Before the Liberals dealt with the land question, they turned their attention to the other great Irish grievance, the establishment of an alien Church. This was one of those matters of sentiment which, between conquering and conquered peoples, produce the most deadly and incurable animosities. The Irish Church had been established for the express purpose of prosecuting the English cause. It embodied and symbolized the alien domination. It perpetuated the memories of a thousand massacres and confiscations. In the language of John Bright, it was "a garrison Church ... the effect has been to make Catholicism in Ireland not only a faith, but absolutely a patriotism." Every clergyman "is necessarily in his district a symbol of the supremacy of the few and of the subjection of the many."[296] In its presence every Catholic Irishman felt himself a member of a conquered race, and every economic grievance was exaggerated. To invest the alien Church with the privileges of Establishment was to rub salt into the wounds of Ireland. The Tories resisted the Liberal Bill partly on proprietary grounds. They treated a corporation, created for the propagation of certain opinions, a task in which it had conspicuously failed, as if it were a private person, and denounced disendowment as robbery. The Liberals contended that the State had endowed the Church, and that on the failure of the Church to provide for the spiritual needs of the Irish people, it was fair that the State should resume part of the property and apply it for other purposes. But the details of disendowment are hardly material. The {250} essence of the Bill was that it tended to destroy the ascendancy of Protestantism as against Catholicism, and of Englishmen as against Irishmen. Gathorne Hardy put the Tory case on this point in one sentence. He said that he looked upon the Church "as a part of the Imperial Government."[297] Sergeant Dowse stated the Liberal case in reply. "The Irish people regarded that Church as a great wrong and a standing memorial of conquest.... Nobody ever said the measure would lead to social equality. But in future a Bishop or Dean would no longer be preferred over a Bishop or Dean of the Catholic or minister of the Presbyterian Church, and in that way, at least, an important removal of social distinctions would be effected." He reminded his hearers that on the anniversary of the Battle of the Boyne orange flags were hoisted on the spires of State churches, and described them as "the badge of degradation to the vast majority of the Irish people. Protestant ascendancy did exist, as long as one Church was patronized and preferred above another Church either of the whole or a portion of the people."[298] The Bill was carried into law after a hard fight with the House of Lords. It did not entirely destroy the insolence of Irish Protestants or allay all the discontents of the peasantry. But it was an earnest of the disposition of an English