from Home Rule.” “Very likely,” answered the Catholic Home-Rulers; “we are quite prepared to find a large percentage of these men fall off, but enough of them will remain faithful and true to make the movement a success; and especially the Protestant youth of the country henceforth will be ours.”

Time—at all events such time as has since elapsed—has quite vindicated this view.

Meantime the country was pronouncing gradually but decisively on the movement. Within the first six months the following corporations, town commissions, and boards of guardians passed formal votes endorsing its principles:

Cork(Municipal Council).
Limerick““
Athlone(Town Commission).
Ballinasloe““
Clones““
Dungarvan““
Galway““
Kingstown““
Longford““
Nenagh““
New Ross““
Mullingar““
Queenstown““
Tuam““
Dublin(Board of Guardians).
Cork““
Drogheda““
Galway““
Kilkenny““
Kilmallock““
Millstreet““
LimerickFarmers’ Club
Cork““
Mallow““

This was barely a few months’ work as to the pronouncement of popularly-elected public bodies. A number of public meetings in various parts of the country, attended by tens of thousands of the

people, gave a further stamp of approval and a cheer of welcome to the movement.

The mode of electing the governing body or council of the association was peculiar. In place of the usual mode—proposing the list at the annual public meeting, and passing it there and then—the members of the council were elected by ballot-papers; each member of the association, no matter where resident, receiving his paper and exercising his vote as well as if he lived on the spot in Dublin. Much curiosity existed to see the result of this secret ballot-vote in a large body so mixed in religious class and (in a sense) political opinions. Two-thirds or three-fourths of the voters would be Catholics—was it not a grievous peril that by any chance they might ballot in a nearly exclusively Catholic council, and thus sow misgiving and mistrust amongst the Protestants? But never yet have the Catholics of Ireland, in private or in public, failed to refute by a noble tolerance the evil suspicions of their foes. The very first council thus elected (under circumstances, too, that precluded concert or arrangement as to either general or particular result) turned out to be composed of thirty-two Catholics and twenty-nine Protestants; and two Protestants headed the poll![145] The announcement had a profound effect, not only in cementing and solidifying the new union of parties and creeds within the organization, but also in spreading its principles abroad. A good idea of the varied

classes composing the governing body thus elected may be gathered from the following analysis of the Home-Rule Council for 1872:

Catholic clergy,5
Protestant clergy,4
(The late) Lord Mayor,1
Aldermen,7
Deputy lieutenants,3
Doctors of medicine,3
Knights,3
Justices of the peace,4
Lieutenant-Colonel,1
Members of Parliament,5
Queen’s counsel,1
Solicitors,2
Town councillors,3

The British Liberal party, who at first pooh-poohed the “Home-Rule craze,” at length began to take alarm; for without the Irish vote that party could neither attain to nor retain office. They warned the Catholic hierarchy to discourage this mischievous business. It was at best “inopportune”; it would arrest Mr. Gladstone’s beneficent design of settling the Catholic university education question; and would only “play the Tory game.” Liberalism was not going to die easily. Things came to a crisis in the Kerry election of 1872. On the death that year of Lord Kenmare, his son, Viscount Castlerosse, then Catholic-whig-liberal member for Kerry, attained to the earldom, and thus created a vacancy in the parliamentary representation. By a compact between the great landlords of the county, Whig and Tory, thirty years previously, it was agreed to “halve” the county between themselves: one Protestant Tory member from the great house of Herbert of Muckross, and one Catholic Whig from the noble house of Kenmare—an “alliance offensive and defensive” against all third parties