The Volunteers were an essentially, and it might be said an exclusively, Protestant organization from the beginning, but it was earnestly supported by the Catholics from a feeling that unrestricted trade and legislative independence were national boons of the first importance, as well as from an apparently well‐founded trust that, these being obtained, the abrogation of the penal laws and the right of representation would speedily follow. They could not believe that an influential but very small minority, seeking liberty for themselves, would persistently deny it to the large majority of their countrymen. They were now about to be undeceived. One of the very first resolutions passed at the convention read as follows: “_Resolved_, That the _Protestant_ inhabitants of this country are required by the statute law to carry arms and to learn the use of them,” etc.; and, lest any doubt should remain of the bigotry and narrow‐mindedness which pervaded the representatives of the Volunteers, the plan of reform, as drawn up by Flood and subsequently adopted, was made to read thus: “That every _Protestant_ freeholder or leaseholder, possessing a freehold or leasehold for a certain term of years of forty shillings’ value, resident in any city or borough, should be entitled to vote at the election of a member for the same.” The limitation of the right to bear arms and to vote to Protestants only was the destruction of the moral as well as physical power of the Volunteers, and a death‐blow to the longings and aspirations of the patriotic Catholics. It was more than a blunder, it was a crime—a piece of rank, selfish hypocrisy, which ill became men who had the words of freemen on their lips, but, it appears, the feelings of tyrants in their hearts. In vain did the Irish Catholics protest in a series of resolutions; in vain did the Earl of Bristol, then Protestant Bishop of Derry, vehemently advocate the claims of the people to something like religious and social equality. The convention was deaf to all remonstrance and entreaty, and blindly rushed to its own destruction.