t ascendancy neither do nor can,
by anything positive, define or describe what they mean by the word
Protestant.... The whole is nothing but pure and perfect malice. It
is indeed a perfection in that kind, belonging to beings of a higher
order than man, and to them we ought to leave it.... Let three
millions of people but abandon all that they and their ancestors have
been taught to believe sacred, and to forswear it publicly in terms
the most degrading, and nothing more is required of them.... The word
_Protestant_ is the charm that locks up in a dungeon of servitude
three millions of people.

Every thoughtful reader of the debates in parliament on the state of
Ireland, must have been struck with the difference of opinion between
the Liberals and the Conservatives, as to the facts of the case. A
still more violent difference was presented in the British parliament,
in the year 1797, when there were great debates in both houses on the
subject, and when the facts were still more glaring, one of them being
that the reign of terror established by the Irish Government prevented
the press from reporting the maddening atrocities which the ruling
faction was daily perpetrating against the mass of the king's
subjects. The debate arose in the Lords, on a motion by Lord Moira
for an address to the king on the state of Ireland. He described the
horrors of which he had been recently a witness, but softened the
recital, lest he should shock his hearers too much. Orange loyalty
was then licensed and let loose upon the defenceless Roman Catholic
population in Ulster. Lord Gosford's description of the scenes of
desolation in his own county, Armagh, is well known. He did what
he could to prevent the burning of Roman Catholic houses, and the
personal injuries inflicted upon the unfortunate inhabitants, while
their Orange neighbours chased them out of the country, giving them
Cromwell's alternative. But his mercy injured his reputation, and he
felt obliged to protest solemnly that he was a loyal man, and that he
wished to uphold Protestant ascendancy in Ireland as much as any of
his accusers. He only asked that the poor Catholic should be allowed
to live in peace. In the debate referred to, Lord Moira declared that
ninety-one householders had been banished from one of his own estates;
and many of them wounded in their persons. The discontent, he said,
was not confined to one sect. He ascribed the state of things to the
recall of Lord Fit