ast multitudes amongst
ourselves. It is worse also--not because in the event more ruinous,
but because in its means less desperate. All the factious in politics
and the schismatic in religion--all those who, caring little or
nothing about religion as a _spiritual_ interest, seek to overthrow
the present Ministers--all those who (caring little or nothing about
politics as a trading interest) seek to overthrow the Church of
England--all, again, who are distressed in point of patriotism, as in
Ireland many are, hoping to establish a foreign influence upon any
prosperous body of native prejudice against British influence, are now
throwing themselves, as by a forlorn hope, into this rearmost of their
batteries, (but also the strongest)--a deadly and combined struggle to
pull down the Irish Protestant establishment. And why? because nothing
else is left to them as a hopeful subject of conspiracy, now that the
Repeal conspiracy is crushed; and because in its own nature an assault
upon Protestantism has always been a promising speculation--sure to
draw support from England, whilst Repeal drew none; and because such
an assault strikes at the citadel of our strength. For the established
church of Ireland is the one main lever by which Great Britain carries
out the machinery of her power over the Irish people. The Protestant
church is by analogy the umbilical cord through which England connects
herself _materially_ with Ireland; through _that_ she propagates her
milder influence; _that_ gone, the rest would offer only coercive
influence. Without going diffusively into such a point, two vast
advantages to the civil administration, from the predominance of a
Protestant church in Ireland, meet us at the threshold: 1st, that it
moulds by the gentlest of all possible agencies the _recusant_ part of
this Irish nation into a growing conformity with the two other limbs
of the empire. The Irish population is usually assumed at about one
fourth part of the total imperial population. Now, the gradual
absorption of so large a section amongst our resources into the
temper, sympathies, and moral habits of the rest, is an object to be
kept in view by every successive government, let their politics
otherwise be what they may; and therefore to be kept in view by all
Irish institutions. In Canada everybody is _now_ aware how much this
country has been wanting to herself, (that is, wanting to the united
interests equally of England and Canada,) in no