Most of the United Irish leaders and a large proportion of the rank and file in the ’98 Rising were Presbyterians, and fought and bled for Ireland with the same heroism as their Catholic neighbours, amongst whom no name is more cherished in the County Down than that of the Protestant General Monroe, who, my Aunt Mary used to tell us, was hanged at his own door in 1798.  How is it that the sons of the men of 1782 and of Grattan’s Parliament, and of 1798 were not as good Irishmen as their fathers?  I think I can give a kind of explanation.

It must be remembered that the era of Grattan’s Parliament and of the Volunteer movement of 1782, of which present-day Nationalists are so proud, was also the era of the Penal laws.  Since then the Protestants have seen the Irish Catholic rising from the dust of serfdom and standing in the attitude of manhood.  They have seen him gradually obtaining a share in the making of the laws of the land, and, naturally, becoming the predominant political power in Ireland—­the Catholics being the majority of the population.  I may be wrong, but I have a theory that many of the Protestants of Ireland—­who once had all the political power in their hands, and did not always use it too mercifully in their treatment of the rest of their countrymen—­are afraid that if they assisted in getting self-government for Ireland the power in the hands of the enfranchised majority might be used against them.

That this is a groundless fear is shown from the fact that no men have been more honoured in Ireland than such Protestant leaders as William Smith O’Brien, Thomas Davis, John Mitchel, John Martin, Isaac Butt, and Charles Stewart Parnell.  The same feeling is constantly shown at this moment towards distinguished Protestants among the present Irish Parliamentary Party.

What has fostered the Anti-Irish feeling among Irish Protestants for the last hundred years has undoubtedly been the fell system of Orangeism, which has caused so much hatred and bloodshed among men who, whatever their race or creed, are now children of the one common soil.  The Orangeman looked upon himself as part of a foreign garrison, holding the “Papishes” in subjection.  He was armed with deadly weapons; consequently, the defenceless Catholic was almost entirely at his mercy, and the Orangeman was but too often backed up in his lawlessness by the law and its administrators.

This almost necessitated the existence, as a kind of defence against Orangeism, of a body I used to hear them speaking of when I was a boy in Ballymagenaghy, called the “Thrashers,” which, I imagine, must have been some kind of a secret society.

It must have been a sort of survival of these “Thrashers” that my friend, Michael Davitt, many years afterwards, came across somewhere in the North of England.  The incident, as described by him, was both amusing and saddening.  He addressed them in his capacity as a Fenian Organiser.  After they had heard him patiently, an old man, the spokesman, said: