Page:An Ulsterman for Ireland.djvu/11

AN ULSTERMAN FOR IRELAND

HEREVER public addresses have been heretofore made to you as Protestants they were always of one or other of these two kinds either they came from your leaders, great landlords, Orange Grand Masters and such like grandees, and dwelt much on the enormities of "Romanism" and the treacherous devices of "the Man of Sin," and on the necessity of strenuously resisting the plots of this same "Man of Sin" (who would appear to have some horrid designs upon you) or else those addresses came from some "agitating" association or other of O'Connell's that wanted your help, and so called you gallant fellows, and your fathers and grandfathers gallant fellows, reminded you of the volunteering, and asked you just to volunteer again and follow them, the agitating associations.

Neither of these was exactly the thing for you. The first showed too much zeal for Protestantism and too little for Tenant-right, or any other right of the poor. The second had always a certain air of fawning blarney, besides a suspiciously clerical aspect, that made you naturally recoil. The first adviser, for all his paternal language and anxiety about "our holy religion," if you watched him closely, had ejectments hid under his purple sash and orange apron the other, with his liberalism and truly sincere admiration for your ancestors, appeared 1