AN ULSTERMAN FOR IRELAND
low-fed people are institutions; stipendiary clergymen, packed juries, a monstrous army and navy which we pay, not to defend, but to coerce, us—these are institutions of the country. Indian meal, too, strange to say, though it grows four thousand miles off, has come to be an institution of this country. Are these the " venerable institutions " you are expected to shoulder your muskets to defend?
But, then, "Protestants have always been loyal men." Have they? And what do they mean by " loyalty"? I have never found that, in the North of Ireland, this word had any meaning at all, except that we Protestants hated the Papists and despised the French. This, I think, if you will examine it, is the true theory of "loyalty" in Ulster. I can hardly fancy any of my countrymen so brutally stupid as to prefer high taxes to low taxes—to be really proud of the honour of supporting "the Prince Albert" and his Lady and their children, and all the endless list of cousins and uncles that they have, in magnificent idleness, at the sole expense of half-starved labouring people. I should like to meet the Northern farmer or labouring man who would tell me in so many words that he prefers dear government to cheap government; that he likes the House of Brunswick better than his own house; that he would rather have the affairs of the country managed by foreign noblemen and gentlemen than by himself and his neighbours; that he is content to pay, equip, and arm an enormous army, and give the command of it to those foreign noblemen and to be disarmed himself or liable to be
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