ere yet not exempt from danger.
These fears suggested the necessity of drawing still more closely the
bond of union between them and their countrymen of other persuasions.
The Protestants met them half way in their advances toward a conjunction
of interests--for they perceived, that though the present blow was
struck against the Catholics, yet the warfare of administration was not
against them only, but against the constitution, against the people,
their privileges, and their interests.

Had these been the only consequences that followed this dreadful
experiment, the partial evil would have been compensated by the union
which it produced. But this was not the case. The alarm which the Armagh
persecution produced on the minds of the enlightened Catholics, and on
the lower orders of that description were very different. In the former
it produced a desire to unite more closely with his Protestant brethren,
in order to form by their conjunction the stronger barrier against the
apprehended assault of the Irish Cabinet upon both. In the latter, it
excited a fear of extermination, which resolved itself into the most
violent and unjustifiable measures, of what they considered personal
defence--The Orange-men had deprived the Catholics of their arms--the
lower order of Catholics co-operating in many instances with their
Protestant neighbours of the same rank, who detested the conduct of
Orange-men, betook themselves to retaliate on those whom they considered
suspected characters. The robbery of arms became a general measure of
safety, and those who exerted themselves in this way obtained the name
of Defenders--a body of men, whom that administration which suffered the
Orange-men to violate the laws with impunity, followed with the utmost
severity of legal punishment.

No man who values the interests of society, or knows the value of peace
and good order in a community, can be supposed for a moment to justify
the intemperate and incautious conduct of those deluded men. If such
licence as they usurped were permitted, human society must be dissolved,
and man be thrown back to a state of savage nature. But on the other
hand, no man who has any regard for truth, or who enjoys a capacity of
distinguishing between different ideas, can deny, that the crimes of the
Defenders were provoked by the preceding crimes of the Orange-men, and
that those powers which, contrary to justice, were suffered to lie
dormant against the one class, whose