The measure once passed brought about an unnatural shifting of parties in Ireland. Many of those who had opposed the measure before it became law, now decided to make the best of what could no longer be prevented. The orators of the Patriot Party passed over to the English Parliament and were practically lost to Ireland. The aristocracy who had upheld the Irish Parliament gravitated towards the new seat of Government and abandoned a capital deserted by the Parliament of their pride. They sent their children to be educated in England, and in the second generation they began to call themselves not Irishmen but Englishmen. The representatives of both these parties became in time convinced upholders of the Union and their influence in Ireland was thrown in favour of the maintenance of the _status quo_. To this "Unionist" party must be added the Orange party who stood for Protestant ascendancy. Much as they disliked the Union to begin with they came to see in the end that, unaided, they could not stand for long against the claim of their Catholic fellow-countrymen for political equality. The one thing that reconciled them to the Union was its possibilities in securing the Protestant interest. To this attitude they have remained faithful ever since, and in the course of the century they were joined by the majority of the Protestants of Ireland. Ulster, at one time the chief strength of the United Irishmen, became the headquarters of extreme and even fanatical support of the Union. Here "the Protestant interest," carefully fostered as an instrument of English influence in Ireland, founded its citadel, the rallying point of opposition to "Irish" claims. After Connaught, the most definitely "Celtic" portion of Ireland (in spite of the Ulster Plantations), its extreme Protestant sympathies, carefully fostered by the Protestant clergy into a bigotry that has become grotesque, converted the dominions of the O'Neills and the O'Donnells into a desperate and apparently irreconcilable antagonist of Irish national interests. Besides, Ulster suffered less than the rest of Ireland from the economic effects of the Union. Though the population of Ulster has been almost halved as the result of it, the "Ulster custom" saved the tenants from some of the worst abuses of the land system of the other provinces, and the prosperity of the linen trade, never endangered by collision with English interests, did not suffer by the measure; while the greater wealth of the manufacturing districts made the burden of unfair taxation (which repressed commercial and industrial enterprise in the rest of Ireland) less felt than it might have been. A mistaken view of their own interests, and an equally mistaken view of the real aims of the rest of their countrymen (a mistake sometimes encouraged by the tactics of their opponents) converted Protestant Ulster into an attitude which ignorance has represented as a consciousness of a racial difference between itself and the rest of Ireland.