The Manchester Guardian publishes things, “incredible,” in England, concerning marauders and murderers, called police, in Ireland.

Everyone in this land who opens his lips has “incredible” tales to tell about them—tales too true.

Here are things, done of late, that never have been published. But the present writer has seen, or he has heard.

(a) In Tipperary, boys, but a short time since, were playing ball against an old disused half-ruinous house. Up drove the “police,” rushed out of their lorry, seized the boys, saying : “You burnt our barracks”— the building where the boys were playing was not the barracks, which (in another part of the town) had been burnt— ”and now we’ll have revenge on you.” They beat the boys with butt ends of revolvers, knocked them to the ground, kicked them, carried off five into a lorry, to deal further with them. Some of the boys escaped to tell the priests of the place. When the men saw the priests, they shouted : “What do you want here, you bloody sky-pilots?” At last, one R.I.C. man among them quieted them so far, that they let go the boys, some of whom were cut about the faces, and had to have their heads bandaged for wounds.

Then the “police” broke into a public-house, stole much liquor, and twenty pounds from the till.

Gentlemen,—You wish, I understand, to get some advice as to how you should set about studying the Social Question. I do not know how to meet your wishes better than by telling how I have myself proceeded ; though this, of course, exposes me to the risk of seeming to pose not only as an expert but as a model. Hence I must begin by saying that I know very little of the question on its economic side. There is, however, another side, the ethical, to which I have given some attention ; and as it is this alone which you are called on to study, perhaps it may help you to know how one who lays no claim to very special knowledge has proceeded in his investigations.

I began, like yourselves, with the treatise on Justice, as set forth in the class-book of this College ; which, in my time, was Gury. I do not know of any better way of beginning, except, perhaps, to devote more attention than we did to the title of Occupation ; which I now regard as the key to much of the question at issue between extreme Socialists and ourselves.

Well, three years after the close of my College course, the Land League was started ; and it was not very long till we heard it argued that there could be no private property in land, as “the exertion of labour in production is the only title to exclusive possession.”

It is much to be hoped that the revival of The Beggar's Opera will do neglected justice to the reputation of John Gay, and that the numerous patrons of the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith, will study the text of the opera. The songs and the dialogue are excellent testimony to his gifts as a lyrist and a wit, and invite the discriminating reader to make closer acquaintance with his essays on “Dress” and “Reproof and Flattery” (which appeared in The Guardian, Nos. ii and 149, 1712-13), and with his ballads and verse in other pieces beside the popular Fables. It is odd that, though Gay has found friendly critics and devoted editors in John Underhill and Mr. Austin Dobson, neither speaks of his reputation without much apology nor gives any convincing reasons for the original success of The Beggar's Opera. For example, John Underhill attributes the success of the opera to “two causes ; the opera was the first specimen of a new species of composition, and it was well stored with satire. The satire, moreover, was not merely general : it was personal and particular. No one could fail to see that Robin of Bagshot—alias Whiff Bob, alias Carbuncle, alias Bob Booty—was designed to represent Sir Robert Walpole’s unrefined manners, convivial habits, and alleged robbery of the public. Macheath was provided in the play with both a wife and a mistress, to indicate to the public that Lady Walpole had a rival in Miss Skerrett.”

The recently published Life of Sister Mary of St. Philip who at her death in 1904 had for nearly fifty years been the moving spirit of the great work of the Notre Dame Training College at Liverpool, has been described as “incidentally the history of Catholic education in this country from the days of Catholic Emancipation.” In his Introduction, the late Archbishop of Liverpool illustrates this by saying that

It is not, however, on the book as a record of Catholic education that these lines are written ; they are limited to its introductory chapters. These contain much that is of interest concerning the life of English Catholics during the period between Catholic Emancipation (1829) and the Restoration of the Hierarchy (1850)—five years before Sister Mary of St. Philip began her great work; and this notice, like the chapters on which it is based, may be regarded as introductory to the biography itself.

It is essential to remember at the outset that . . . just as in material affairs, things that are the merest commonplaces of daily life or have already become obsolete, were then unheard of and unknown, so two of the most important factors of English Catholic life as we now know it were in 1829 practically non-existent.