facility of sustaining and enforcing wrong under the name of giving support to public tranquillity.  Yet, forcing on its way amidst all these difficulties by a natural law, in a strange haphazard and disjointed method, and by a zigzag movement, there came into existence, and by degrees into steady operation, a sentiment native to Ireland and having Ireland for its vital basis, and yet not deserving the name of Irish patriotism, because its care was not for a nation, but for a sect.  For a sect, in a stricter sense than may at first sight be supposed.  The battle was not between Popery and a generalized Protestantism, though, even if it had been so, it would have been between a small minority and the vast majority of the Irish people.  It was not a party of ascendency, but a party of monopoly, that ruled.  It must always be borne in mind that the Roman Catholic aristocracy had been emasculated, and reduced to the lowest point of numerical and moral force by the odious action of the penal laws, and that the mass of the Roman Catholic population, clerical and lay, remained under the grinding force of many-sided oppression, and until long after the accession of George III. had scarcely a consciousness of political existence.  As long as the great bulk of the nation could be equated to zero, the Episcopal monopolists had no motive for cultivating the good-will of the Presbyterians, who like the Roman Catholics maintained their religion, with the trivial exception of the Regium Donum, by their own resources, and who differed from them in being not persecuted, but only disabled.  And this monopoly, which drew from the sacred name of religion its title to exist, offered through centuries an example of religious sterility to which a parallel can hardly be found among the communions of the Christian world.  The sentiment, then, which animated the earlier efforts of the Parliament might be Iricism, but did not become patriotism until it had outgrown, and had learned to forswear or to forget, the conditions of its infancy.  Neither did it for a long time acquire the courage of its opinions; for, when Lucas, in the middle of the century, reasserted the doctrine of Molyneux and of Swift, the Grand Jury of Dublin took part against him, and burned his book.[84] And the Parliament,[85] prompted by the Government, drove him into exile.  And yet the smoke showed that there was fire.  The infant, that confronted the British Government in the Parliament House, had something of the young Hercules about him.  In the first exercises of strength he acquired more strength, and in acquiring more strength he burst the bonds that had confined him.

    “Es machte mir zu eng, ich mussie fort."[86]