None but a democratic Assembly could possibly have grappled with these evils; nor is there any reason to suppose that in the existing condition of Ireland a Protestant democratic Assembly, even if temporarily it retained its sectarian character, would have grappled with them less boldly and drastically than an Assembly composed of Catholics and Protestants.  The material interests of nineteen-twentieths of the people were the same, while the education and intelligence belonged mainly to the Protestants.  Ulster tenants had as much need of good land laws as other tenants.  Tithes were as much disliked in the north as in the south.  The Established Church was the Church of a very small minority, and its clergy, numbers of whom were absentees, were as unpopular as the absentee landlords and the absentee office-holders and pensioners.

But with no redress, and, what is more important, no prospect of redress for the primary ills of Ireland, the centrifugal forces of religion and race had full scope for their baneful influence.  And it was at the very moment when tolerance was steadily gaining ground among all classes that these spectres of ancient wrong were summoned up to destroy the good work.

How did this come about?  Let us remember once more that everything hinged on Reform.  Reform gained a little, but suffered far more, by its association with the question of Catholic franchise, which was useless without Reform, while it was the corollary of Reform.  Nothing is more remarkable than the growth of academic tolerance during this period, doubtful and suspect as the motives sometimes were.  It is true that the great Relief Act of 1793, giving Catholics the vote and removing a quantity of other disqualifications, would scarcely have been sanctioned by the Parliamentary managers without the stern dictation of Pitt, whose mind was strongly influenced by the violent anti-Catholic turn just taken by the French Revolution; but, once sanctioned, it passed rapidly, and was received with universal satisfaction in the country at large.  Without “Emancipation,” that is, the permission to elect Catholics to sit in Parliament and hold office, the franchise was illusory and even harmful.  In the counties the forty-shilling “freehold” vote ("freehold” was an ironical misnomer) encouraged Protestant landlords for another generation, before and after the Union, still further to subdivide already excessively small holdings, while the benefits to be derived from the admission to power of propertied Catholics, with all their intensely Conservative instincts, were thrown away.  Emancipation apart, the franchise without Reform was a complete farce, for the boroughs, which controlled the Parliamentary balance, were the personal property of Protestant landlords, and the 110 Parliamentary placemen were indirectly their tools.  As usual, the men of light and leading contributed unconsciously to the strength of a system which, in their hearts, as honest men, they condemned.  Each of them had