in Ulster or elsewhere is to rule the question for Ireland. I
am aware of no constitutional doctrine on which such a
conclusion could be adopted or justified. But I think that the
Protestant minority should have its wishes considered to the
utmost practicable extent in any form which they may assume."

GLADSTONE (1893).

CHAPTER V.

HOME RULE DIFFICULTIES

"Sooner or later," said a wise man to me the other day, "always sooner
or later in the Home Rule question you bump up against religion." That
is, unhappily, still true, though not so true to-day as in 1886 or in
1893. No one who visits Ireland to-day can doubt that the religious
hatreds of the past are being softened; but, unhappily, this process,
as recent events have vividly shown us, is still fiercely resisted by a
small minority.

It may almost be said that in Ireland religious intolerance is a
political vested interest. It would indeed be impossible to justify the
immense preponderance of salaried power and place still given at the
centre to the Protestant minority[47] unless you could maintain the
idea that the Catholic is a dangerous man when in a place of power.
That consideration, doubtless largely unconscious, may yet partly
explain the immense amount of energy devoted in the north-east of
Ireland to the encouragement of religious prejudice--honest in many of
the rank-and-file, artificial, I fear, in many of the organisers.

BELFAST

Belfast, so like a great modern city in its magnificent outward aspect,
is still largely mediaeval at heart. Its chief social energies are
thrown into that vast and powerful organisation known as the "Orange
Society"--still wearing the badges of the seventeenth century, still
uttering its war-cries, and still feeding on its passions. This immense
religious club has to support in the modern age that theory of
religious incompatibility which nearly every other community has long
ago abandoned. It has to justify itself in excluding from the municipal
honours of Belfast almost every Roman Catholic. It has to justify the
majority of 300,000 Belfast Protestants in giving a small and
inadequate representation among the rulers of this great wealthy town
to the minority of 100,000 Catholics. To maintain this policy of
Ulster ascendancy the Orange chiefs watch every document that comes
from Rome with a lynx eye, and try to catch a glimpse of the "Scarlet
Woman" behind