On the question of the Home Rule Bill Ulster was almost equally divided. The majority of the Ulster Protestants were against it, though a minority, among whom traditions of Protestant Nationalism had survived the sordid bigotries fostered for a century, were strongly in its favour; the majority of the Catholic population were in favour of it. Among the Nationalists there was a minority who professed the creed of Sinn Fein and of Republicanism: late in 1913 a branch of the Young Republican Party in Belfast, composed of Gaelic Leaguers, members of Freedom Clubs and Trades Unionists unfurled its banner of an orange sunburst on a green ground with the motto in white, "Young Republican Party--Dia agus an Pobul," and there had been branches of Sinn Fein established in Ulster some years earlier; but on the whole the Ulster Nationalists supported the Parliamentary Party. No geographical or ethnological line of political demarcation could be drawn. There was no district in Ulster which was not politically divided: there was no stock in Ulster which had not members in both political camps. Some of the most outspoken and vehement of the Unionist Party bore, and were proud of, purely Irish names; many of the Nationalists were the bearers of names introduced into Ireland with the planters sent by King James. The settled policy of the Act of the Union had done its work with almost complete success. The Protestant had learned to regard the connection with England as essential to the maintenance of his religious and civil freedom: he believed not only that the Roman Catholic Church was officially intolerant, but that all Roman Catholics were, as a matter of fact, intolerant in conduct and in practice, and incapable of being anything else. And Irish Catholics seemed to him to be peculiarly susceptible to the intolerant influences of their ecclesiastical leaders. When the views of the Catholic Hierarchy in Ireland and those of Irish Nationalists coincided he saw in their agreement the triumph of the "priest in politics": when they differed he was either at a loss to account for an occurrence so far removed from the settled habits of nature or saw in it an obscure but interesting symptom of a fear of Home Rule on the part of the Hierarchy, a fear that Home Rule might jeopardise their own predominance. But not even the supposed hesitations of the Hierarchy could reconcile him to the prospect of a Home Rule under which the electoral majority would be "priest-ridden." Unkind critics might have urged that people whose whole political outlook was hag-ridden by the phantoms of popes and priests were not in a position to call those "priest-ridden" who at any rate sometimes differed sharply from their clergy in political and civil affairs; but the Ulster Protestant was proof against mere logical quibbles and rhetorical retorts. He had done his thinking about politics with the Act of Union: he had taken his stand: