THE NEW DECREE.
[To TER EDITOR Or THE " SPBCTATOR.") have to congratulate you on your new ally. The decree Ne ternere might be treated perhaps as non-committal, but the Vatican has given itself away completely by this second shaft from its armoury. Clearly now both have a common aim : Home Rule is the enemy, the time draws near, and so Rome and the Spectator are at last in the same boat. I hope, Sir, you will prove equal to the occasion : your logic and the Pope's intimidation should prove a powerful combination. Fancy his Holiness playing on the anti-Popery string in John Bull's composition so as to frighten the poor fool from dealing an unintended blow at Papal interests in Ireland ! It was Carlyle, I think, who said somewhere that there were quarrels of such a kind that even the Prince of Darkness, himself appearing to give help on the right side, has to be welcomed, and doubtless you will treat the Pope handsomely now that he has come into the fray as a militant Unionist. All help, as Vespasian said of all money, is good. You will realize the difficulties of the alliance no doubt, but they should not prove insuperable. The Pope may be under a delusion Home Rule may not really in the event work to the undoing of Rome Rule, as the Vatican clearly dreads; but still a bad thing is a bad thing even if it is not bad all round, and so you can both fall on Mr. Redmond as the common enemy and make your separate profits in his defeat. Still there is a comic element in the business, and there is sometimes danger fn. this. People in earnest are apt to grow suddenly savage when they suspect they are being laughed at and a good few English people, mind you, on both aides are in earnest about Ireland. If they suspect- the Vatican is playing the "Fee-foh- funi" game with them to frighten them away from a policy towards Ireland which it does not want there will be trouble. I shall be curious to see what you will do to prevent the people of England from seeing the Pope is trying to humbug them ; but doubtless to sit tight and say nothing is the safest policy. For Redmond will naturally say but little either. But if even an inkling of the truth gets out you are lost. Politics, Sir, make people purblind and more. I know that without narrowness nothing can be done, and that is why I have never done anything, for I am wide as humanity itself over all its interests. But the effects of Home Rule in this country can only be fitly compared to creating a fire under an iceberg, an inextinguishable fire, on which through the ages have risen convents and crucifixes, cathedrals and cloisters, and all parts of the ice themselves. The melting is even now going on, rapidly. I am an old Protestant, and it sometimes frightens me. The poor shrieking reactionaries—who, indeed, have my heartiest sympathy, for they are in no way respon- sible for the situation in which they are fated to helplessly shriek and gesticulate—have lately started over here to organize, amongst other things, -what they call a "League of Pure Literature" or something of that kind, a frantic effort to-keep out a whole new world, the existence of which the Irish have only just begun to suspect and now insist upon learning all about. They are at it here, a grave con- clave of conscious humbug, quiet laughter heard in the streets, mostly silence though, here and there a low growl. The poor Church—of course there is only one here—re- minds one of nothing so much as a clucking, terrified hen trying to rescue her duckling family from the newly found water. No wonder the Pope is alarmed; the Irish dissolution will stagger you, Sir ; the theatre is small, no doubt ; still there are some twenty millions of us, mostly not in Ireland, and somehow it will be a concentrated thing, but there will be no blood, scarcely violence even, but as the sacred prophet says when announcing an approaching Divine interposition in the affairs of his much tried country: "Behold, we shall show you
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