Page:An Ulsterman for Ireland.djvu/25

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.

AN ULSTERMAN FOR IRELAND

are found running to the English Parliament to get coercion Bills for the same purpose—and those men who urged on the people to do themselves right were called Jacobins, and infidels, and philosophers, and many other bad names; and indeed there was a great deal of confusion, cruelty and misery, as there always must be for a time when the mass of the People are driven to take their affairs into their own hands—but the end of it was, the class of nobles was destroyed, the great estates of proprietors were cut up and allotted to small farmers, and France has been a rich, independent, and prosperous country ever since.

Do you see anything so very hideous and horrible in this kind of Jacobinism? Does it frighten you much, the idea of holding, each man of you, the land you occupy as your own domain for ever?

Ah! but you say what has all this to do with Repeal? Repeal is a Papist movement, and Papists want ascendancy, and if we had not Protestant England to back us the number of Catholics in Ireland would so preponderate that they could carry anything they liked against us. Now, I do assure you, my friends, that, except yourselves, there is nobody in all Ireland dreaming of religious distinctions in politics, and such nonsense is kept alive only by our worshipful grand masters with their prate about Jezebel and the Man of Sin. If you look all over the Continent of Europe yon will perceive that the fullest and freest toleration, or rather the most unreserved religious equality, has been everywhere established, and that Catholic countries

15