The Catholic question also awakened the Castle fears. The penal laws had failed to diminish the "Papists": at the then rate of conversion it would take four thousand years to turn the people into Protestants. A nobler idea had arisen throughout Ireland. "The question is now," Grattan said, "whether we shall be a Protestant settlement or an Irish nation ... for so long as we exclude Catholics from natural liberty and the common rights of man we are not a people." Nothing could be more unwelcome to the government. A real union between religious bodies in Ireland, they said, would induce Irish statesmen to regulate their policy mainly by the public opinion of their own country. To avert this danger they put forth all their strength. "The present frame of Irish government is particularly well calculated for our purpose. That frame is a Protestant garrison in possession of the land, magistracy, and power of the country; holding that property under the tenure of British power and supremacy, and ready at every instant to crush the rising of the conquered." Finally the pressing question of reform, passionately demanded by Protestant and Catholic for fifteen years, was resisted by the whole might of the Castle. "If," wrote the lord-lieutenant to Pitt, "as her government became more open and more attentive to the feelings of the Irish nation, the difficulty of management had increased, is that a reason for opening the government and making the parliament more subservient to the feelings of the nation at large?"