ABSTRACT
We did not anticipate that the calm and temperate reply of the Archbishop of Dublin to Lord St. Leonards would have received much courtesy from the men and the writers who were the loudest in their vauntings that the Archbishop had no case, no facts, no reason on his side, and would not, therefore, risk a reply to his assailants. We did, however, hope that mere Billingsgate-slang would not be substituted for reasoning and argument, and that public writers who dissented from the opinions and conclusions of his Grace would first endeavour to set aside his facts, if they at all entered into the arena. The Mail—the most noisy of the clamourists—who called on Dr. Cullen to give one single fact in support of his assertions that proselytism had been practised and encouraged—that Protestantism was recognised and Catholicism ignored by the Patriotic Fund Commissioners—has treated the letter of the Archbishop in a manner so much at variance with its usual manly spirit of fair play, that we can find no rational interpretation for the course adopted. A column of vigorous abuse of "Popery" and "Brahminism" is devoted to "Archbishop Cullen's defence;" but the defence itself finds no place in the columns of our contemporary, and we must, in charity, presume that the writer never read it, for on no other supposition can we account for the strange line of assault adopted. "The paltry effusion of venom," as an epithet for a peculiarly mild and conciliatory document, and the "old story of the cuttle fish blackening the water with an inky cloud," may with a certain class pass for fine writing, but the most illiterate of the readers of the Mail will recognise that coarse abuse is not argument, and that the refutation of any one of the statements put forward in the letter of the Archbishop would produce more effect than all the abuse in the Mail's vocabulary, and do more to detract from the influence the letter is calculated to produce than all the "inky clouds" the Mail and its entire staff could rise.
