The speech of Mr. Mayne, M.P. for Mid-Tipperary, at the
meeting of the Dublin Corporation at the City Hall on Thursday, was a very frank admission indeed that the Papal Rescript is already operating, and operating powerfully. " He would tell them," he said, "of one incident from his own county. There, as all over the land, the people acted in the agrarian warfare under the advice and with the co-operation of the priests ; but now that was at an end, and the priests had been compelled to withdraw from that co-operation, and the people would no longer have recourse to them for counsel. What was the result ? Four farms evicted some years ago had continued derelict while the priests and people were banded together, and while the people felt that they were acting not only with the approval but with the assistance of their clergy ; but these farms, every one of the four, had been grabbed since the appearance of the Rescript ; and more than that, the men who grabbed them put the Rescript forward as their justifica- tion. They must look facts in the face, and it was the fact that clergymen who had given every assistance and taken their full share of work in the movement could not give their assistance any longer, at all events if the Rescript remained in force and unmodified." That is as explicit as it can possibly be, and Mr. Mayne goes on to say that because this moral rescript has political consequences, it must be regarded as a political rescript "from first to last." He might just as well say that
because " Thou shalt not kill " and " Thou shalt not steal " are moral laws which take effect in the political and criminal legis- lation of every civilised State, therefore, they must be regarded as intrigues on the part of Moses with the politicians of unborn generations whose very parts of speech did not, in the time of Moses, exist, even in germ.
