e would never exercise any privilege to which he was or
might become entitled to disturb or weaken the Protestant religion or
Protestant government in this kingdom."[209]

The second question was, it will probably be confessed, even more
important. Pitt, who had always contemplated, and had encouraged the
Irish Roman Catholics to contemplate, the abolition of their political
disabilities as an indispensable appendage to, or, it may be said, part
of the Union, had designed, farther, not to confine his benefits to the
laymen, but to endow the Roman Catholic clergy with adequate stipends, a
proposal which was received with the greatest thankfulness, not only by
the Irish prelates and clergy themselves, but also by the heads of their
Church at Rome, who were willing, in return, to give the crown a veto on
all the ecclesiastical appointments of their Church in the two
islands.[210] The justice of granting such an endowment could hardly be
contested. The Reformation in Ireland, if what had taken place there
could be called a reformation at all, had been wholly different from the
movement which had almost extinguished Popery in England. The great
majority of the Irish people had never ceased to adhere to the Romish
forms, and the Reformation there had been simply a transfer of the
property of the Romish Church to the Church of England, unaccompanied by
any corresponding change of belief in the people, who had an undeniable
right to claim that the state, while making this transfer, should not
deprive of all provision the clergy to whose ministrations they still
clung with a zeal and steadiness augmented rather than diminished by the
discouragements under which they adhered to them.

The policy of granting such endowment was equally conspicuous. No
measure could so bind the clergy to the government; and no such security
for the loyalty and peaceful, orderly behavior of the poorer classes
could be provided, as might be expected from the attachment to the
government of those who had over them an influence so powerful in its
character and so unbounded in its strength as their priests. And the
Duke of Wellington, who had at one time been himself the Irish
Secretary, and, as an intimate friend of Lord Castlereagh, who held that
office at the time of the Union, had a perfect knowledge of what had
been intended at that time--and who was, of course, aware of the very
decided favor which the House of Commons had so lately shown to the
p