THE ENGLISH A.TTITUDE TOWARDS ROMAN CATHOLICS.
[TO TIIE EDITOR OF TUE "SPECTATOR."
SIII,—The article in the Spectator of August 3rd on this sub- ject recalls to my mind an interesting anecdote told me by an old Oxford friend of mine. He paid, generally, an annual visit to Cardinal Newman,—my friend as well as his Eminence having passed from Orford into the Roman Catholic burch. In conversation one day at the Edg- baston Oratory, my informant told me that he asked the Cardinal "what his opinion was as regarded the general feeling in England towards the Catholic Church." His Eminence replied:—" Individually I meet with nothing but kindness from my fellow-countrymen who are Protestants, but I consider that there has been no change in the national feeling towards the Catholic Church; it remains what it has ever been,—a mixture of hate and fear." This seems to be a view much in accord with those expressed in the article I refer to. Your remarks as to the Dreyfus case seem strange. It is not so long since Jews in flg,land were out- side the Constitution and were ineligible to sit in Parliament, and so far they were a " persecuted race" in Great Britain. They were, it is true, welcomed within the British dominions ; but that was not because they were Jews, but because they were rich. No doubt Lord Beaconsfield's influence had much to say- to the better and more just treatment in England of this once-persecuted race. The Irish Catholic repre- sentatives in Parliament, whether under Daniel O'Connell or since, always voted for the "emancipation of the Jews." This should be remembered when articles like the one I refer to [We neither hate nor fear the Roman Church, and we believe that English Roman Catholics, and the Roman' Catholics of the Empire generally, are thoroughly loyal citizens, and that we may count upon their patriotic devotion equally with that of their Protestant fellow- subjects. But that does not alter the fact that the attitude of the Roman Church en the Continent during the Dreyfus and .A.uti-Semite agitation, and also during the war, has been a source of profound disappointment and disillusion- ment to liberal-minded Englishmen. It is true that sixty years ago we did not allow Jews to sit in Parliament, but did our Protestant newspapers during the agitation of the Jew Bill look forward to the time when the sewers would be choked with the bodies of Jews and Roman Catholics? Yet that, inutatis mutandis, was the kind of language in regard to Jews and Huguenots indulged in by papers like the Libre Parole a year or two ago, while La Croix, an avowedly Church paper, was equally violent. It is true that O'Connell, though so loyal a Roman Catholic, was no Anti-Semite, but that makes the present attitude of many Ultramontanes on this question only the more disappointing.—ED. Spectator.]
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