The power of the political franchise to elevate a degraded people, to convert slaves into men, is exhibited before the eyes of the present generation in the Southern States of America; even where differences of race and colour are most marked, and where the strongest natural antipathies are to be overcome.  We may judge from this what must have been the effect of this concession on the Irish Celts.  The forty-shilling freeholders very soon became objects of consideration with their landlords, who were anxious to extend their political influence in their respective counties, for the representation of which the great proprietors had many a fierce contest.  The abolition of this franchise by the Emancipation Act made that measure a grievance instead of a relief to the peasantry, for the landlords were now as anxious to get rid of the small holders as they had been to increase them so long as they served their political purpose.  It was one of the great drawbacks which deprived emancipation of the healing effect it would otherwise have produced.  If—­as Pitt intended—­that measure had formed part of the Union arrangements; if the forty-shilling freeholders had been spared, and the priesthood had been endowed, we should never have had an agitation for repeal or even for the separation of the church from the state.  Pitt’s plan of the Union included the abolition of Protestant Ascendancy.

Edmund Burke, in one of his letters on Ireland, said:  ’A word has been lately struck in the mint of the castle of Dublin.  Thence it was conveyed to the Tholsel, or city hall, where having passed the touch of the corporation, so respectably stamped and vouched, it soon became current in parliament, and was carried back by the speaker of the House of Commons, in great pomp, as an offering of homage from whence it came.  That word is Ascendancy.  The word is not absolutely new.’  He then gives its various meanings, and first shows what it does not signify in the new sense.  Not influence obtained by love or reverence, or by superior management and dexterity; not an authority derived from wisdom or virtue, promoting the happiness and freedom of the Roman Catholic people; not by flattering them, or by a skilful adaptation to their humours and passions.  It means nothing of all these.  Burke then shows what it does mean.  ’New ascendancy is old mastership.  It is neither more nor less than the resolution of one sect of people in Ireland to consider themselves the sole citizens in the commonwealth, and to keep a dominion over the rest, by reducing them to absolute slavery under a military power; and thus fortified in their power, to divide the public estate, which is the result of general contribution, as a military booty, solely among themselves.  This ascendancy, by being a Protestant ascendancy, does not better it, from a combination of a note or two more in this anti-harmonic scale.  By the use that is frequently made of the term, and the policy