was to turn.  After Aughrim and the Boyne, the new device of England was to sacrifice everything to the “garrison.”  “Protestant Ireland,” as Grattan put it, “knelt to England on the necks of her countrymen.”  In one aspect the garrison were tyrants; in another they were slaves.  They were at once oppressors and oppressed.  There was a sort of “deal” between them and the English Government by which the public welfare was to be sacrificed to the English Government, the Irish Catholics to the “garrison.”  A vile programme, but subtle and adroit, it bore its unnatural fruit of legislation, passed by the Westminster Parliament and the Dublin Garrison Parliament alike, for the destruction of every manufacturing and commercial interest in Ireland that was thought to conflict with a similar interest in England.  But another debacle has to be chronicled.  Out of the very baseness of this regime a new patriotism was begotten.  The garrison, awakening abruptly to the fact that it had no country, determined to invent one; and there was brought to birth that modern Ireland, passionate for freedom, which has occupied the stage ever since.  In our own time it has knit, as a fractured limb knits, into one tissue with the tradition of the Gaelic peasantry.  Hanging and burning, torture and oppression, poison and Penal Laws, bribes and blackguardism so far from exterminating the Irish people actually hammered them into a nation, one and indestructible, proud of its past and confident of its future.

Take instances still more recent and particular—­the struggle for religious freedom or the struggle for the land.  Catholic emancipation is a leading case:  obstinacy against obstinacy, the No! of England against the Yes! of Ireland, and the former sprawling in the ditch at the end of the tussle.  “The Law,” ran the dictum of an eighteenth-century Lord Chancellor, “does not suppose any such person to exist as an Irish Roman Catholic.”  At this moment a Catholic holds the seals and purse of the Chancellorship.  Never did ministers swallow their own stubborn words more incontinently than did Peel and Wellington.  So late as 1828 Peel was loudly declaring that the continuance of these bars, which excluded the Catholics from the acquisition of political power, was necessary for the maintenance of the Constitution and the safety of the Church, and Wellington was echoing his words.  A year later, utterly defeated by O’Connell, Peel was introducing the Catholic Relief Bill in the Commons.  Wellington had it for his task to induce, or rather frighten the king to assent.  Ireland not only emancipated the Catholics, she went on to emancipate the Dissenters, a service of freedom of conscience which is too often forgotten.

The Tithe System was similarly declared to be part of the fabric of the Constitution, to be upheld at the point of the bayonet.  Scythe in hand, the Irish peasant proclaimed that it must go.  It went.  Still more fundamental was the existence of the Protestant Established Church.  To touch it was to lay hands on the Ark.  Orange orators threatened civil war; two hundred thousand Ulstermen were to shoulder their Minie Rifles, and not merely slaughter the Catholics but even depose Queen Victoria.