the fact that it had no country,
determined to invent one; and there was brought to birth that modern
Ireland, passionate for freedom, which has occupied the stage ever
since. In our own time it has knit, as a fractured limb knits, into one
tissue with the tradition of the Gaelic peasantry. Hanging and burning,
torture and oppression, poison and Penal Laws, bribes and blackguardism
so far from exterminating the Irish people actually hammered them into a
nation, one and indestructible, proud of its past and confident of its
future.

Take instances still more recent and particular--the struggle for
religious freedom or the struggle for the land. Catholic emancipation is
a leading case: obstinacy against obstinacy, the No! of England against
the Yes! of Ireland, and the former sprawling in the ditch at the end of
the tussle. "The Law," ran the dictum of an eighteenth-century Lord
Chancellor, "does not suppose any such person to exist as an Irish
Roman Catholic." At this moment a Catholic holds the seals and purse of
the Chancellorship. Never did ministers swallow their own stubborn words
more incontinently than did Peel and Wellington. So late as 1828 Peel
was loudly declaring that the continuance of these bars, which excluded
the Catholics from the acquisition of political power, was necessary for
the maintenance of the Constitution and the safety of the Church, and
Wellington was echoing his words. A year later, utterly defeated by
O'Connell, Peel was introducing the Catholic Relief Bill in the Commons.
Wellington had it for his task to induce, or rather frighten the king to
assent. Ireland not only emancipated the Catholics, she went on to
emancipate the Dissenters, a service of freedom of conscience which is
too often forgotten.

The Tithe System was similarly declared to be part of the fabric of the
Constitution, to be upheld at the point of the bayonet. Scythe in hand,
the Irish peasant proclaimed that it must go. It went. Still more
fundamental was the existence of the Protestant Established Church. To
touch it was to lay hands on the Ark. Orange orators threatened civil
war; two hundred thousand Ulstermen were to shoulder their Minie
Rifles, and not merely slaughter the Catholics but even depose Queen
Victoria.

Ireland said that the Establishment too must go; and, with the echoed
menace of Fenianism ringing in his ears, Mr Gladstone hauled down the
official blazon of Ascendancy. "Ulster" did not fight. But the