sternly for the inevitable struggle that is
approaching." This organisation in Chicago is
opposed by the bishop of the Irish Catholics, as it
is opposed in Ireland and America by the main
body of the bishops and priests of the Irish
Catholic Church, except only a few men like
father Lavello, who described Prince Albert at
the Rotundo meeting as "a German reviler of
our creed and country, and the husband of a
foreign queen." Oppressed as their Church truly
is by a dominant Protestant establishment, which
is the genuine cause of more than half the bad
blood of the country, its honest efforts to
check the "Young Irish" party in its wild
course of sedition have been unintermitting,
and made at some sacrifice of popular influence.
Let us give to faithful servants of Christ who
are not of our own communion, the honour due
to them herein for Christian work. The Chicago
Fenians scout the admonitions of their Bishop
Duggan. "When the old world harness," says
one magnificent spirit, "is attempted to be
buckled tightly upon the Americanised Catholic
mind, and the gear once fails, as in the case of
the Fenians, it may as well be returned to the
lumber-room, or used only for docile females
and quiet old men, who from long training will
not grow restive in the traces. We regard the
Fenians as having achieved their first great step
in the elevation of Irish nationality, by teaching
a lesson to the priesthood which they will never
forget, and the first of a series which, once
taken, the rest will follow." The Americanised
Irish sharper fully developed into a Fenian
leader, is a most eloquent creature; "rough he
is, so air our bars; wild he is, so air our
buffalers; but his glorious answer to the tyrant and
the despot is, that his bright home is in the
setting sun." Hear, for example, one of the
two great managers of Fenian finance at Chicago,
Messrs. Michael and John Scanlan, proposing
at a "Fenian banquet," on Saint Patrick's Day,
"the Day we Celeberate" (spelling is not one of
the strong points of the Chicago Fenian and
National Fair Gazette, wherefrom we quote),
hear him tell how "our glorious pagan ancestry,
rising above the things of earth, plucked the
very sun from heaven, placed it in their banner,
and marched to victory beneath its beams," or
hear him praise the United States, and quote
the Americanised Shakespeare. "States, where
men walk earth in the light of freedom, with
nothing twist their souls and heaven, until the
kings and titled nobility of earth appear as
pigmies,

Cutting up such fantastic pranks before high heaven,
As make the angels weep."

All hail to Messrs. Michael and John Scanlan!
These seem to have been the gentlemen who
got up the other day at Chicago a Fenian Irish
National Fair, which began on Easter Monday,
and was to have a season of a week. There were
sold for a dollar apiece season tickets of admission.
"One dollar," said the announcement, "one
dollar will aid the holiest cause that ever
engaged the heart and brain of man," besides
giving a chance of winning one of a thousand
prizes to be drawn for: a rosewood piano, a
diamond-cased lady's gold hunting-watch, a fine
French clock, a silver plated tea set, a
meerschaum pipe, a sewing-machine, a dozen fiddles,
five boxes of Havanas, two dozen sets of heavy
plated spoons, or a marble bust of General
Corcoran. Gifts of all kinds were to be sent from
all parts for sale at the Fenian Fair, and the
proceeds—ah, well, they would be invested in U. S.
bonds until wanted.

These patriotic people call themselves a
"Fenian Brotherhood," because Irish tradition
says that the Fenians were an old national militia
employed to protect the Irish coasts from all
foreign invaders. Each of the four provinces
is said to have had its band or clan, Fionn and
Oisin (Fingal and Ossian) being chiefs of one of
the clans with which the other clans fought, till
the institution came to its end pretty much in
the same way as the meeting did the other day
in the Rotundo. But there were Fenians in
Scotland and North Germany as well as in
Ireland, and, in fact, there is good reason
to suppose that they were a distinct tribe of
those Celts who preceded the Germanic races in
occupation of the North German and Scandinavian
shores. No matter for that. Tradition
connects them with the best of the early Irish
poetry as the home militia and coast-guard,
composed of men of miraculous attainments: so
nimble that they could walk over rotten sticks
without breaking them: so fleet that each of
them could outstrip in the race all "the rest" of
his comrades: so brave that any one of them
counted it equal battle to fight nine of any other
nation. So here we have the Fenians again,
though the boldest of them don't hold by the
old traditional rule that prevented her militia
from passing out of Ireland; and in America
they take one John O'Mahony to be their Finn
M'Coul.

The professed object of this band of brothers
is the national freedom of Ireland. The congress
of November last, began by proclaiming its
determination to uphold the laws and constitution
of the United States; it then went on to
say that, in consequence of the hostile attitude
assumed by the English oligarchy, merchants,
and the press, towards the United States since
the beginning of the civil war, hostilities between
the two countries is imminent; and they resolved
that the younger members of the Brotherhood
be drilled so as to be prepared to offer their
services to the United States when these begin
their war with England. Ireland at present
being the vanguard of America against British
aggression, "her organised sons keeping watch
and ward for the United States at the thresholds
of the despots of Europe, nay in their very
citadels," it was resolved that the Brotherhood
is open to every man who is loyal to the
principles of self-government, and will oppose
the emissaries of foreign despotisms who would
feign (Fenian spelling again) crush the growth
of republican principles, and stop the onward
march of freedom. The preamble to another