Page:A letter to the Right Hon. Chichester Fortescue, M.P. on the state of Ireland.djvu/47

 permanent, largely useful, find extensively conciliatory. Catholic peers have taken their seats in the House of Lords; Catholic orators of the rank of O'Connell and Shiel have added lustre to the debates of the House of Commons; Catholic judges have expounded from the Bench the laws which are the birthright of the subject, and awarded the punishment due to the traitor and the malefactor.

When a Roman Catholic shall take his seat, as Lord Chancellor of Ireland these benefits of equal justice will be still more widely possessed by the Irish people. Even the permission to Roman Catholic judges and mayors to appear in their places of worship with their official insignia, long withheld by party and sectarian prejudice, is not without its value. It is a part of equality, and equality is signified by a scarf, no less than by the seals of office, or a seat in Parliament.

When Lord Grey came into office, and the Whigs, after sixty years of exclusion, began a new scheme of Irish policy, there were two prominent evils in the government of Ireland. The first was the corrupt and intolerant system of administration called Protestant Ascendancy; the second, the Irish Church Establishment. The first of these evils—called by Burke, Non regnum sed magnum latrocinium; and by Fox, a miserable monopolising minority—was quite as great a grievance to the people of Ireland as the second. It drove into rebellion such men as Lord Edward Fitzgerald, the Emmets, and Wolfe Tone. By a series of what were called by Irish statesmen 'ripening