that is grafted on it, the name Protestant becomes nothing more or better than the name of a persecuting faction, with a relation of some sort of theological hostility to others, but without any sort of ascertained tenets of its own, upon the ground of which it persecutes other men; for the patrons of this Protestant ascendancy neither do nor can, by anything positive, define or describe what they mean by the word Protestant....  The whole is nothing but pure and perfect malice.  It is indeed a perfection in that kind, belonging to beings of a higher order than man, and to them we ought to leave it....  Let three millions of people but abandon all that they and their ancestors have been taught to believe sacred, and to forswear it publicly in terms the most degrading, and nothing more is required of them....  The word Protestant is the charm that locks up in a dungeon of servitude three millions of people.

Every thoughtful reader of the debates in parliament on the state of Ireland, must have been struck with the difference of opinion between the Liberals and the Conservatives, as to the facts of the case.  A still more violent difference was presented in the British parliament, in the year 1797, when there were great debates in both houses on the subject, and when the facts were still more glaring, one of them being that the reign of terror established by the Irish Government prevented the press from reporting the maddening atrocities which the ruling faction was daily perpetrating against the mass of the king’s subjects.  The debate arose in the Lords, on a motion by Lord Moira for an address to the king on the state of Ireland.  He described the horrors of which he had been recently a witness, but softened the recital, lest he should shock his hearers too much.  Orange loyalty was then licensed and let loose upon the defenceless Roman Catholic population in Ulster.  Lord Gosford’s description of the scenes of desolation in his own county, Armagh, is well known.  He did what he could to prevent the burning of Roman Catholic houses, and the personal injuries inflicted upon the unfortunate inhabitants, while their Orange neighbours chased them out of the country, giving them Cromwell’s alternative.  But his mercy injured his reputation, and he felt obliged to protest solemnly that he was a loyal man, and that he wished to uphold Protestant ascendancy in Ireland as much as any of his accusers.  He only asked that the poor Catholic should be allowed to live in peace.  In the debate referred to, Lord Moira declared that ninety-one householders had been banished from one of his own estates; and many of them wounded in their persons.  The discontent, he said, was not confined to one sect.  He ascribed the state of things to the recall of Lord Fitzwilliam, which crushed the hopes of the Catholics, and gave unbounded licence to the yeomanry, who were empowered to act with a vigour beyond the law; to turn out, banish, or kill the king’s subjects, on mere suspicion, often prompted by private malice, and having no better warrant than anonymous information.  But for all this the Irish parliament and the new reactionary viceroy freely granted acts of indemnity.  According to Earl Fitzwilliam ’whole parishes, baronies, and even counties, were declared to be out of the king’s peace.’