funds of Ireland belong, without the possibility of a
cavil, to the Irish nation; that nation has, from one reason or
another, persistently refused to follow us in deserting the general
creed of Christendom. They have clung and still cling to their
faith with that desperate tenacity which persecution best
engenders.... But the gradual abandonment of the atrocious penal
code--as one by one its provisions became revolting to the
increased humanity of the age--was a virtual confession that we
gave up all hope of driving the Irish Catholics within the pale of
our church.... Angry at resistance, the English government,
cooperating with English fanaticism, set itself deliberately to
persecute, degrade, almost destroy, those whom it could not succeed
in converting. All has been tried, and the Establishment remains,
as of old, the privilege of a powerful minority, the badge of
conquest upon a prostrate race, a perpetual source of
irritation--and nothing more. So far from being Protestantised, the
Irish are already the hottest Ultramontanes in Europe, and are
assuming more and more the triumphant air to which their numerical
ascendancy entitles them. There is not the ghost of a chance of
Ireland becoming other than she is, or of the Establishment making
such strides as might render her present position less
transparently absurd. The one question is this, whether we choose
to perpetuate a state of things condemned by all statesmen as
vicious in principle, and proved by long experience to be
productive of nothing but a tyrannising temper, on the one hand,
and chronic disaffection on the other. Every Irish peasant has
sense enough to appreciate the injustice of the arrangement which
obliges him to build his chapel, pay the priest, and gives his
landlord a church and parson for nothing. He may be excused too for
a feeling of annoyance, as he trudges past the empty parish church,
supported at the public expense, to some remote chapel crowded with
peasants, out of whose abject poverty the necessary funds for its
support have to be wrung. He may be excused if his notions of fair
play, equal rights, and political loyalty, are somewhat indistinct,
and that where the law is from the outset a manifest wrong-doer, it
should be sometimes superseded by rougher and more ef