o tell us, was hanged at his own
door in 1798. How is it that the sons of the men of 1782 and of
Grattan's Parliament, and of 1798 were not as good Irishmen as their
fathers? I think I can give a kind of explanation.

It must be remembered that the era of Grattan's Parliament and of the
Volunteer movement of 1782, of which present-day Nationalists are so
proud, was also the era of the Penal laws. Since then the Protestants
have seen the Irish Catholic rising from the dust of serfdom and
standing in the attitude of manhood. They have seen him gradually
obtaining a share in the making of the laws of the land, and, naturally,
becoming the predominant political power in Ireland--the Catholics being
the majority of the population. I may be wrong, but I have a theory that
many of the Protestants of Ireland--who once had all the political power
in their hands, and did not always use it too mercifully in their
treatment of the rest of their countrymen--are afraid that if they
assisted in getting self-government for Ireland the power in the hands
of the enfranchised majority might be used against them.

That this is a groundless fear is shown from the fact that no men have
been more honoured in Ireland than such Protestant leaders as William
Smith O'Brien, Thomas Davis, John Mitchel, John Martin, Isaac Butt, and
Charles Stewart Parnell. The same feeling is constantly shown at this
moment towards distinguished Protestants among the present Irish
Parliamentary Party.

What has fostered the Anti-Irish feeling among Irish Protestants for the
last hundred years has undoubtedly been the fell system of Orangeism,
which has caused so much hatred and bloodshed among men who, whatever
their race or creed, are now children of the one common soil. The
Orangeman looked upon himself as part of a foreign garrison, holding the
"Papishes" in subjection. He was armed with deadly weapons;
consequently, the defenceless Catholic was almost entirely at his mercy,
and the Orangeman was but too often backed up in his lawlessness by the
law and its administrators.

This almost necessitated the existence, as a kind of defence against
Orangeism, of a body I used to hear them speaking of when I was a boy in
Ballymagenaghy, called the "Thrashers," which, I imagine, must have been
some kind of a secret society.

It must have been a sort of survival of these "Thrashers" that my
friend, Michael Davitt, many years afterwards, came across somewhere in
the