The purpose of the Irish Unionist party in the Commons is purely negative, to defeat Home Rule.  It does not represent North-East Ulster, or any other fragment of Ireland, in any sense but that.  It is passionately sentimental and absolutely unrepresentative of the practical, virile genius of Ulster industry.  The Irish Unionist peers, in addition to voicing the same negative, are for the most part the spokesmen of a small minority of Irishmen in whom the long habit of upholding landlord interests has begun to outlive the need.

I have said little directly about the problem of modern Ulster, not because I underrate its importance, which is very great, but because I have some hope that my arguments up to this point may be perceived to have a strong, though indirect, bearing upon it.[67] The religious question I leave to others, with only these few observations.  It is impossible to make out a historical case for the religious intolerance of Roman Catholics in Ireland, or a practical case for the likelihood of a Roman Catholic tyranny in the future.  No attempt which can be described as even plausible has ever been made in either direction.  The late Mr. Lecky, a Unionist historian, and one of the most eminent thinkers and writers of our time, has nobly vindicated Catholic Ireland, banishing both the theory and the fear into the domain of myth.[68]

He has shown, what, indeed, nobody denies, that, from the measures which provoked the Rebellion of 1641, through the Penal Code, to the middle of the nineteenth century, intolerance, inspired by supposed political necessities, and of a ferocity almost unequalled in history, came from the Protestant colonists.  In that brilliant little essay of his Nationalist youth, “Clerical Influences” (1861), he described the sectarian animosity which was raging at that period as “the direct and inevitable consequence of the Union,” and wrote as follows:  “Much has been said of the terrific force with which it would rage were the Irish Parliament restored.  We maintain, on the other hand, that no truth is more clearly stamped upon the page of history, and more distinctly deducible from the constitution of the human mind, than that a national feeling is the only check to sectarian passions.”  He was himself an anti-Catholic extremist in the sense of holding (with many others) that “the logical consequences of the doctrines of the Church of Rome would be fatal to an independent and patriotic policy in any land.”  But he insists in the same passage “that nothing is more clear than that in every land where a healthy national feeling exists, Roman Catholic politicians are both independent and patriotic.”