lousy, just as the Protestants of Ireland were enabled to
lead in 1782, notwithstanding the existence of Protestant Ascendancy.
Religious equality is not a cause of tranquillity in itself. It
tranquillises simply because it implies the absence of irritation.
It takes a festering thorn out of the side of the unestablished
community--a thorn which inflames the blood of every one of its
members. Let worldly interest, political power, and social precedence
cease to be connected with the profession of religion, and religious
differences would cease to produce animosity and intolerance. If the
Magyars had been the Hungarian party of Protestant ascendancy, and if
the Protestant interest had also been the Austrian interest; if the
mission of the Magyars had been to act as a garrison, to keep down the
Roman Catholic majority, their cause could never have triumphed till
Protestant ascendancy should be abolished. But Hungarian Protestantism
did not need such support, although the Pope has as much authority in
Hungary as in Ireland. Of course the cases of Hungary and Ireland
are in many respects dissimilar. But they are alike in this: their
respective histories establish the great fact that the most benevolent
of sovereigns, and the wisest of legislatures, can never produce
contentment or loyalty in a kingdom which is ruled _through_ and _for_
another kingdom.

We can easily understand that when the light of royalty shines upon a
country _through a conquering nation still dominant_, the medium is of
necessity dense, cold, refracting, and discolouring. Of this the
best illustration is derived from the relations between Austria and
Hungary, now so happily adjusted to the unspeakable advantage of
both nations. Austrian rule was unsympathetic, harsh, insolent,
domineering, based upon the arrogant assumption that the Hungarians
were incapable of managing their own affairs without the guidance
of Austrian wisdom and the support of Austrian steadiness. But the
Hungarians, united among themselves, putting their trust, not in
boastful, vapouring, and self-seeking agitators, but in honest,
truthful, high-minded, and capable statesmen, persevered in a course
of firm, but temperate and constitutional, national self-assertion,
until the Austrians were compelled to put away from them their
supercilious airs of natural superiority, and to concede the principle
of international equality and the right of self-government.

What sickens the reader