Page:An Ulsterman for Ireland.djvu/32

AN ULSTERMAN FOR IRELAND nobleman, for his part cautions you earnestly against Popery and Papists, and points out how completely you would be overborne and swamped by Catholic majorities in all public affairs.

My Lord Enniskillen does not say a word to you about what is, after all, the main concern—the tenure of your farms—not one word. It is about your Protestant interest he is uneasy. He is apprehensive not lest you should be evicted by landlords and sent to the poorhouse, but lest purgatory and the seven sacraments should be thrust down your throats. This is simply a Protestant pious fraud of his Lordship's, merely a right worshipful humbug. Lord Enniskillen, and every other commonly informed man, knows that there is now no Protestant interest at all; that there is absolutely nothing left for Protestant and Catholic to quarrel for. Even the Church Establishment is not a Catholic and Protestant question, inasmuch as all Dissenters and all plebeian Churchmen are as much concerned to put an end to that nuisance as Catholics are. Lord Enniskillen knows, too (or, if he do not, he is the very stupidest grand master in Ulster) that an ascendancy of one sect over another is from henceforth impossible. The fierce religious zeal that animated our fathers on both sides is utterly dead and gone. I do not know whether this is for our advantage or not; but at any rate it is gone. Nobody in all Europe would now as much a& understand it—and if any man talks to you now of religious sects, when the matter in hand relates to civil and political rights, to administration of government or distribution of property 22