Page:Irish In America.djvu/193

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EVIL OF HAVING BUT ONE PURSUIT.
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principle on which the system is based is that of allowing to each religious denomination the education of its own youth an arrangement which marvellously simplifies mat ters, and removes every possible excuse for mischievous meddling, or collision of any kind. More than one hundred students are receiving a first-class collegiate education in the College of St. Bonaventure, such as to prepare them to maintain an honourable position in the various walks of life for which they may be destined ; and in the same institution the candidates for holy orders are prepared for the priesthood, the design of the bishop being to recruit the ranks of the clergy from amongst the natives of the colony, Ireland having hitherto supplied all the priests for the mission. The zeal and fidelity of the Irish Catholics of Newfound land may be estimated by the great things they have done for their church, notwithstanding limited resources and original discouragement. Whenever a great work is to be done, every one assists according to his means ; and where money cannot be subscribed, the full equivalent is freely given in work and labour. So thoroughly identified arc the people with the cause to be promoted, that in a whole parish a single defaulter is rarely to be. met with! But if the bishop calls on his nock to assist him in one of those useful undertakings in which he is so constantly engaged, he himself is the first to afford a signal example of libe rality, having contributed the munificent sum of 10,000/. out of his own resources towards the works of his pro motion. Perhaps the great evil of the colony is the almost exclusive devotion of its inhabitants to the one engrossing pursuit. So long as the fisheries are prosperous the evil is not so manifest ; but should this grand resource of the island prove less productive than usual, intense distress is the immediate consequence, there being little else to fall back upon. What agriculture is to Ireland, the fisheries