ARCHBISHOP MANNIX.
(To THE EDITOR or THE " SPECTATOR.") SIR,—The very just action of the Government in preventing Archbishop biennia from landing in Ireland leads me to com- ment on some of his incendiary and seditious utterances that your readers may realize how far he wanders from the truth and how little he respects in his politics the Ten Command- ments and the Sermon on the Mount. I have been familiar
with the character of the man for three years from reading his speeches reprinted in the Irish World and the Gaelic American, two of the worst Sinn Fein papers in the United States. His fondness for terminological inexactitude fairly surpasses belief. To my mind 95 per cent. of all his speeches constitutes wide wandering from the path of sole truth, and the remaining 5 per cent. is non-pertinent truth.
My first example will be his utterance at the Roman Catholic Summer School at Plattsburgh, New York, in which he eclipsed all his previous records. These were his words: " England is, always has been, and always will be, the perma- nent enemy of the United States." Every one at all familiar with the history of the two countries knows at once that Mannix could not compress into a single sentence more un- truth than he put into that one. All decent men in my country know full well that for the three years before we entered the war the British were fighting our battles. That is the reason why so many of our youth enlisted in the Canadian or British Army, and why so many regretted that we did not declare war immediately after the sinking of the "Lusitania.' We recognized in the words of Ambassador Gerard that " a Sinn Fein Irishman is a Prussianized Irishman," and that the triumph of these two murderous and unscrupulous allies would be a disaster to Christian civilization and Christian democracy. When the Proclamation of the Irish Republic spoke of Germany as "Our Gallant Ally" we knew beyond disproof what many of us had realized before, that Germany's triumph meant the end of justice and peace for all self-respect- ing nations. But I wish to speak of other proofs that Mannix rejoices not in the truth but in its opposite.
During the Civil War Lancashire and other parts of England suffered terribly from the blockade, but twice, when France under Louis Napoleon urged the British Government to recog- nize the independence of the Southern Confederacy, the answer was in the negative. Bernharcli, ardent Prussian and Fenian, speaks in his book with amazement that the United Kingdom should then have lost a golden opportunity for seising the mastery of the world by splitting the United States into two nations. If Germany had then been in that position at that time she would have quickly shown what a bitter enemy of the United States Prussianized Germany under the Hohenzollerns is and always has been. Of other proofs that the United Kingdom is, and for centuries has been, our best friend among the nations of the world, many though they are, I can speak of only one or two. That far stretching boundary between the two great republics of North America, without a fort and without a cannon, symbolizes the actual and unbroken alliance between the two great English speaking nations. In the Spanish War you stood by us when Germany was ready to betray us.
But I wish to mention briefly two economic proofs which the man in the street scarcely sees or thinks of. First, your economic trade policy has contributed enormously to the growth and prosperity of the United States. As in the case of ungrateful, stupid and rebellions Sinn Fein Ireland, you have been far and away the best and most generous customer of the United States as you have been to her. Sinn Fein Ireland eagerly bites the hand of its best benefactor, but the great majority of intelligent people in my country recognize the great debt we owe to yon on this account. Still another great contribution to our moral and economic welfare occurred in the last decade of the last century, when Bryanism and the free silver heresy seemed likely to prevail. Both parties were coquetting with the evil temptation to vitiate the money standard of silver. Even Senator Lodge, as he now bitterly fights the noble League of Nations, so then deliberately urged in the Senate a trade boycott of the United Kingdom if she continued to adhere to the gold standard. But in the words of Seneca's Pilot, " You kept your rudder true," and thus saved not only my own country but the world from terrible financial disaster.
Here's another instance of how Mannix delights to murder the truth. At the laying of the corner stone of a church at Warwick, Australia, last April, this man, who bears the name of Christian so unworthily, on that solemn occasion poisoned the minds of his hearers by saying these words : " Ireland has older wrongs and deeper wounds than• Belgium." The fact is that Ireland joined the Union with Great Britain in 1800, with the support of every Roman Catholic Bishop and Arch- bishop. All the strong Roman Catholic communities, now seeth- ing with murderous rebellion, Dublin, Galway, Limerick and Cork, when the Roman Catholics had the right of suffrage, on equal terms with the Protestants, re-elected to the United Parliament the very same representative members who in the Irish Parliament voted for the Union. No more conclusive proof that Ireland joined the Union willingly can be demanded than these facts. Now just as Abraham Lincoln and his sup- porters triumphantly maintained that citizens of the Southern Confederacy in 1861 were pel.manently bound to stay in the Union, by the solemn compact of the citizens of the South in 1789, so every loyal British citizen should put down rebellion by force of arms if necessary, as Lincoln did, and sternly, insist that the Roman Catholic Sinn Feiners are just as much solemnly bound by the action of the Roman Catholic hierarchy of priesthood and laity of Southern Ireland in 1800. That contract should be just as binding in the minds of every loyal citizen, as in the minds of the devout adherents of the Roman Catholic Church the marriage contract, properly solemnized, can never be broken between man and woman until death do them part.
Let me say that it is the Sinn Fein Irish in Ireland, the United States and Australia who are the oppressors and not the oppressed. The Irishman and the Irishwoman in Ireland have larger political and civil rights and bear a lighter burden of taxation than in any other country in the world.—I am, London. (New Haven, Connoctiout, U.S.A.).
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