I have been at noontide and midnight among Terry Alts, Lady Clares, Whitefeet, and reviving Rockites; and after I left the Richmond Prison among Molly Maguires and Tipperary men—and I now proceed to prove how wellgrounded was the atrocious and revolting lie of Scorpion Stanley, and therefore pray with profound reverence permission to give your Lordship the rationale of a Protestant pacificator's mode of producing tranquillization, by the analogy, of course I do not say identity, of his relation to the Catholic Priest at the Confessional.

Instead of diffusing the subject over several cases, I select one as an illustration, but that is a very remarkable one.

In the year 1831, during the time of the Terry Alt insurrection in Clare, Jones, Gleeson and Hogan, dressed in female attire, with painted faces, and bonnets on their heads, shot an unfortunate herdsman near Cratloe Wood, and then in open day, danced with their guns in their hands a reel round the body of their slaughtered victim.

In some time after Jones gave me up his gun in Cratloe Wood, about midnight, on an occasion when I was out in the execution of my duty as O'Connell's Head Pacificator of Ireland.

I was accompanied in my work of peace over the mountain side, by my lamented friend, the late Rev. Dr. Fitzgerald of Cratloe, and by a young gentleman, then a divinity student of Maynooth, and now a Catholic clergyman, the Rev. Mr. Considine.

Well, I went to England after the pacification of Clare, and returned in 1832; and in the spring of 1833 I was sent by my bemoaned leader among the Kilkenny Whitefeet.

After the repression of that outbreak I returned to Clare, my native county.

In some time after I heard that Jones had committed another savage murder, and I sent him word that I wished to meet him.

We did meet him at midnight in Tradree; I was accompanied by Mr. Considine, still a student.

I whistled, and Jones came out of a brake of bushes. On his meeting me, I said, " Jones, do you remember the night when you gave me up your gun in Cratloe Wood, and the conversation I had with you when we were walking alone, Father Fitzgerald and Mr. Considine being at some distance before us, on the night when I got up so much arms on the mountain ?"

He replied, "I do remember it very well, Sir."

I then said, "Well, as you do, you must recollect that you asked me what agreement had been made by the Lord Lieutenant when he was in Ennis ?"

I told you that "the arrangement made by his Lordship, Dr. McMahon, with the Marquis of Anglesea, was this: that any of the Terry Alts and Lady Clares who committed only the ordinary outrage of the country, and who, after giving up their arms should return to courses of peace and order, would not be disturbed;-but for those who had committed murder, or any crime of that kind, there could be no hope of mercy."

I then said to him, "The fact is, Jones, I then knew who you were as well as I do now; though I did not seem to know it, but my business was to get arms out of the Terries' hands, and to save them if I could.

"I thought that after this solemn warning, you would try

to make your escape to America, or to some other country, where, by a life of penitence, you would try to make atonement for whatever you had done wrong at home-but now, after two years, I find you with the blood of another man upon your soul !"

"Where is this to end, Jones; are you to murder every man that you take it into your head intends to give information against you?”

"From me you well know that you are as safe as from your own Priest at the Confessional; for I told the Terry Alts, and Lady Clares in this county, and the Whitefeet in Kilkenny, that although I am a Protestant, they should be as safe in talking with me, as in making a Confession in the Chapel to their own Clergy."

This, my venerated Lord Bishop, is the moral analogy I have alluded to;-and let any one show me the living man, or the man who ever lived in Ireland, who being in the closest co-operation with the Catholic Clergy, and using the magic name of O'Connell as his talismanic spell, did so much as I did, to preserve, or to restore the peace of Ireland.

The Catholic Clergy are, as your Lordship well knows, in every part of Ireland wonder-workers, by legitimate means-without the violation of the sanctity of the Confessional, in preventing murder and other crime.

When I was in this county in 1845, I was reviled as a "Thug" by the Evening Packet, because I did not transmute myself into an Informer!

There is very much more of deep interest interwoven with the story of Jones-but I abstain from over-laying this communication to your Lordship with more matters than are

absolutely necessary for the purpose of demonstrating not merely by absolute facts, but by ethical analogy in the case of a Protestant, the inestimable value of the sanctified secresy of the Confessional, in preventing or repressing of Irish crime;-of crime in retribution for other ghastly crime, committed by perpetrators who ought to possess moral illumination superior to that of the Irish frize-coated peasant. One incident I must not omit.

Before meeting Jones the second time, I went specially to the Palace of my illustrious and ever-lamented friend, that glorious Prelate, Doctor M'Mahon, the Catholic Lord Bishop of Killaloe, and told him I was that night going to meet Jones the murderer, to try, if I could, to divert him from his course of crime.

His sanctified Lordship, not only condescended to express his fervid approbation of my work of peace, and preventing multiplied murder, but he gave me his benediction on my retiring from his presence.

I may as well mention what Jones said to me that night, when he declared that he did not intend to be a second time a homicide:

"I did not intend to kill him, Mr. Steele; I had reason to think that he was preparing to give information against me, and I wanted to frighten him by giving him a terrible beating. If I wanted to kill him, Sir," continued he, taking a brace of pistols from his breast pockets and displaying them to Mr. Considine and me, "I could have killed him very easily."

I pray leave to conclude by stating that when I went on my three missions of peace into Ulster, it was solely to warn the Catholics not to interfere with the intended marching

of the Orangemen, then recently LEGALIZED by the expiration of the Processions Act.

Wishing your Lordship, from my heart, many and very happy returns of Christmas and New Years, I have the honor to remain, your Lordship's most sincere and faithful servant and friend, THOMAS STEELE.

The Catholic Lord Bishop of Derry.

My Dear Sir,-I have read with much attention the terms for a re-union of Repealers, and am happy to have to say that they are such as to meet with my unqualified approval. I fondly hope that no obstructions will be thrown in the way of a cordial, perfect reconciliation between all sections of Repealers. It is the one thing necessary for us. Division has ever been the curse of our country; and what we are, the most miserable people on earth, we would not have been, were it not for our foolish, our wicked altercations. Fortunately for us, we can now unite without any compromise of principle; recent events have removed the ground of difference, and have made the feelings and duties of all parties identical. We have not now much left of our constitution to contend about. Indeed, for my own part, during my mission in Ireland, I but seldom had the gratification of seeing its beautiful theory practically and beneficially illustrated. Three-fourths of our people were placed beyond its pale, and depended for life and liberty on the nod of some village lord, who was as much an autocrat as the Emperor of Russia. There was neither