Where, then, could the ardent young patriot, gifted, enthusiastic, and impatient of the restrictions placed upon himself and his fellow-countrymen, find an audience and an outlet for the fiery eloquence that heaved and burned in his soul? Clearly in popular gatherings and in the courts of law. But the people at that time were so timid, nay, so degraded, that they dared not assemble in any force to protest against the tyranny that had for so many generations enslaved them; or, if a few hundreds did assemble together, the sight of a magistrate, or the presence of some truculent follower of the castle, like the infamous Maj. Sirr, was sufficient to disperse them, while the few Catholic noblemen and gentry yet left were as timid as so many hares. The Irish Catholics of that epoch, so long trodden under foot, and deprived absolutely of political power and landed interests, were not like the Catholics of to-day, who, in all thankfulness be it said, are triumphantly bearing aloft the banner of the church when so much of Europe is trailing it in the mire of infidelity and communism. Then Wolfe Tone, once their secretary, in his _Memoirs_, and Wyse, in his _History of the Catholic Association_, likened them to the servile Jews, and described them as deficient in manliness and self-respect. They crawled at the feet of a hostile government, says the latter, fawned on their Protestant neighbors, and felt honored by being even noticed by persons of that creed, even though in every respect their inferiors. Such people had very little business in the civil courts to give, and what little they had they gave to those who loathed their creed and despised themselves.