"The church funds of Ireland belong, without the possibility of a cavil, to the Irish nation; that nation has, from one reason or another, persistently refused to follow us in deserting the general creed of Christendom. They have clung and still cling to their faith with that desperate tenacity which persecution best engenders.... But the gradual abandonment of the atrocious penal code--as one by one its provisions became revolting to the increased humanity of the age--was a virtual confession that we gave up all hope of driving the Irish Catholics within the pale of our church.... Angry at resistance, the English government, coöperating with English fanaticism, set itself deliberately to persecute, degrade, almost destroy, those whom it could not succeed in converting. All has been tried, and the Establishment remains, as of old, the privilege of a powerful minority, the badge of conquest upon a prostrate race, a perpetual source of irritation--and nothing more. So far from being Protestantised, the Irish are already the hottest Ultramontanes in Europe, and are assuming more and more the triumphant air to which their numerical ascendancy entitles them. There is not the ghost of a chance of Ireland becoming other than she is, or of the Establishment making such strides as might render her present position less transparently absurd. The one question is this, whether we choose to perpetuate a state of things condemned by all statesmen as vicious in principle, and proved by long experience to be productive of nothing but a tyrannising temper, on the one hand, and chronic disaffection on the other. Every Irish peasant has sense enough to appreciate the injustice of the arrangement which obliges him to build his chapel, pay the priest, and gives his landlord a church and parson for nothing. He may be excused too for a feeling of annoyance, as he trudges past the empty parish church, supported at the public expense, to some remote chapel crowded with peasants, out of whose abject poverty the necessary funds for its support have to be wrung. He may be excused if his notions of fair play, equal rights, and political loyalty, are somewhat indistinct, and that where the law is from the outset a manifest wrong-doer, it should be sometimes superseded by rougher and more effective expedients. He is naturally a rebel, because the state proclaims herself his enemy. He naturally thinks it monstrous that any proprietor of the soil should have it in his power to refuse the inhabitants a spot of ground on which to celebrate their religious rites; that men, women, and children should be obliged to walk five, six, and even ten miles to the nearest place of worship; that education should be constantly refused, except coupled with open