The Protestant gentry, who alone had free entry into public life, were of necessity the chief actors in the recorded story. But in the awakening country they had to reckon with a rising power in the Catholic Irish. Dr. Lucas, who in 1741 had begun to stir for reform and freedom, had stirred not only the English settlers but the native Irish. Idolised by the Irish people, he raised in his _Citizens' Journal_ a new national protest. The pamphlet war which followed--where men argued not only on free trade and government, but on Ireland itself, on its old and new races, on its Irish barbarism, said some, its Irish civilisation, said others--spread the idea of a common history of Ireland in which all its inhabitants were concerned. In parliament too, though Catholics were shut out, yet men of old Irish race were to be found--men of Catholic families who had accepted Protestantism as a means of entering public life, chiefly by way of the law. They had not, save very rarely, put off their patriotic ardour with their old religion; of the middle class, they were braver in their outlook than the small and disheartened Catholic aristocracy. If their numbers were few their ability was great, and behind them lay that vast mass of their own people whose blood they shared. It was an Irishman who first roused the House of Commons to remember that they had a country of their own and an "Irish interest"--Antony Malone. This astonishing orator and parliamentarian invented a patriotic opposition (1753). A great sea in a "storm" men said of him. Terror was immediately excited at his Irish origin and his national feeling. Dublin Castle feared that he might mean emancipation from the English legislature, and in truth the constitutional dependency upon England was the object upon which Malone's eye was constantly fixed. He raised again the protest of Molyneux for a free parliament and constitution. He stirred "the whole nation" for "the last struggle for Ireland." They and their children would be slaves, he said, if they yielded to the claim of the government that the English privy council could alter the money bills sent over by the Irish parliament, or that the king had the right to apply at his will the surplus funds in the treasury.