What, then, is the secret of this determination?  It lies in a nutshell.  A Parliament in Dublin would be under the control and domination of the Church of Rome.  Two facts in Irish life render this not only likely and probable, but inevitable and certain.  The first fact is that three-fourths of the members would be Roman Catholic, and the second fact is that the Irish people are the most devoted Roman Catholics at present in Christendom.  No one disputes the first fact, but the second requires to be made clear to the electors of Great Britain.  Let no one suppose that I am finding fault with Irishmen for being devoted Roman Catholics.  What I wish to show is that the Church of Rome would be supreme in the new Parliament, and that she is not a good guardian of Protestant liberties and interests.  Ireland has been for the last two generations brought into absolute captivity to the principles of ultramontanism.  When Italy asserted her nationality, and fought for it in 1870, Ireland sent out a brigade to fight on the side of the Pope.  When France, a few years ago, broke up in that land the bondage of Ecclesiasticism, the streets of Dublin were filled Sunday after Sunday for weeks with crowds of Irishmen, headed by priests, shouting for the Pope against France.  The Church first, nationality afterwards, is the creed of the ultramontane; and it is the avowed creed of the Irish people.  But this would be changed in an Irish Parliament, British electors affirm.  Let us hear what Mr. John Dillon, M.P., says on the point.  Speaking about a year ago in the Free Trade Hall in Manchester, Mr. Dillon said—­

“I assert, and it is the glory of our race, that we are to-day the right arm of the Catholic Church throughout the world ... we stand to-day as we have stood throughout, without abating one jot or tittle of that faith, the most Catholic nation on the whole earth.”

What Mr. Dillon says is perfectly true.  The Irish Parliament would be constituted on the Roman model.  If there were none but Roman Catholics in Ireland, Ireland would rapidly become a “State of the Church.”  But how would Protestants fare?  Just as they fared in old Papal days in Italy under the temporal rule of the Vatican.  But it may still be said that Irishmen themselves would curb the ecclesiastical power.  This is one of the delusions by which British electors conceal from themselves the peril of Home Rule to Irish Protestants.  They forget that Irishmen are, if possible, more Roman than Rome herself.  I take the following picture of the Romanised condition of Ireland from a Roman Catholic writer—­

“Mr. Frank Hugh O’Donnell, who ’believes in the Papal Church in every point, who accepts her teaching from Nicaea to Trent, and from Trent to the Vatican,’ says, ’While the general population of Ireland has been going down by leaps and bounds to the abyss, the clerical population has been mounting by cent. per cent. during the same period....’  A short time