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mont and Genoa, in the Milanese and Venetian state, and indeed throughout all Lombardy, how well is the soil cultivated, what manufactures of silk, velvet and paper and other commodities flourish! The King of Sardinia will suffer no idle hands in his territories, no beggar to live by the sweat of another's brow; it has been made penal at Turin to relieve a strolling beggar. To which I might add that the person whose authority will be of the greatest weight to you, even the Pope himself, is at this day endeavouring to put new life into the trade and manufactures of his country.' Berkeley was, what is called in metaphysics, an idealist; that is, roughly speaking, he held that the external world was but one's own idea projected outwards and fixed outside one like a man's face in a looking-glass. I am not surprised. I could hardly save myself from idealism whilst I was reading those passages I have quoted from his pamphlet. It is hard to trust one's eyes to the reality of things when reading such cruel effrontery and untrammelled nonsense from the pen of a man of a singularly acute and powerful mind. But his economic idealism was in theory to be applied only to the Papists whom each Protestant soul in his diocese cost in tithes every year £10 a soul to save. In practice he pinned his faith to a princely income, to the

extensive mensal lands which stretched out from his palace at Cloyne, to the four acres of a garden noted for fruit-culture, especially strawberries which his Lordship loved, to the surrounding shrubberies and the winding walks, some of them more than a quarter of a mile long, and adorned with hedges of myrtles, six feet high, planted by the bishop's own hand, or leading away among sequestered and over-hanging crags of limestone into caverns of unknown depth such as the imagination of the people might colonise with traditions of fairies, gob

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lins, and ghosts. I am merely giving a rough sketch of the place as described by one of Berkeley's immediate successors in a letter to Dr. Parr. Berkeley, the apostle of economics and industry to the Irish priests and people of his day, gave his services free and uncalled for; Berkeley, the Protestant bishop, enjoyed as large an income for doing nothing, as the Catholic bishop and all the priests of Cloyne together. Pity on those Papists who remained uninfluenced by his example of industry in cultivating strawberries and planting myrtle hedges! But why do I at all revive what was written so long ago? Because, as an expression of feeling, it is no better and no worse, but of a piece with similar counsels of insult and insincerity, which have been given to the priests and people of Ireland in unbroken succession down to this day.

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LECKY writes: "For reasons which have been often explained, Catholicism is, on the whole, less favourable to the industrial virtues than Protestantism, but yet the case of France, of Flanders, and of the Northern States of Italy, show that a very high standard of industry may, under favourable circumstances, be attained in a Catholic country. But, in Ireland the debilitating influence of numerous church holidays, and of a religious encouragement of mendicancy, was felt in a society in which employment was rare, intermittent, and miserably underpaid, and in which Catholic industry was legally deprived of its appropriate rewards. Very naturally, therefore, habits of gross and careless idleness prevailed which greatly aggravated the poverty of the nation. At the same time the class of middlemen or large leaseholders was naturally encouraged, for whilst they escaped some of the most serious evils of the landlord, they were guarded by the law from all Catholic competition, and accordingly possessed the advantage of monopoly. It was soon discovered that one of the easiest ways for a Protestant to make money was by taking a large tract of country from an absentee landlord at a long lease, and by letting it at rack-rents to Catholic cottiers." He is here writing of the condition of Irish Catholics at the time when Berkeley wrote. It is a clever amalgam of truth and falsehood, in which

anti-Catholic bigotry is glossed over with that apparent philosophic impartiality which Lecky affects. As between Catholicism and Protestantism generally, he is on the whole an impartial writer. But that does not absolve him from the stain of non-Catholic partiality. We must recollect that he was not a Protestant of the ordinary Anglican or Church-of-Ireland species. His Protestant doctrine of private judgment had led him to ignore the supernatural; and the form of Protestantism in which he thought he had found salvation was simple naturalism. He discusses every question which bears on Catholicism from a naturalistic standpoint, taking for granted that the Catholic principle as opposed to his own is for a certainty false, and then proceeds to discuss the consequences of the Catholic principle using his own as the criterion of his judgment-a most unfair and unphilosophic thing to do. Hence, whilst as between Catholicism and what is called orthodox Protestantism he is impartial on the whole, as between Catholicism and naturalism he is as keen a bigot as the rest of them. The same narrow philosophy pervades the writings of agnostics generally. They have a fundamental, positive, and definite doctrine, that man knows nothing about what is called the supernatural. If they themselves happen not to know it, let thein by all means enjoy their agnosticism if they can; but when they say that it is "unknowable," they make their minds the measure of the minds of all men, including St. Thomas, Leibnitz, Pascal, Rosmini, and Brownson; and thus they assume their own personal conviction to be the criterion of truth. From the fact that they have passed beyond the stage of partiality towards the ordinary forms of orthodox Protestantism as against Catholicism, they pose before the public as the only men of disinterested investigation. They assume to have earned and to possess a monopoly of impartial criticism all round. The fact is that one can

find in agnosticism and naturalism bigots quite as blue as a Belfast Orangeman. They want the public to grant them a patent for impartiality because they impartially reject all principles except their own.

Burke called trade, commerce and manufactures, "the gods of the economical politicians." Thus to the mind of Lecky, Protestantism is preferable to Catholicism, inasmuch as it is more favourable to the industrial virtues; and having committed himself to that opinion he directly passes on to commit himself, even in the same sentence, to the same inconsistency to which Sir Horace Plunkett has committed himself. Indeed, the social economics of Sir Horace and himself are so closely allied that either they must have compared notes, or they sat under the same master, took away his teaching and wrote it down as their independent thinking; unless the case be that one of them borrowed his philosophy from the other.

As I have already shown, I am not, as a Catholic, at all concerned to prove that Catholicism is better or even equal to non-Catholicism of any kind in the matter of trade, commerce, manufactures, or making money. Those matters, of course, form part of human duty; but to take them as implying a philosophy of human life is as foolish as to take a fraction of a man's body for the whole. If the cases of France, Flanders, and Italy, show that a "a very high standard of industry may be attained in a Catholic country," what are those “ favourable circumstances" which he wedges in as a necessary complement to Catholicism? Is it that they should be without an England to misgovern them? If so, what

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about those "industrial virtues" of Protestantism? it that they should start on their industrial career by rejecting the supernatural? If so, then his own cases, especially Belgium, belie his own principles. He and Sir Horace stand on the same turf-bank, and both tumble into the same bog-hole. The rest of the extract I have

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