n. It had a distinct moral existence
before, and now the Presbyterian ministry will be a subordinate
ecclesiastical aristocracy, whose feeling will be that of zealous
loyalty, and whose influence on those people will be as purely sedative
when it should be, and exciting when it should be, as it was the reverse
before." Those who blame Pitt for not having carried through his schemes
of concurrent endowment, and who see in his failure to do so, one reason
for the ill success of his policy of Union, must admit the importance of
the fact that the Presbyterian clergy were pensioners of the State. A
notion of the extent to which they were subsidised may be inferred from
the fact that by the Commutation Clauses of the Church Disestablishment
Act of 1869, the Dissenters secured as compensation for the loss of the
Regium Donum and other payments a sum of L770,000, while the equivalent
amount paid in lieu of the Maynooth grant to the Catholics--numbering at
least eight times as many--amounted to only L372,000.

It was Froude who declared that if the woollen and linen industries had
not been hampered there would now be four Ulsters instead of one. Even
in the days before restrictions were placed on the production of Irish
linen for the better encouragement of the English trade, the North of
Ireland was far ahead of the rest of the country in the matter of
flax-spinning, and this pre-eminence was mainly due to the fact that the
climate there is more suited to that plant than in other parts of
Ireland.

Starting with this advantage, linen was able in that province to survive
the impositions placed on its production, while in places less favoured
by a suitable climate the industry went to the wall. To assume off-hand,
without going into the innumerable causes which effect such movements of
commerce, that innate thrift was responsible, apart from all other
causes, for the progress of Belfast is an attitude similar to that of
one who should hold that nothing but the stupidity of the East Anglian
yokel has prevented that country from becoming as much a centre of
industry as is Lancashire, for such a sweeping generalisation would take
no account of other forces at work in the development of the great
commercial centres of the North as, for example, the fact that the
peculiar conditions of the Lancashire climate are such that the
processes of cotton-spinning can be best effected in an atmosphere
containing the amount of moisture which th