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APPENDIX

long since recognised that if his Church is to play the masterful part, which he and those who joined it with him forty years ago imagined, it is essential that its leaders should be in harmony with the Irish, who form so large a portion of their flocks in London, and the other great cities of England and Scotland, and who are naturally not of the better type eulogised by the Bishop of Derry.[1]

  1. It will, I feel sure, be news to most of my readers, British and Australian, that there are only, according to the "Catholic Directory," some 1,354,000 Roman Catholics in England and Wales; but it is even more astonishing to find that at least three quarters of a million are of Irish birth or parentage. Deducting the foreigners, it is fairly estimated that the English Roman Catholics do not exceed half-a-million. Moreover, this element seems steadily decreasing, or rather it does not keep pace with the natural increase in the general population. See that most suggestive article on "The Roman Catholics in England," in the Quarterly Review for January 1888, the authorship of which has been so much canvassed in religious and literary circles. The writer, who is evidently well-informed of what goes on "behind the scenes," makes the following severe strictures on the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Westminster:—"Above all, the policy of Cardinal Manning has been to advertise himself and his Communion, by continually keeping it before the public eye, and by posing in his own person as an English patriot and philanthropist, though simultaneously abetting the National party in Ireland, and assenting to, if not enjoining, that dead silence as to the crimes of the National League, which has been steadily observed by the Anglo-Roman Episcopate, whose flocks are composed mainly of Irish by birth or descent, and who are afraid of telling them unpalatable, however wholesome and necessary truths"—(p. 51). It is highly honourable to the English Roman Catholics, numerically a minority in their own communion, even in their own land, who, under the circumstances, and nobly led by the Duke of Norfolk, have remained so faithful to the loftier traditions of their loyal forefathers.