The delegates of the Eighty Club made a special public appeal for information as to cases of religious intolerance. They received a great many responses to this appeal, but it is hardly any exaggeration to say that they found no genuine cases of religious intolerance outside the North-east corner of Ulster, where they received some conspicuous examples of the religious persecution of Liberal Protestants by their Orange co-religionists.[49] Journeying southwards, however, the Eighty Club delegates passed with every mile into a serener atmosphere. They received deputations at every wayside station from the public bodies in the south of Ulster. These presented documents stating the bare facts as to the representation of these two forms of the Christian religion--so often, alas! belying the doctrine of Christian love by the practice of mutual hatred--on their public bodies. They found, for instance, in Monaghan, a predominantly Catholic town, that seven seats on the local Council went to the Unionist and Protestant Party, a considerable concession from a majority large enough in numbers to pack the whole of the council if they so desired. That little town might give a good lesson to some of the boroughs of our great county of London, where it is an almost universal practice for either party to seize the whole of the seats if they are capable of doing so. Take one more instance in that district--out of the many--in the town of Cavan, a preponderantly Catholic borough. There, out of twenty-three candidates at the last election standing for eighteen seats, four Unionists were elected by a similar method of compromise. Where is the evidence of the Orangemen in their strongholds meting out similar measure to the Catholics? Passing further south they found that although the great majority of the public bodies was naturally Nationalist and Catholic, there was no sign of that spirit of rigid exclusiveness extended towards the Catholics by the Protestants in the city of Belfast. Of course, a large number of the Protestant officials found so frequently in the service of these public bodies are appointed in Ireland by the Crown, and not, as in England, by the local authorities. But the Protestants are not confined to those offices. Dublin has several times freely elected a Protestant to the Lord Mayoralty of that city. In other parts of southern Ireland the Eighty Club found Protestants as masters in the county schools, surveyors of taxes, local registrars, clerks of the works, rate collectors, and public librarians. The Catholics on the local bodies recognise that the Protestants in the south possess, owing to their superior advantages in education, a great proportion of the brains, and they are not slow to do justice to this fact in filling public posts.