences of all the things which I have mentioned, and
others which I need not add? What could one think,
except that spiritual jurisdiction was not the abject they
had in view, but rather political hostility—that between
wheelies and protestants good will should not exist—that
confusion must be promoted ii tout prix, and that fur arms
with which to assault England Rome uses Ireland as an in-
exhaustible arsenal ? Certainly a state of thing, such as I
have in part described is much more than a compensation
fur the peccadilloes of a vice-consular agent, and gives me
the right to ask wheat confidence could England have in the
papal government ?
I believe that a great part of the fatal evils which have
and of which the end will not be seen in our lifetime,
might have been hindered if we had had a
than
represen-
tative in Rome ; and no one laments more than I du that the
assent of so many catholic peers on so vital a question per-
mitted Lord Eglinton to obtain the insertion of Lis oh-
noxious clause in the bill. My own desire would have been
to abandon the bill altogether when it was necessary to take
it with is prove ion insulting to the Pope us a sovereign
prince., and which he could not and ought not to have en-
dured. But if we had had a disereet minister accredited to
his Holiness, who would have told him the real truth about
England, he would never have thought of reconstructing
the hierarchy in the way he has done. If he had thought
only of the interests and the wants of the catholic church, if
the bishops had been appointed without ostentation ; if there
had been assigned to them districts without territorial titles,
without a demarcation of the country, or assumption of the
powers of government, no one would have had a right to
complain. and I am certain that no remonstrance would
have been heard ; but the Pope's bull and the Cardinal's
pastoral presented themselves suddenly to the astonished
nation, in terms which made no account of the sovereign, of
the church, and of the public opinion of England. When
England was treated like a heathen country, which, having
been conquered, was now going to be occupied, who could
wonder at the people's believing that a serious and studied
insult bad been offered them, and that they prepared to
resist it, and to show their resentment ? I admit and I
! deplore that this was done in an extravagant manner, that
the fiercest bigotry has been displayed, and that senti-
ments have been expressed and demands made which, in
this enlightened age, I should have hoped were impos-
sible; but the people were in a frenzy—thought, nut only
that their Queen had been affronted, and their religion
attacked, but also that their civil liberty, indissolubly con-
joined with our protestant institutions, was in danger by
means of the assumption and the exercise of an exorbitant
power on the part of the catholic church, and by the esta-
blishment amongst us of ale canon law of Rome, which accord-
ing to the cardinal's own words, wasagreat object iu the resto-
ration of the hierarchy. It is useless to say that all the
uproar has been for a mere nothing, seeing that the Eng-
lish are neither stupid nor excitable ; and it cannot he for a
light cause, nor for a mere misunderstanding, that this
universal alarm and this ungovernable zeal have taken this
shape.
On one point, and that a most important one, the Pope
has acted against the advice he had received, and the pru-
dence of wnich could not be doubted. Lord Minto, when
he discussed with his Holiness the renewal of diplomatic
relations between England and Route, explained the grave