I have heard it said by Englishmen who have watched the course of politics for some years that the jingling watchword which Lord Randolph Churchill coined for the Unionists twenty years ago, that Home Rule would spell Rome Rule, if used again to-day would to a very great extent fall flat. They have based this view, not on the assumption that Englishmen love Rome more, but rather upon the opinion that they care for all religions less, and that hence the appeal to bigotry would make less play. The fact, however, remains that one meets men in England with every sympathy for Irish claims who shrink nevertheless from the advocacy of the principle of self-government through fear lest the Protestant minority should suffer. This fear for the rights of minorities serves always as the last ditch in which a losing cause entrenches itself, and timid souls have always been found who hesitate at the approach of every reform on the ground that the devil you know may turn out to be not so bad as the devil you do not know. The legislative history of the House of Lords during the last century, if examples of this were needed, would provide them in large numbers; and as to the question of whether it is better that the majority or the minority of a nation should be governed against its will, one need scarcely say which is the principle adopted in a normal system of Parliamentary government. The rapidity with which under Grattan's Parliament an emancipated Ireland ceased to be intolerant leads one to suspect that the bigotry of creeds which is attributed to us as a race is not a natural characteristic, but rather the outcome of external causes. This view is borne out by the opinion of Lecky, who declared that the deliberate policy of English statesmen was "to dig a deep chasm between Catholics and Protestants," and if proof of the allegation is needed it is to be found in the fact that in the middle of the eighteenth century the Protestant Primate, Archbishop Boulter, wrote to Government concerning a certain proposal that "it united Protestants and Papists, and if that conciliation takes place, farewell to English influence in Ireland." Under Grattan's Parliament Trinity College, Dublin, opened its doors, though not its endowments, to Catholics. In 1795 a petition from Maynooth, the lay college in which was not till twenty years later suppressed by Government for political reasons, was presented to the Irish House of Commons by Henry Grattan, protesting against the exclusion of Protestants from its halls. In the ranks of the Volunteers, who secured free trade in 1779 and Parliamentary Independence in 1782, Catholics and Protestants stood shoulder to shoulder, and the independent legislature, which was the outcome of their efforts, granted the franchise to the Catholics.