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{{title|A Warning to Belfast|[[Wikipedia:Goldwin Smith|Goldwin Smith]]|September 25, 1888<br /><br />Excerpt transcripted by [[User:Liberlogos|Benoît Rheault]] from:<br /><br />''The Times''}}
#REDIRECT [[A Warning to Belfast]]
 
To the editor of the Times.
 
Sir, — I have more than once endeavoured to show that while the analogies commonly drawn in the Irish controversy from this side of the water are totally false — neither the relations of the American States or the Canadian provinces to the Federal Government nor that of Canada to the Imperial country bearing any resemblance to the Gladstonian scheme for Ireland — points of real and instructive analogy to the case of Ireland are presented by the French Catholic province of Quebec, the financial exploits of whose Legislature, in the way of plundering taxation and of attempted spoliation of bond-holders, have been attracting the attention of the commercial world. Quebec resembles Ireland in being a country with very limited powers of production, inhabited by a race which, having a low standard of living, multiplies recklessly, the Church enjoining early marriage and re-marriage for the sake of morality, fees, and power. If Quebec were an island, the pressure on the means of subsistence would soon make it a counterpart of Irish distress; but as it is, there is a ready overflow into the United States, to which the French-Canadian emigrate by hundreds of thousands. The over-population of Ireland, owing to the thriftless philoprogenitiveness of its inhabitants and the anti-economical influence of its Church, has always been, and remains, the root of the evil, though no allusion to it is ever made in Gladstonian orations, which constantly assume that an Irish peasant with a family of ten children, on a potato plot, and sunk in superstition, would be happy and enlightened if only he were set free from the Government which, against the will of his priesthood, has given him national education. Quebec has Home Rule in full measure, but this does not prevent over-population and lack of industrial energy from producing their natural effects.
 
Another point of analogy is the economical action of the Church in Quebec, which fleeces the people from their cradles to their graves, and is fast getting the best lands of the province into her hands, just as the Church had done throughout Europe before the Reformation, which was a movement of economical as well as of religious emencipation. The same thing would be sure to hammen in Roman Catholic Ireland if Roman Catholic Ireland were left to herself, and what is now taken by the landlord would not be made over the people but would pass into the coffers of the Church.
 
== Note ==
This is a letter from ''The Times'' newspaper of London (September 25, 1888, p.12), from ''The Times Digital Archive'' available at the Gales Databases website, in turn available with a membership of the Bibliothèque nationale du Québec.

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