The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1838-10-19 00:00:00

To sweep them from our sight.
No, sir, your plan will never answer. You might as well re-
require the worthy aldermen of the city of Londo❑ to dis-
gorge for the benefit of the poor the civic feasts of the last
wenty years. The image is t coarse one, but it is not there-
fore the less accurate.
Your next plan borders on the facetious. It is the having
a Protestant as well as a Catholic bishop in every diocese in
Ireland, at what you call the ample pay of £1,200 a-year
each. As to the Catholic bishops, we have already one in
every diocese; there being, I bless God, twenty-seven in all
—four archbishops and twenty-three bishops. They would
indeed consider £1,200 per annuli each an ample endow-
ment ; but they are too wise and too pious to have anything
at all to do with a state endowment. Pass them by.
You must surely he in jest when you talk of £1,200 a-
year to a Protestant bishop. \Vhs, what would a Protes-
tant bishop be with £1,200 a-year ? Oh, ridiculous !It
would he hardly sufficient for Mrs. Bishop's toilet, and the
little Misses Bishop's dancing and music " Cease your
funning."
But, in sober sadness, how your plan differs from that. of
the great Lord Stanley! He is a zealous Protestant, and
wishes to Protestantize Ireland; and finding the ProteStant
bishops a species of nuisance in his way, he at one blow
strikes off ten out of twenty-two : and very properly declares
there is less mischief in twelve than these would be in the
entire number; and yet you have the audacity (I must use
the word) to differ with so great it Protestant, and so great a
man, and to multiply Protestant bishops in Ireland, while he
is striking them down like ii nepins.
Your next project is the sale of the chnrch lands for the
purposes of founding schools and colleges. Here is, indeed,
a gleam of pure good sense, and I thank you heartily for it.
And then your plan for reducing the emoluments of the Pro-
testant livings is safe, salutary, and, above all, practical—
one which, I trust, we shall see effected, and in which I
readily offer to co-operate with you. Again—yourgood sense
breaks out when you contrast the real reform which has taken
place in the Catholic church, with that fraud, hypocrisy, fa-
naticism and plunder, which have been called " reformation"
by her enemies. The Catholic Church—unalterable, because
truth is unchangeable, in matters of faith and essential disci-
pline—has thrown off the rust, "the straw and the stubble,"
which ages of peace and security had flung upon some of her
practices. Besides, she has, banished for ever Simoniacle
contracts, and all the abuses of pluralities. You are quite
right in saving that thousands daily return to their fold—
"the one fold of the one Shepherd;" and I hope that the
spirit of Christian charity, the greatest of all virtues, will
come at length to he cultivated by the enemies of the eternal
church—enemies who have too long spent their time in vile
calumnies and useless revilings.
There is much matter for serious thought and statesman-
like counsel in your plan of emigration, and in your uotion of
the distribution of the crown lands. But it has been deemed
more flippant to cut short all wiser schemes, in order to fling
upon us a poor-law; to sink our property in workhouses, and
to make us rich, by causing us to support with money masses
of our poor at the expense of an establishment, the cost of
which would produce must valuable results, if employed in
the manner you suggest—in canals, in railroads, and in other
useful works. You are, however, mistaken in supposing
that the rent of land is higher in Ireland than in England.
It iI a mistake in which so many concur with you as to be
quite blameless.
Ido confess you have made me melancholy. There are in
some of your suggestions materials of incalculable utility to
Ireland. But how are they to be worked out ? What chalice
is there of obtaining a patient ❑nd thorough investigation of
the discordant elements which belong to our political econo-
my? Our absentee landlords—our hostile resident proprie-
tors--our impoverished agriculturists—our extinguished or
expiring manufactures—how is a remedy to be found for
these, and one thousrnd other evils with which the social
state in Ireland is tilled ? I will tell you. By a domestic
legislature—and by a domestic legislature alone.
The last experiment to obtain a fair consideration for the
claims of Ireland is being made ; and before twelve months
are over, 1, for one, shall, I believe, be driven to labour to
expunge for ever from the statute book that " desperate act
of scoundrelism," which you have characterised with no
less
severity than truth, as far as relates to the act itself.
I aur, Sir, &c., &c.,
DANIEL O'CONNELL.