Roman Catholics 3,238,656
Irish Church 575,489
Presbyterians 439,876
Methodists 61,806
All other Christian denominations 57,718
Jews 5,101
Information refused 3,305

I beg the electors of Great Britain to look steadily into the above figures, and to ask themselves who are the Home Rulers and who are the Unionists in Ireland.  Irish Home Rulers are almost all Roman Catholics, and the Protestants and others are almost all stout Unionists.  Does this fact suggest nothing?  How is it that the line of demarcation in Irish politics almost exactly coincides with the line of demarcation in religion?  Quite true, there are a few Irish Roman Catholics who are Unionists, and a few Protestants who are Home Rulers.  But they are so few and so uninfluential on both sides that the exception only serves to prove the rule.  These exceptions, no doubt, have been abundantly exploited, and the very most has been made of them.  But the great elementary fact remains, that one-fourth of the Irish people, mostly Protestant, are resolutely, and even passionately, opposed to Home Rule; and the remarkable thing is that the most militant Irish Unionists for the past twenty years have not been the members of the Irish Church who might be suspected of Protestant Ascendency prejudices, but they are the Presbyterians and Methodists who never belonged to the old Protestant Ascendency party.  It is of Irish Presbyterians that I can speak with the most ultimate knowledge.  Their record in Ireland requires to be made perfectly clear.  In 1829 they were the champions of Catholic Emancipation.  In 1868 they supported Mr. Gladstone in his great Irish reforms.  They have been at all times the advocates of perfect equality in religion, and of unsectarianism in education.  They stand firm and staunch on these two principles still.  But they are the sternest and strongest opponents of Home Rule, and their reason is because Home Rule spells for Ireland a new religious ascendency and the destruction of the unsectarian principle in education.

I ask on these grounds that English and Scottish electors should pause for a moment, and open their minds to the fact that there is a great religious problem at the heart of Home Rule.  Irish Presbyterians claim that they know what they are doing, and that they are not the blind dupes of religious prejudice and political passion.  It is for a great something that they have embarked in this conflict; they are determined to risk everything in this resistance, and in proportion as the danger approaches, in like proportion does their hostility to the Home Rule claim increase.