No society can be conceived better adapted to keep working men from those
bad associations which we have been considering, or more calculated to
bring every blessing to individuals, and above all to homes. The public
house, the drinking saloon, the music hall, the obscure “shebeen,”
wherever, in one word, drink is sold, is the antechamber of the secret
society for men, and ruin both of men and women. On this point permit
me to be plain with you, my Catholic fellow-countrymen, as I may call
you—for I find that the majority, indeed the mass of the Catholic
congregations in Edinburgh, as well as in Glasgow, in Manchester,
in Leeds, in Birmingham, and in all the large towns of England and
Scotland, are, men and women, mainly, if not entirely, of Irish birth
or Irish blood, the children of Irish parents. It is, the world knows,
from you that the faith has come to Great Britain, by the providence
of God in this nineteenth century. In the Highlands, I am told, there
are some twelve thousand genuine Scotch Catholics. In the Lowlands it
is doubtful whether so many genuine Scotch Catholics can be found; but
the number of Catholics in Scotland is a quarter of a million, and the
excess comes from the Irish, whose migration has made the Church. I
believe the proportion in England, notwithstanding the conversion of so
many by reason and grace, and the holding out of several old families,
is still greater in favour of the Irish element. From the converts and
the good old Catholic families come many blest with vocations for the
Priesthood, who devote their lives with great zeal to the service of the
race which forms the majority—the mass of the Church. Now I praise that
mass, to which I myself belong, when it deserves to be praised; but you
will allow me the liberty of a friend to blame a portion of it when it
deserves blame. God, Who knows all hearts, knows that I desire to do the
blaming as a friend. I praise you for what I see you do. The Churches,
the Cathedrals—magnificent in many cases as both are—the Schools, the
Houses of the Teaching Orders, are mainly the work of your hands. The
Priesthood that has been brought to minister everywhere, and the active
Orders of men and women who teach, are kept in the very largest measure,
by you. Notwithstanding all your burdens, your poverty, and your local
wants—great everywhere—you give with a willingness unequalled by any
other race, to every good work. Of you, at home and abroad, generous,
faithful people, it may be said, that you realize to the very letter the
truth that it is better to give than to receive. And what a blessing do
you not in return receive in this land, when you remain faithful to the
teachings of that religion for which God has enabled you to do so much!
There is not a city I have visited that I do not find some amongst you,
who came to this country as poor as the rest, already risen to affluence
and ease, sometimes to public and honourable position amongst their
fellow-citizens differing from them more widely in religion than in
race. There is no place where I have not been consoled with the signs of
substantial prosperity amongst you. Pleasant it is for me, when visiting
the many educational establishments now, thank God, so plentifully
diffused over the face of the country, to find your sons in the Colleges,
your daughters in the Convents, and to know that not a few of them
dedicate themselves to the highest service of God. These prove the
happy, holy homes which blessed them with true parental love and care,
and cast round their childhood the influences of religion. I have at
this moment before my mind’s-eye the death of an Irish mother who passed
to eternity, since I commenced my present journey, consoled by having
her death-bed surrounded by children every one of whom were holy, and
several of whom had the happiness of being either Religious or Priests.
This valiant Catholic mother came to one of the great cities of England
the wife of an Irish working man. She had her reward surely in this life
as well as in the next. In your own midst, there are instances of the
honest prosperity which blesses the sober, well-conducted, though poor
man, who comes to this country to make an honest livelihood. If he be but
faithful to his religion, his life is always happy. His end is always
holy. His children “rise up and call him blessed.” He is a blessing to
the Church and to this country. I could easily prolong this picture; but
I must speak plainly upon another. I have seen even in this city hundreds
of little children, as I passed yesterday, Sunday, through your streets;
many of them were Catholics, certainly. Poor children! they saluted me
reverently. They were, I found, sent—for the law happily forces that—to
the Catholic School. That was the reason why the light of Faith was in
their little eyes, which brightened at the sight of a Priest; but alas!
the sign of hunger was upon the cheeks and upon the almost naked limbs
of many of them, without shoes, without stockings, and in rags. I have
seen children too, many of whom I know to be Catholic and Irish, selling
newspapers in the streets on weekdays, and preparing, boys and girls, for
careers I shudder to contemplate, after a very few years. On yesterday I
had evidence of the cause of their sad state. I saw men and women, the
fathers and mothers of these children, crowding round public-houses,
openly intoxicated, and in consequent wretchedness upon the streets. I
know of course that a large proportion of these were not Irish, but I
know also from inquiries I made, that a large proportion was. These
were the degraded, abominable parents who reduced their own little ones
to the sad condition in which the whole world could see them. I do not
suppose that in a respectable gathering like this such drunkards are
found, but I allude to the matter in the hope that my words and opinions
may, through you who are here, come to them; that they may know, that
while I praise my beloved fellow country people for what they have done
so nobly and so well for the works of religion, I have no words strong
enough to reprobate the conduct of those who give themselves to drink in
this country, at all. I say, at all. For to commence with—where, I ask,
is the working man to be found, or the working man’s wife, who, having
undertaken the care and responsibility of the present and the future of
the numerous family it is generally their lot to have, can afford to
spend earnings which belong to their children, on the pernicious and
expensive luxury of drink? A working man needs every fraction he can earn
by his labour for the education and maintenance of his children, for the
rainy day, for the season of sickness, for an honest independence in his
old age. He cannot be honest to his children, or to himself; he cannot
advance religion, education, or the cause of God, if he drinks. When a
working man loses his employment, when he sickens, when he gets into
trouble, we invariably find drink at the bottom of it. There is nothing
that one can praise in the man who practises this vice. He is mean, and
he is cruelly dishonest always. He drinks the shoes off his children’s
feet, the clothes off their backs, the bit from out their mouths, the bed
from under them, the home from over them, and sends them upon society,
boys degraded, and girls so lost that I cannot contemplate the picture.
It is therefore that good Pastors like Cardinal Manning, who (because of
his numerous Irish flock, regards himself in London as an Irish Bishop)
have undertaken a life and death crusade against this devil that preys
upon the vitals of their most choice and devoted people. It is therefore
that Cardinal MacCabe and others have made so many personal efforts to
uproot this vice. My own Archbishop, for many years, while Bishop of
Ossory, in Ireland, practised total abstinence, in order to give his
people an example. He is determined to make the same sacrifice in the
new and vastly more extended field of labour which the Vicar of Christ
has committed to his care at the Antipodes. I have great faith in such
acts of self-denial coming from such quarters. When those of the flock
who need restraint see the pastors placed over them by God make such
sacrifices for their salvation, there cannot, it seems to me, be much
doubt about the issue. What they can do, what such men as the late Mr.
A. M. Sullivan and others have done, without any constraining necessity,
others, who owe such restraint to themselves and their families, can do.
For the mere temporal well-being of every working man, and every working
man’s family, I would be glad to see every such man a total abstainer.
But when I consider the evils to which the eternal salvation of the Irish
working man, in these countries especially, is exposed by the habit of
drinking, I can find no words strong enough to express my anxiety to see
him give up intoxicating drinks absolutely and for ever. The sacrifice
is small, the gain enormous. God grant that all whom my words may
reach—all Irish Catholics—may think with me on this point. Should that
be so, the consequences would be indeed consoling. The Church of God
might well rejoice. The days of secret societies would for the Irish end
for ever, and for a certainty they would carry out to its fulness the
glorious destiny given them of planting the Faith all the world over,
and resisting to the bitter end the wiles, the deceits, and finally the
last and most terrible onset of Antichrist against God, His Church, and
Christian civilization throughout the world.