But even in Ulster there still remain many Protestant Irishmen to whom the recollection of the days of the United Irishmen is like the recollection of the Golden Age. Still faithful to the doctrines of equality, fraternity and freedom they are the last links of the chain which once bound Ulster to the cause of Ireland. On the other hand Catholic Ireland as a whole, and especially its leaders, ecclesiastical and other, viewed the enactment of the legislative Union with a kind of apathetic despair. Nothing apparently was to be hoped from the Irish Parliament in the direction of real religious equality or reform of the franchise: nothing more could be expected from armed resistance after the signal failure of the rebellion. The country was occupied by an English army and, whatever they thought, they must think in silence. Hopes were held out that the Union might bring Catholic Emancipation, that the Catholic clergy might receive a State subsidy similar to that given to the Presbyterian ministers. They were to find that Catholic Emancipation was no more to the taste of England than to that of the Irish Parliament and that a State subsidy to the Catholic Church would only be granted at the price which Castlereagh desired the Presbyterian ministers to pay for the _Regium Donum_. But for the moment they did nothing and there was nothing that could be done. Entitled to vote but not to sit in Parliament, but half-emancipated from the bondage, material and moral, of the Penal Laws, they had no effective weapon at their disposal within the constitution, and the only other weapon that they had had broken in their hands. They were forced into a position of silent and half-hearted protest, and have ever since been at the disadvantage of having to appear as the disturbers of the existing order. The hopes held out by the promoters of the Union were not realized without prolonged and violent agitation, and the cause of Ireland appeared doubly alien, clothed in the garb of a Church alien to the legislators to whom appeal was made. That the national cause was first identified with the claims of Irish Catholics to religious equality is the _damnosa hereditas_ of Irish Nationalism in the nineteenth century. The music of "the Pope's Brass Band" drowns the voice of orator and poet. The demand that the nation as a whole should no longer be compelled to support the establishment of the Church of a minority was represented as a move on the part of the Roman Curia to cripple Protestantism in the United Kingdom. The demand for the reform of the worst land system in Europe was looked upon as a resistance to the constitution inspired by the agents of the Vatican. The Irish people asks for nothing, but the Pope or the Irish Catholic hierarchy, working in darkness, is supposed to have put it into their heads, though the Irish people have taught both Pope and Bishops many lessons upon the distinction between religious authority and political dictation.