ous to get rid of the small holders as they had been to
increase them so long as they served their political purpose. It was
one of the great drawbacks which deprived emancipation of the healing
effect it would otherwise have produced. If--as Pitt intended--that
measure had formed part of the Union arrangements; if the
forty-shilling freeholders had been spared, and the priesthood had
been endowed, we should never have had an agitation for repeal or even
for the separation of the church from the state. Pitt's plan of the
Union included the abolition of Protestant Ascendancy.

Edmund Burke, in one of his letters on Ireland, said: 'A word has
been lately struck in the mint of the castle of Dublin. Thence it was
conveyed to the Tholsel, or city hall, where having passed the touch
of the corporation, so respectably stamped and vouched, it soon became
current in parliament, and was carried back by the speaker of the
House of Commons, in great pomp, as an offering of homage from whence
it came. That word is Ascendancy. The word is not absolutely new.' He
then gives its various meanings, and first shows what it does _not_
signify in the new sense. Not influence obtained by love or reverence,
or by superior management and dexterity; not an authority derived from
wisdom or virtue, promoting the happiness and freedom of the Roman
Catholic people; not by flattering them, or by a skilful adaptation to
their humours and passions. It means nothing of all these. Burke then
shows what it does mean. 'New ascendancy is old mastership. It is
neither more nor less than the resolution of one sect of people in
Ireland to consider themselves the sole citizens in the commonwealth,
and to keep a dominion over the rest, by reducing them to absolute
slavery under a military power; and thus fortified in their power, to
divide the public estate, which is the result of general contribution,
as a military booty, solely among themselves. This ascendancy,
by being a _Protestant_ ascendancy, does not better it, from a
combination of a note or two more in this anti-harmonic scale. By
the use that is frequently made of the term, and the policy that is
grafted on it, the name Protestant becomes nothing more or better than
the name of a persecuting faction, with a relation of some sort of
theological hostility to others, but without any sort of ascertained
tenets of its own, upon the ground of which it persecutes other men;
for the patrons of this Protestan