Page:An Ulsterman for Ireland.djvu/12

AN ULSTERMAN FOR IRELAND too often masquerading in a "holy coat of Treves" or on his knees before the "venerated hierarchy." Neither of them quite met your case.

For your case was and is just this the farmers are gradually, in Ulster as in other provinces, losing hold of the soil, under the pressure of poor rates, rents and taxes, and becoming labourers; and the labourers and artisans, from the excessive competiton [sic] of other labourers and artisans, are sinking gradually into paupers, so that there is a continual sliding scale sloping downward to perdition. For every ruined farmer there is one destitute labourer the more, for every ejected cottier there is another pauper on the rates, and the still increasing rates weigh down faster and faster continually more and more of those who still struggle to earn their bread into the class which has given up the effort in despair, and thrown itself on the earnings of other men.

Is this or is it not a true statement of the case 1? And if it be, do you think it is to be remedied by a vow to defend our Protestant constitution in Church and State? It seems to me precisely our constitution in Church and State that has brought us to this condition it certainly was not the Pope of Rome the Pope, we know, is the "Man of Sin" and the "Antichrist," and also, if you like, the "Mystery of Iniquity," and all that, but he brings no ejectments in Ireland. The Seven Sacraments are, to be sure, very dangerous, but the quarter. acre clause touches you more nearly. In short, our vicious system of government, and especially 2