I am all for education, but not at the expense of freedom and family life. When the House of Commons decrees that no child is to live with its father and mother on board a canal boat, it strikes a blow against marriage, and the family, and liberty, which is almost worthy of Moscow. Nor would such a measure be suggested, but for the insufficiency of our educational experts, whose indolence suggests to them that it is an easier job to destroy a home than to make a special kind of school to support a special kind of family. The modern legislator is never so happy as when he is interfering with domestic peace, or hindering a man at his work; and the Government Aunties all know, far better than mere mothers, how children should be fed, clothed and taught. I have no doubt that there are men in the Education Department, like Edward Holmes, the late chief inspector of education, who if given a free hand to-morrow, could devise an excellent scheme for providing the canal boat children with all the education they want, and saving them from many weary hours of scholastic slavery in an unwholesome atmosphere. To do this would necessitate tearing up a lot of futile regulations and obtaining a sum of money from a niggardly Treasury. Not so much, of course, as the Exchequer would spend on a useless airship, or some pictures of bananas to please Empire advertisers, but merely a few thousands for such sanitary buildings and sensible teachers as the scheme would need.

To discuss the private life of Daniel O’Connell as though it required vindication is, especially around the centenary year of the Catholic Emancipation Act, an impertinence which would have called forth a scathing rebuke from the Liberator himself, if he had not passed beyond the range of those bitter controversies that saddened all his later public life. But a vindication has, in fact, become requisite in view of the extraordinary and quite gratuitous attack upon O’Connell’s moral reputation which was made a few years ago in a book which has attracted a great deal of public attention both because of its sensational style and because its author is not only an Irish Catholic but a former Lord Justice of the Irish Courts.

In all the vast output of recrimination with which O’Connell was assailed during his long struggle to win Catholic emancipation, and later as the leader of the Repeal movement, there is certainly no more astonishing and vindictive attack than that which was made quite recently by the Rt. Hon. Sir James O’Connor in his History of Ireland 1798-1924. And as this ex-Lord Justice has seen fit to attack O’Connell’s reputation from a new angle, throwing into the scales against a dead man his own prestige and authority as one of the principal former members of the Irish judiciary, the attack cannot, in fairness to O’Connell’s memory, be left unnoticed. The present writer has by accident discovered quite recently new evidence bearing directly upon the flimsy testimony which Sir James O’Connor produced.

Once more Abbot Butler has put us in his debt. It was not to be wondered at that the work involved in compiling his fascinating Life of Archbishop Ullathorne should have focussed his attention on the story of the unfinished Council in which Archbishop Ullathorne took so real a part though hardly one of the great protagonists in those immortal scenes.

Though the Council is famous for its definition of Papal Infallibility, curiously enough this was not one of the subjects marked for discussion, even though everybody knew long beforehand that it was to prove the great feature of the meetings. Quite rightly then does Abbot Butler present us with a history of the Council in which the Dogma of Infallibility is the key to all the discussions, even to those which preceded the gathering of the bishops. That the doctrine should ultimately be defined was not only a logical necessity but an historical one, for it is enshrined in the doctrine of the Primacy already defined at Florence. Moreover, as it were unconsciously, the Christian ‘sense’ of the truth of this doctrine lay at the back of all the disputes between the Papacy and the Christian kings which are so marked a feature of European history. Hence in his opening pages the Abbot gives us a really masterly survey of such thorny questions as that of the deposing power claimed by the Popes, and of the effort—begun at Constance and perpetuated in Gallicanism—to make the Pope in some way or other subordinate to an Oecumenical Council.

In that stretch of country that may be described as lying between France and Brittany—the pays gallot —there is a still narrower district that encircles the Three Towns (Saint-Malo, Saint-Servan, and Dinard) and lies along the banks of the Rance. It is known in the local speech as the Clos-Poulet, a quaint phrase with a ring of the patois about it, and like the patois itself venerable and significant; for it has a meaning that is plainly declared by the name of a village within its borders, Saint-Pierre-Marc-en-poulet, or in the Latin Sanctus Petrus de Marco in pago Aletho.

Now this ‘Aleth’ deserves at least a word in passing. Very long ago—I cannot give a precise date, but it was in ‘the time of the Saints’ when they crossed the water (in stone boats or not, as you may prefer) as missioners to the folk of Armorica : when Saint-Malo found his way to Saint-Aaron’s hermitage on the rock then rising in the midst of forests that was later to be called after him; when men of our own race, our own blood, Scots, Welsh, and Irish, came here to conquer, to teach, and to pray, saints and fighting-men, an endless list of amazing names, Coulfmith, Armaël, Cadocanam, Jagu, Maclou—somewhere in the fifth or sixth century, Aleth came first into being. Very little is known of that first settlement, but it was the home of one of the many early bishops or missioners, more important than the rock of Malo to which some centuries later the Bishop and his Chapter removed. And somewhere very early in the ninth century it emerges from the shadows, if not into the full light of history, at least into the daybreak of a clear tradition.

Whilst Italy celebrates the bi-millenary of the birth of Virgil, Provence keeps this year the centenary of her own Virgil, Frédéric Mistral, born at Maillane, near Arles, on the 8th September, 1830. His memory is still fresh amongst his people, for he died only as recently as 1914, and we may confidently expect a flood of personal reminiscences from many who were privileged to know him intimately, but to the average Englishman, Mistral can be spoken of only as one who has already passed into literary history, and the justification of these lines must be the comparative unfamiliarity of their subject matter to most English readers.

That Mistral is so little known here is perhaps to be ascribed to the fact that his writings are to us, in a sense, doubly foreign. His most important work, Mirèio (Mireille), may be known, as to its theme, through the medium of Gounod’s opera, but, of the latter, two versions exist, one of which falsifies the action of the poem for the sake of a ‘prettier’ curtain. The poem itself has been translated into English, but such is the irony of things, that the more readable a translation, the less it savours of the original, and in the case of poetry one feels dissatisfied with anything but a strictly literal version intended to enable the reader to follow the original, line by line. Mistral is doubly foreign to us, in the sense that even Paris is able to read him only with a French translation en regard.

De nominibus non est curandum is one of those trite sayings of St. Thomas which, outside its context, could easily be gravely misunderstood. He is blaming those who concern themselves more with words than with the realities which words are meant to represent. Words are only signs, and the sign without the reality loses its reason of being. It is a sign-post which points to a place that does not exist.

There is abundant reason for thinking that the implicit criticism contained in these words of St. Thomas is especially applicable to modern times when men seem so strongly attached to words and symbols, and delude themselves into thinking that they possess the realities because they have the words. Democracy, efficiency and rationalisation are words to juggle with, though the realities they stand for seem to be very conspicuous by their absence. Indeed, you can never take for granted what the users of these words mean by them. A request for definitions is always worth while.